“One thing more—prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you.” Philemon v. 22
Goodbyes and separations. I suppose they are a natural part of human life—the ebb and flow of comings and goings, departures followed by absences, although many times they feel anything but natural. And now I’ve come to the point in my year where I have begun to say goodbye to the things, places, and people that have become my world over the past eleven months. This time of farewell always hung vaguely around the edges of my conscious, as a distant, though inevitable, future reality, when each experience could be “the last time” and each exchange of two kisses, one on each cheek, might be the last…ever. Full well acknowledging the drama of this statement, we truly never know where life will take us, and if it will bring us back to places or reunite us with people that have instructed our souls through our encounters with them. Each culture and language has its own customs of greetings and taking leave, and in Arabic the response to “see you soon” or “I hope you return to us” is inshallah meaning quite literally, “God-willing.” If God wills it, we will be together again. If God wills it, I will return to you.
We finished school last week, and I said goodbye to many of the students and teachers who I’ve come to love at Helen Keller. I admit it was hard to release those hugs, since I was painfully aware that I might never see some of these children again in this life. I explained again and again in the still limited Arabic that I have that no, I was not coming back the following school year—not because I didn’t want to, but because it was a one-year program, a new volunteer would take my place, etc., etc. But it is hard for a child to understand all of that, or even to process what “goodbye” entails, so they give you hugs and kisses and hang on your arm, and continue to demand that you come back. All the while, I knew that goodbye was far more important to me, that my impact on their lives would be slight, though positive, inshallah, that I would likely be forgotten by many…and that that was okay. Their impact on me cannot be counted, and will scarcely be fully appreciable until I return back to the life I left last August and begin to notice the changes this year has wrought in me reflected in my thoughts and actions.
Return. Sometimes saying goodbye goes hand in hand with a return to places and people that saw their own goodbye not too long ago. Reading the verse that I opened this letter with speaks to me simultaneously of my desire to one day return to Jerusalem and the people here, along with my longing to be restored once again to friends and family in the States. This past week I had an amazing opportunity to travel to Mt. Sinai, the traditional site of Moses’ receiving of the Ten Commandments and the Law, as well as the traditional site of the Burning Bush. While many scholars dispute it’s claim as the authentic Biblical site, the mountain and St. Catherine’s monastery are nonetheless beautiful places, and important in their own right with a monastic and pilgrimage tradition dating back at least to the 6th century CE. Rachel, Anna, Jana, and I followed a Bedouin guide up the winding Camel Road by moonlight to a height of 2285 m. There at the summit we watched the stunning, fiery sunrise over the mountains, and regardless of the site’s authenticity, I understood more what the ancient Israelites might have witnessed: the glory of the Lord like a “devouring fire on the top of the mountain.”
We climbed back down by way of the 3750 “Steps of Penitence” towards the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine, which claims to be located at the site of the Burning Bush. Stopping to take a break on a smooth, reddish rock in the shadow of the mountain, I flipped open to Exodus for a little refresher of this famous story when Moses first hears the voice of the Lord. And tucked into the face of a mountain, in the middle of the Sinai wilderness, swiftly approaching the end of this amazing year, this scripture found me once again (as scripture sometimes sneakily does)—a scripture read to us at our orientation as we prepared for missionary service last year.
“Oh my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” But he said, “O My Lord, please send someone else.” Exodus 4:10-13
I thought instantly of a concern, a desire that has much occupied my thoughts over the past year, both in my writings and in conversations: the faithful transmission of my experiences over the past year, the faithful telling of the stories of people that I have met, wanting to be a faithful witness to the cause of peace and justice here. I have long felt that this was intimately tied to “the return,” because even as we are called in our lives to silence and listening, there also come moments when we are called on to speak. Indeed, moments when our conscience does not permit us to stay silent. And in acknowledging the power of words, this call to speak can seem daunting and intimidating…O My Lord, please, send someone else.
There are moments when I look at the fear, the oppression, the injustices and complexities of life here in Palestine-Israel and find myself straining for complete thoughts. Where to begin? While I in no way face anything like the awesome task set before Moses, we are all of us called to act in love in our own small ways in our own small lives—sometimes this means speaking up to our friends, families, coworkers, politicians, pastors, even strangers. Sometimes the things we have to say will be unwelcome and cause us to face rejection, even as we speak out of our deepest convictions of our hearts. As I move closer to returning home, my prayer is this:
For the wisdom to know when to speak, and when to stay silent. And when the moment comes to speak, that the Lord would be with my mouth, that the Holy Spirit might teach me in that moment what I am to say. That I might be a faithful witness to this place and the people I’ve encountered. That God might be with the people I leave behind, and bring us together again if it is His Will. That God might be with the people that I return to, and grant us all patience and faithfulness to one another as we share together what we’ve learned and how we’ve changed in the year we’ve been apart. Amen.
See you soon, inshallah.
