The other day I wrote my friends in Palestine, “even though you’re on the other side of the world, I don’t speak your native language, we are different church denominations, and global powers are making everyone more and more paranoid, your wellbeing makes me more emotional than than things that happen here, which is what I’m trying to make happen. This is because of prayer. The other cool thing about prayer is that you connect on a heart level. I know your hearts. As people will get paranoid that Russia is involved with Palestine, that Hamas represents Palestinians, that Muslims are xyz (unspeakable things I won’t even write), even as this is happening, as internet and electricity is cut, we are building bonds, united in prayer in different languages. I went on a silent retreat several months ago if you recall, and it was amazing how close I felt to everyone there during those three days. We heard lectures but could say nothing in return. They were based in the Ignatian spiritual exercises. The last day we had lunch, and could talk. We all were invigorated and yet more shallow, not seeing each others humanity and trapped in words and particularities.”

The impetus for a call to empathic prayer 

Several days ago my dog was attacked. This was upsetting because psychologically any disturbance in relational bonds is deeply traumatic and I am with my dog every day and she is mine and we have no children. However, my husband Todd and I had Gaza on our hearts. We had to go to numerous animal hospitals and she was in crisis and bleeding. My husband was struck by how the danger was passed, he wasn’t racing around while bombs were falling, and again, it was just a dog, no homes destroyed. No generations of ethnic cleansing and genocide. We could afford the bill and even our dog has pet insurance and we’ll get reimbursed. We had medical supplies and medicine available. 

I wrote my friends, “Every tragedy of ours we compare to yours, even though therapists remind us this is unhelpful in terms of coping with one’s own grief and can also risk projection where we really have no idea how any single person is feeling at a given time… And every time, we are humbled to know you and eager to continue to live in solidarity with you.”

I am taking in the weight of the injustice that my dog has better care than newborns (and all other humans) in Gaza. We are obsessed with how to have her move forward with as little trauma as possible. This is what people do for those creatures they love. This is what God wills that his creatures like me would will for the world and all living beings, including the planet. I am stupefied thinking of the realism of my musings about the injustice that my dog would be tended to with such excessive care.

In one interview, Munther Isaac talked about how people can’t even recover or rest because of the steady stream of severe trauma on the West Bank. Let alone Gaza. I need to find a framework that would allow me to care for myself in my context (and my dog) while also being in solidarity.

Sometimes solidarity is framed as, if their children are dying, I’m going to let my dog die. Or what I’m going through isn’t as bad, so I’m not going to feel my feelings because it’s immoral to grieve when my dog is attacked when children are under the rubble in Gaza.

But this denies the fundamentals of grief psychology.

The role of proximity in grief

When I was a hospice volunteer we talked about how just as every relationship is unique so every experience of grief is unique. This of course is a western individualistic model. We don’t process collective grief in our psychology trainings. In Arabic class there was a phrase we learned that was like something like “this is the same air we are breathing.” This is not a Western (white) psychology response. It was illuminating and refreshing.

I’m just thinking about how stuffing our emotions in solidarity blocks off the emotions we need to engage if we are really going to do the work of reconciliation. But it is really really upsetting when mourning like Palestinians mourn to think about grieving my dogs health. And yet if I don’t process this, I’m less emotionally available for justice work. There needs to be a framework. One New York Times columnist wrote about how people reached out to him more when he wrote about how his dog died rather than the war torn parts of the world.

If you think about the role of relationality in grieving, from a psychological studies perspective, this makes sense.

Drawing close to Palestine in times of genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing

Maybe I could start a Palestine prayer movement that had good frameworks about the role of prayer in building empathy. People who can’t go on delegations can do a prayer delegation, or something. But like in person, coming to my house, and spending a week praying and studying, and writing. We could read memoirs so Palestinians wouldn’t have to worry about censorship.  It could based on Acts and the opening of Acts when the believers are in their own languages and yet united in prayer, in Jerusalem. I am currently writing an Acts commentary and an article on hermeneutics that draws on Acts.