!Hope
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agk's diary
9 December 2023 @ 03:15 UTC
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written on X61/hp vf15 display/model m keyboard
listening to WEVL radio in the kitchen after guest
and daughter sleep, before Evy's home
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Hope I'll get enough sleep to be a good nurse for
my patients tomorrow, a good support to my staff,
to attend to needs, prevent crises, and go home on
time, after only 12 or 13 hours.
Hope, the start of Advent, looking forward to the
possibility light will come into darkness. Maybe
not believing it'll come, but dreaming, preparing,
because what if it did? I should be ready. We
should be ready.
Yesterday an Israeli military operation rounded up
truckloads of unarmed men in Gaza, made them strip
their clothes, made women and children run away,
kidnapped the men. They left piles of clothes,
shoes in the street. In 1956 they lined Khan Yunis
and Rafah's men against walls and shot them. Now
nobody knows what they do with them.
As for women, children, old: at least 19,000 dead
in two months, almost 10,000 missing under rubble,
50,000 blinded, burned, amputated, infected. Almost
2 million homeless in cold rain. Nine of ten alive
can't eat every day.
My county completed 200 flights in 2 months. Bombs,
tank rounds, missiles, rifles, bullets, drones;
vetoed today's otherwise unanimous UN ceasefire
resolution. Congress debated the next 10,000 bombs,
100,000 shells. President ignored democracy, wrote
executive order. C-17s flew them over.
Retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick said
it'd end in less than a day if my country stopped
supplying it. They can't make their own bullets.
Hope: they'll run out. They'll have to stop.
Hope doesn't have to be cheerful. This week's
lectionary reading from the Prophets, Isaiah 64,
is not cheerful.
Chapter 63 is the confession:
Why, God, did you make us wander from your ways?
Why did you make us cold and stubborn
Chapter 64 starts with the prayer:
Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend,
make the mountains shudder at your presence--
As when a forest catches fire
As my country's bombs laid ruin to dozens of
mosques and several ancient churches, as armed
settlers prevent Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque,
demolish the Imam's house, target and kill dozens
of journalists, cut power and phone service to hide
the evil, Chapter 64 reads:
Your holy cities are all ghost towns:
Zion's a ghost town,
Jerusalem's a field of weeds.
Our holy and beautiful Temple,
which our ancestors filled with your praises,
Was burned down by fire,
all our lovely parks and gardens in ruins.
Palestinian Christians are descended from ancient
Hebrews, whose holy and beautiful Temple that was.
Bethlehem's churches, Protestant, Roman Catholic,
Orthodox, Armenian, canceled lights and trees to
mourn this Christmas. Why celebrate and be shot by
settlers as your family's flesh burns 12 km away?
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bethlehem, led
by Pastor Munther Ishaq, replaced its infant Jesus
in stable nativity with a child buried under
concrete rubble.
Mark 13:
Take a lesson from the fig tree. From the moment
you notice its buds form, the merest hint of
green, you know summer's just around the corner.
And so it is with you. When you see all these
things, you know he's at the door.... Stay at your
post. Keep watch.
Pastor Ishaq said, "Christmas is the solidarity of
God with those who are oppressed, with those who
are suffering. If Jesus is to be born again this
year, he will be born under the rubble in Gaza."
In the time of Emperor Augustus, under Herod's
genocide, Christ was born. Impossibly, secretly,
apocalyptically. That time, I hope, is the time in
which we live.
