| Finding Easter Hope Among Grief |
| by Kathy O’Leary Organizer for FOSNA-NJ and Pax Christi New Jersey, Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace |
| As I write this, we are in the midst of the Octave of Easter- the most joyous time in the calendar of the Church. Jesus is risen. As Psalm 118 says, “let us rejoice and be glad”. But the Palestinian people are still crucified. My heart feels heavier than it has for all of Lent, for the past 18 months of genocide in Gaza. I am left searching for the hope in the darkness, the joy amid the suffering. |
| This Monday, I tried to explain to a congressional aide, as I have so many times before, the new horror that is Gaza this week. And then, something different happened. I began to cry. The news we delivered to this congressional staffer was particularly grim. The last fully-functioning hospital was bombed out of operation by Israeli forces on Palm Sunday. Tents in the “safe zone” were struck by Israeli missiles on Easter Sunday. OCHA was warning that “mass casualty events are now the norm”. But we have relayed grim news before—news of decapitated babies and children burned alive. Even then, I have retained my composure. Perhaps it was the news of Pope Francis’ death, fresh in my mind, that dislodged a bit of stuck grief from past reports and caused the tears to flow. I cannot say for sure. I do know that my grief is fed by a feeling of helplessness. I feel helpless as I watch child after child die on my screen. I feel helpless as I witness an American Catholic church creeping toward a liberal theology that justifies the religious ethno-nationalism of Israel, and that will surely intensify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. I also feel complicity in my connections to a government bent on supplying weapons to genocide, and the leadership of the US Catholic Church, both ordained and lay, that is largely silent about the greatest moral issue of our time. I know that my grief is also compounded by the loss on Easter Monday of Pope Francis who was a moral voice for so many causes, including and especially the rights of the Palestinian people. Cardinal Pizzaballa attached Pope Francis’ gentle accompaniment of the Palestinian people and his fierce public prophetic pronouncements to his overall legacy when he said “Gaza was one of the symbols of his pontificate”. With my stuck grief now dislodged, I can start to see where I will find hope. One of those places is in the people at Holy Family Parish in Gaza who carry the courage that Pope Francis helped to instill in them with his nightly phone calls. Another is in the Christian leaders at Kairos Palestine, who like the persistent widow (Lk. 18:1-8), continue to call out the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on its failure to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people and its failure to acknowledge our complicity as a nation in the suffering and death of so many, including fellow members of the body of Christ, and call for an end to weapons sales and transfers to Israel. This year, my Easter joy may be harder to find. But when it does come I know that it will come from the community that FOSNA is helping to build with other organizations to work for an end to the genocide in Gaza and a free Palestine. |
