The Victory of Surrender by Kristyn Komarnicki My mother-in-law is dying of cancer right now. In a small clinic in southern central France, she is awaiting her final day on earth with grace and calm. We watch from afar, have visited to see goodbye as we were able, and dread the phone call we know will come any day. Three years ago, my own mother lay dying, also from cancer. As I sat by her bedside, I worked to put the finishing touches on a PRISM issue that included major features about the situation in Israel/Palestine. I guess history really does repeat itself, because the latest issue of PRISM also focuses on the Middle East, and again I am waiting for a dear woman in my life to breathe her last. There is something about the poignancy of dying in spring that resonates well with the Israel/ Palestine story. Here is what I wrote the three years ago, as I waited and watched by my mother’s side: I am sitting in a spacious, light-filled room in a quiet suburb of Philadelphia. Cardinals flash their scarlet robes against the snow as they feast at the bird feeder just beyond the glass. All is peace and tranquility and beauty. No scene could contrast more sharply with the rubble and mayhem of battle-worn Palestine, half a world away. And yet, like the Palestinians and the Israelis, I am engulfed in grief. I am keeping watch at my mother’s bedside as she slips every day further into the clutches of an incurable cancer. On the other side of this suffering lies her heavenly home, a place of health and wholeness, and for that I rejoice. Indeed it is the only thing that makes her departure not only bearable but also, in some mysterious way, beautiful. While preparing two features on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Peace Fighters and Liberating the Oppressor, I have felt a deep connection to the people’s suffering in that part of the world. Over the past few weeks, the stories of apartheid, harassment, retaliation, and escalation have merged in my mind with the frightening indignities and seemingly random violence my mother is enduring at the hands of her own enemy. Just like the Palestinian and Israeli activists who have chosen to confront the hostility nonviolently, my mother has chosen to absorb the blows of her disease rather than take aggressive and futile measures against it. I am using this imperfect metaphor to help make sense of the painful journey my family currently finds itself on, as well as to help me understand the mystery of nonviolent activism as embodied in the Palestinians.
EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/ePistle