Pilgrimage of Peace for All
Image from flight map. Ken Butigan
I have arrived at O’Hare Airport waiting to board a nonstop Royal Jordanian flight to Amnan. The far end of Terminal 5 shines with a brilliance I don’t associate with Chicago, with its I.M. Pei bone-white sculptured ceiling and the late afternoon pastel blue light flooding in through the endless windows.
I am headed to Jordan, where I will connect with other members of the “Light in the Darkness: Pilgrimage for Just Peace,” a cohort fashioned by my colleague Eli McCarthy—a professor in peace studies at Georgetown University and an organizer with Christians for Ceasefire—in collaboration with Sabeel, the long-time effort by Palestinian Christians struggling for a peace rooted in the power of active nonviolence and the principles of liberation theology. The goals of this journey are solidarity and accompaniment, including contributing to being an international presence with people under attack—and inviting Christians in the United States to deepen their advocacy for concrete steps for a just and lasting peace.
We’ll spend the night at a hotel near the capital, then travel to Jerusalem.
It was not at all certain that this delegation would finally go forward, given the tensions that have ratcheted up over the last couple of weeks in the wake of Israel’s recent assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut and the death in Iran of Ismail Haniyeh, one of Gaza’s highest-ranking officials who was playing a key role in negotiations for a ceasefire. Israel has not claimed responsibility for that hit, which transpired while the Hamas chief was in Tehran attending the inauguration of Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, but few believe that Tel Aviv was not behind the killing. The Sabeel delegation scheduled for last week was postponed as airlines canceled flights because of the possibility that the conflict between Israel and both Iran and Hezbollah could escalate into a major war across the region.
All the while, the relentless attack on Gaza continues. Yesterday another 100 Palestinians were killed as Israel bombed a school compound, where thousands of displaced people were sheltering.
According to press reports, the ceasefire talks suddenly lurched back to life last Thursday night, apparently propelled by the fear that a region-wide cataclysm is in the offing, which perhaps could be averted by a peace deal in the Israel-Gaza war.
Settling into my window seat I find myself adrift in a hope against hope that something can be done to extinguish the ceaseless rounds of suffering. The horror of Hamas’ October 7 surprise attack that engulfed a series of Israeli communities along the Israel-Gaza border, leaving over 1100 people dead and hundreds abducted. The relentless ground and air tsunami unleashed by Israel on Gaza, with the unconscionable suffering in its ongoing wake: 40,000 killed, hundreds of thousands injured, two million at risk of starvation and disease. The horrific prospect of a conflagration across the Middle East. My own government’s role in all of this.
Another grisly turn of history’s wheel, with decades of death and injury and oppression both the cause and the effect.
Intractable. Yet I am astonished by the resolve some have that this cycle of retaliation and escalation can finally be broken. Here I am thinking not so much about the politicians and chieftains on all sides who, when they run out of options, plead for peace, but for the others who, faced with the horrors prepared for them, break the rules of the countless systems of domination that sprawl across our history. They double-down on the wager that the powerless possess a different kind of power, a way out of no way.
I saw this resolve on display in the Zoom call in preparation for this pilgrimage, where one of the Sabeel organizers made a presentation on the principles that they root their work in and that will operate in this delegation as we encounter the realities in the places we will visit, including Bethlehem, Hebron, and Jerusalem: Inclusivity, Justice, and Nonviolence. We are all one. Every last one of us. We all deserve justice. Every last one of us. And we struggle for “justice for all” nonviolently.
Astounding but logical: we cannot defeat evil with evil. We have to defeat evil with good, he says.
Simply put.
These precepts are not only ancient ideals—though he did reference Jesus’ command that we “love our enemies”—but also courageous wagers that have been made time after time in many places over the course of history, including in the midst of the withering violence Palestinians have confronted since 1948.
I have taken this journey as a response to that history that grinds on in real-time. I come not to do anything and certainly not to solve anything, but to “be with.” The invitation from the Palestinians who work with Sabeel was for us to be, even for just a moment, present: to see, to listen, to be with the reality. We will meet with families of the Israeli hostages, and families of Palestinian prisoners.
I long for peace for all. For Palestinians. For Israelis. For people throughout the Middle East and every place in the world, wounded and sacred. For my own country, which has so often contributed to the cycle of violence.
In this spirit, I lift up the words my spouse Cynthia Okayama Dopke said as I left home, “Soak it all in and bear witness.” And then she added, “Be open to expanding your frameworks of meaning.”
I am taking her words to heart.
Ken Butigan is the Strategic Consultant at Pace e Bene. He also teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. This is the first of what is intended as a series of reflections on this pilgrimage of peace.