A Star of Hope is Born in Palestine; Remembering is Resistance
Commoners' Advent, day 7
These are an exciting and meaningful few days in our journey through Commoners’ Advent and so I am feeling quite giddy and struggling to settle on what to write about. Yesterday, 22nd November, was St Clement’s Eve and patron saint of music, St Cecelia’s Feast Day, and so the perfect opportunity to share an Advent playlist. Today, 23rd November, is Old Clem’s Night, and tomorrow, 24th November, is Old Martinmas, St Mrata’s, one of our wolf saints, Feast Day, St Catherine’s Eve, and Stir Up Sunday for making our puddings and cakes! And we will, I hope, explore all of this, but today was also Goose Night at Crossbones Graveyard and I have been thinking about the important of remembering.
I wrote a long piece; ‘This is Still the Crossbones Graveyard’ in 2022. I would love you to read it and let me know what you think if you have a moment. Crossbones is the most wonderful place and, if I were pressed to say what my religion is, I would definitely answer “Crossbones”. Today has been the 28th anniversary of playwright, John Constable and his alter-ego John Crow’s discovery of the ‘secret history’ of the Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark, South London, and so the 28th Goose Night!
Just to give you a sense of what Crossbones is here’s something from my previous sharing…
“In Southwark, close to London Bridge station in one of the oldest, dirtiest, and poorest, parts of London, stands the Crossbones Graveyard, once known as the Single Women's churchyard. Here, in this most sacred earth, lie the bodies of sex workers and paupers, who were either refused, or too poor to be granted, burial in consecrated ground. From at least the 14th Century until 1853, when the graveyard was closed having become 'overcharged with dead', an estimated 15,000 people, many of whom were babies & children, were buried there in unmarked graves.
It is an irony that the medieval sex workers buried there were licenced by the Bishop of Winchester, under an ordinance signed by Thomas Becket in 1161, to work in the stews, or brothels, of Bankside's Liberty of the Clink. The Liberties were areas outside the control, & the laws, of the monarch & some activities that were forbidden elsewhere, such as bull & bear baiting, brothels & theatres, were allowed there. The sex workers of the Liberty became known as the 'Winchester Geese' & enjoyed a measure of protection from the bishop whilst alive but were denied Christian burial at the end. The most brutal of judgements on women from whom the church had benefitted financially.”
Do pop over to the full piece of writing here to discover the ways in which Crossbones has become, despite the seeming impossibility of it, a bright and shining beacon of healing and hope in a ragged world. But, of course, it is also a reminder of the hypocrisy of the Church, being more concerned about its own status and power than about those in its care, especially those who are vulnerable and rendered voiceless. This is something which is all too horribly relevant now. Tonight we listened to Frank Turner’s beautiful and powerful song, ‘The Graveyard of the Outcast Dead’, written for Crossbones, and I felt every word, because I am a member of the Church of England (although I have never been confirmed as I refuse to ‘go under the Bishop’s thumb’), and I mourn for what we have done, and continue to do.
“…Now the bishops snuck off to fresh pastures
While my grave was grown over with weeds
No burial plots, just some forget-me-nots
For the women they branded unclean
The wasteland was claimed by the city
They covered it with tenement slums
For where we'd been left had never been blessed
And they dug down and built on our bones
But every December
With frost on his fingers
My lover returns
For he still remembers
To meet me in the graveyard
The graveyard where they made my bed
Plants a white flower under cold stars
On the grave of the forgotten dead…
So London, don't mourn for your lovers
Raise a glass for us glorious dead
For beneath Southwark streets, we outlasted the priests
And the city's raised up on our beds
Though we're gone, London, do not forget…”
And so, tonight at our monthly vigil for the Outcast, Living and Dead, we talked about the ways in which the powerful believe that they can erase the memory of what they have done in their pursuit of power, wealth, and status, but that they never truly can. What’s held in the memory of the land will always break through and will sing its rage, its grief, and its hope, to any ear willing to hear. I am sure that the Bishop of Winchester, who benefitted financially from the work of the Winchester Geese but refused them Christian burial, would never have believed that, more than 400 years later, a disparate group of edge people, and not so edge people, would be holding vigil for the dead of Crossbones and planting flowers on their graves, or that there would be plays, songs, poems, and art installations in their honour, that their burial ground would be held as sacred despite his refusal to consecrate it. He might not have believed, but he would have been wrong.
And this, I think, is what Commoners; Advent is all about, because Advent is about waiting, about longing, and what we are longing for is a better, more just world. And that world is never going to come from above, from the powerful. It will always come from the songs rising up from our feet; songs of despair, songs of injustice, and songs of remembering. And it will come from a growing solidarity across time and place, because what the powerful have succeeded in doing to us they will always attempt to do to someone else and we have to do all that we can not to let that happen.
Which brings me to Palestine, and Palestine is a subject that we will need to turn our gaze towards if we are looking for the star that shines over that beleaguered land.
On 22nd October, 2023 in Bethlehem, Palestinian theologian and Academic Dean of Bethlehem Bible College, Munther Isaac, preached that, “God is under the rubble in Gaza” and we were told that there would be no Christmas lights in Bethlehem, no festivities and only sombre reflection on the meaning of the season. I cannot imagine that this year will be any different, especially now that the West Bank is also under siege.
I know that what was happening in Gaza then, and now, is not new. Whilst this violence may be unprecedented, the people of that land have been enduring apartheid and a slow genocide for many decades. Our support is not just needed now but in the long-term and, despite and because of our broken hearts, we have to find the strength and will for that. And to find those things we have to remember that we are still alive, and whilst we have breath there is still someone to speak the words, “Free Palestine”. It is not for us to offer hope because we need to centre the voices of the Palestinian people and they have been teaching us for a year that they love life and hold endless hope, but what we can offer is our witnessing and our memory, just as we have offered to the dead of Crossbones Graveyard.
A few days ago I read a moving article by award-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, who previously reported on the genocide in Bosnia. In ‘Organized Oblivion’, he writes that, like the victims of the Armenian genocide, the people of Gaza;
“…too will soon battle to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world that stood by as they were slaughtered. They too will doggedly seek to preserve scraps of their existence. They too will write memoirs, histories and poems, draw maps of villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, set down painful stories of butchery, carnage and loss. They too will name and condemn their killers, lament the extermination of families, including thousands of children, and struggle to preserve a vanished world.”
and that;
““The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Milan Kundera reminds us.
It is better to endure crippling trauma than to forget. Once we forget, once memories are purged — the goal of all genocidal killers — we are enslaved to lies and myths, severed from our individual, cultural and national identities. We no longer know who we are…
Those who carry out genocide seek total annihilation. Nothing is to remain. Especially memory.
This will be our next battle. We must not forget.”
Displaced Palestinian people in the diaspora continue to talk about their lost villages, their memories and the memories of their grandparents. They continue to treasure the keys to their stolen homes, which they one day hope to return to. The people of Gaza continue to make art, plant seeds, tell their stories. They hold on to hope as if it were breath, as if it were life itself, because it is.
But what can we offer in world in which we often feel so powerless, in which we see those in power turn away from the mass murder of a people as if it were nothing? We can offer ourselves to the battle; we must not forget. The people of Gaza have shown us so much, often at the cost of their own dignity. They have told us their stories, allowed us to share in their unimaginable loss. Many of us have seen things that we wish we had never seen, things that we can never unsee. Nor should we, because our witnessing is part of the keeping of memory.
In my church’s Advent study group this week we were talking about eyes;
“Your eyes are the windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light…” (Matthew 6:22)
and I was reminded of the ‘Eulogy from a Physicist’, written by Aaron Freeman, which I have read out at several funerals. It is truly beautiful. It tells us,
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your broken-hearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever…”
And so let’s honour our witnessing for the people of Gaza, because their stories shared with us through our screens have ‘gathered in the particle detectors that are our eyes’ and they will go on forever, even after we have gone. The powerful think that they can erase the memory of the things they have done, but the very molecules of existence are singing resistance songs and stitching memory back in to the fabric of life. Far, far in the future, no matter what has happened in the meantime, an atom that was once perhaps in the mouth of the Nile, and then became part of an eye that saw the final moments of a life in Gaza, will settle back into being and the the voices of the silenced will be heard again. There will be no forgetting.
And so, because stories matter and we are stitching memory in, let’s learn something about nature and resistance by considering the Palestine Sunbird.
The Palestine Sunbird (Cinnyris osea ~ ‘osea’ from Ancient Greek ὁσια, hosia, meaning "holy"), is a small bird that has come to hold great meaning. Rana Hijaw in ‘This Week in Palestine’ writes that, “The Palestine sunbird was declared the national bird of Palestine in 2015 after the Israeli occupation authorities tried to change its name in their efforts to erase Palestinian identity.”
Sunbirds are one of the smallest birds in Occupied Palestine. The female birds and juveniles are a grey-brown colour for protection but, in order to attract mates, the males have distinctive blue-green metallic feathers on their heads. During the breeding season from June to October, bright yellow and orange tufts appear under their wings like tiny flames.
The tip of the Palestine Sunbird’s tongue resembles a brush to help it collect nectar from flowers, but they also feed on invertebrates such as spiders and other insects, some of which are a threat to crops. The Palestine Sunbird then is an important part of a healthy eco-system, helping to reduce the use of pesticides and also acting as a pollinator.
Rana Hijwa ends her article by saying that,
“The Palestine sunbird not only carries the country’s name but also symbolizes Palestinian natural heritage. Wildlife societies in Palestine and independent researchers have done a great job in raising awareness of the existence of this marvelous bird by creating or participating in competitions that aim to document and honor the Palestine sunbird. Although birding, writing, or painting can be seen as simple means of expression, they are, in fact, very powerful in confronting any force that tries to erase our existence. Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti tied resistance to beauty, saying, “Whenever you face injustice or roughness, remember to defend yourself by finding beauty … document, prove, and defend it because all beauty is resistance.”
I will end with this poem of resistance and remembering by writer and professor Refaat Alareer, killed by the IOF in an airstrike on 6th December 2023, along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children.
If I Must Die
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Translation by Sinan Antoon
So let’s stitch the knowing of the Palestine Sunbird into our pockets, honour our eyes and our hearts for their willingness to look when so many others would turn away, and know that we are holding precious memories in our very cells, because, like beauty, remembering is resistance. Let it be a tale.
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Powerful. Thank you.
Thank you for your words and your remembering...🙏🏼✨