This is a prayer. (Mk. 6.2-4)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church
May 12, 2024
For the mother whose child is taken captive. For the mother whose child is starving. For the mother whose child is wrapped in a shroud. This is a prayer.
He hadn’t planned to be in the city, but had been referred to a specialist for a second opinion. Some things in life, like rare diseases, were naturally complicated. He understood this.
What he had never understood was how people chose to complicate things. The ways we could lose touch with our basic humanity. The newspaper was filled with examples.
So he had been heartened to see the encampment on the news. Bright-eyed students pitching tents on the lawn of an elite university. Some wore keffiyehs and others kippahs. Their message was that maybe it didn’t have to be so complicated. He decided he would go.
Walking toward the encampment, he was struck by the peace and quiet. There were no shouts or chants. Not a bullhorn in sight. Only students, and older people who looked to be faculty, sitting on blankets on the lawn. It was shaded and cool. He could hear birds.
He circumnavigated the encampment before going in. A slow, prayerful walk. He read the banners the students had made and chosen to hang as their words to the world. Free Gaza, read the first. We are all community, read the next. Love each other. He kept walking. Kept reading. Jews say let Gaza live. Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living. Comida gratis. Free food. Anyone is welcome. He kept walking.
After a time, he entered the camp. Three students were standing there, two women and a man. They wore masks and smiled as he approached. He was surprised by the warmth of their welcome and the gentleness of their tone. They all began to talk about the war. They were concerned for everyone who was suffering. They couldn’t look away any longer. So they had come out onto the lawn. Their protest was in its fourth day. The students didn’t know what would happen, only that they needed to be there.
It was just before Mothers’ Day, which was an occasion with its own peaceable history. The day had begun as a call to action by Anna Jarvis in Appalachia. She wanted to promote health and hygiene to lower the infant mortality rate. Later Julia Ward Howe would issue the Mothers’ Day proclamation, which was an anti-war statement in response to the American Civil War. Arise, then, women of this day! Howe had written. From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm! Howe urged the settling of international questions through peaceful means. Too many children had been sacrificed. The cycle of bloodshed must be broken.
He hadn’t thought of Mothers’ Day while standing with the students, though he had thought their mothers should be proud. For here were young people paying attention to their own consciences, the stirring in their souls. They hadn’t tried to ignore it, suppress it, or explain it away. Rather, they attended to what was most deeply human in themselves, that rising anger and anguish that said no more to war. He heard their idealism and wanted to honor it. He wondered if it even was idealism to believe that killing each other’s children was wrong. He thought it was just a kind of common humanity. How and when exactly had we lost that?
Pundits had panned and mocked the students. Politicians had demonized them. Bureaucrats had been frustrated. So many had opinions about the messengers that the message itself was obscured. Yet the messengers he met that day were gentle, compassionate, and conscientious. Their message was morally clear: Stop dropping bombs, stop starving people, stop underwriting this waste and destruction of life. And stop staying so quiet about it all.
The novelist Zadie Smith wrote of the students’ detractors. Anyone who finds themselves, she wrote, rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie. He agreed. The students weren’t only making demands of their university and their country, they were making demands of their elders. Where are your ethics? they were asking. What are your commitments? And if you can’t find them when mothers grieve for their children held hostage, their children starving, their children buried, then let us help you. The students’ questions were prophetic.
He knew the prophets were known for their brashness. They didn’t follow convention or do things in a comfortable way. No, they cried out against injustice. They caused a spectacle. They thundered. He thought the students quite mild by prophetic standards, at least the ones with whom he spoke. Yet their words rang with prophetic hope. Their eyes lit with prophetic vision. They were sure that the way things were was not the way things had to be. It could all be different. There was no reason people couldn’t choose to live in peace. No reason they couldn’t take the risk. No reason they couldn’t find the way forward together. The adults criticized them, said they didn’t understand. But maybe it was the adults who didn’t understand. The way things were was not working.
The students with whom he spoke came from different religious traditions yet they might have understood some words from his own. Jesus, after beginning his work, was criticized for it. He observed that prophets weren’t always well received at home. By their own people. Their own parents. Their own universities. Their own country.
It was an interesting thing for Jesus to say, an offering to all who would come after and find themselves criticized. They wouldn’t be the last, just the latest in a long line. It’s not as if students had never set up encampments or protested injustice before. The comedian John Oliver had commented on it saying that to look across history is to see that student protests age well. Civil rights. Boycotting South Africa. Protesting the American War in Vietnam. In each case, the students were right. And in each case, they were criticized. Told they were doing it wrong. Met with force and taken to jail. Yet their voice and their vision remain.
He spoke with the students for a while. He was in no hurry to leave. The whole place felt like a kind of prayer to him. They were living it out, just for a moment, the peace they dreamed about. He could see it all around. They offered him food and water. Shared their concerns for people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. Told of interfaith prayers held on the lawn. Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others. All of them joined in a heartfelt observance. He wished everyone could see what the students had created and feel its gentle courage and strength.
One of the students said to him, we can’t convince anyone by shouting or arguing. What we can do is make space for each other. He smiled at the student’s wisdom, how countercultural it was. And he thanked the students for what they were doing. He wished them well before he left.
Walking away from the encampment, he felt the peace of the place going with him, and also its prophetic summons. He thought of a final banner he had read, its moral challenge irresistibly clear: We invite you, it read, to struggle with us and fight for Palestinian human rights.
In the name of a different world, he thought. May it be so.
*See Zadie Smith, “Shibboleth,” The New Yorker, May 5, 2024, accessed online at https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/shibboleth-the-role-of-words-in-the-campus-protests
charleston kahu 
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