Ending the Fast

Hi everyone,

As you know, I've been doing a liquids-only fast for the past month or so.
It has been both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful for seeing the ways in
which the body changes and adapts to the lack of food; curious to see the
wierd emotional and deep memory-probing effects it has had on me, and
terrible to become quite ill actually. I have run into trouble with anemia
twice in the past month, and a possible electrolyte imbalance. The
light-headedness and sharp headaches were really the most disturbing,
because I could not keep up with the work. The fast was not the only
contributing factor, but it was adding on to other physical strains and
aggravating the problems. I could basically choose to start taking lots of
electrolyte and vitamin drinks and pills, etc., to keep going, or return
to food. The Lenten fast for Eastern Christians is to abstain from all
animal products and sweets for fifty days. So I am doing what I can,
within the confines of responding gracefully to Iraqi hospitality. As a
team, we learned that our fast was causing strain to our relationships
with our Iraqi friends. Our refusal of their hospitality and invitations
was doing more harm than good. Making allowances for the sake of right
relationships, I think, is also a form of spiritual discipline.

I was feeling quite guilty about ending the fast though, or adapting it in
any way. Part of the baggage comes from fasting in Hebron during Ramadan,
where two teammates were actually kind of cruel in calling fasters who had
to adapt later or needed to talk about the experience of being hungry
'hypocrites.' They were not fasting themselves and wanted to hear nothing
about it. At that time, I was beginning to develop ulcers and needed to
stop. They were not sympathetic. By the time their comments finally
reduced me to tears, they then began to stop and think. When I think back
to life in Hebron, there are both impassioned loves and deep hurts. The
fasting did help me to connect with those deep hurts, the ones I thought
I'd forgotten. Yet I think that love and hurt is team life, and community
life. It is human life. Though I remember that hurt, I still love my
teammates.

I still feel guilty though, especially when looking at the two other
liquids-only fasters on the team. They are doing well, but they have done
long fasts before. I would definitely fast again, maybe even several times
a year, but perhaps I will only do so for a week at a time.

It is getting to that point while I am on project when I find it hard to
write. Things settle into a sense of normalcy, even when life is far from
normal. For this reason, I believe no peace worker should stay in a war
zone for more than three months at a time. One forgets what needs to be
explained to those people who need to know what is going on in the world.
Returning home and coming back allows me to see with North American eyes.
What good is salt once it loses its saltiness? Yet, unlike salt, a peace
worker can be re-charged and renewed. It just takes time and a place of
refuge, a return to what is peaceful and healing. At the same time,
especially for Americans, you cannot stay in those small places of refuge
and forget the troubles in the world. Americans are constantly in danger
of this. I recently heard a song by Bruce Cockburn called “Where the
Death Squads Live.” The key verse is,

“When you think you’ve lost the difference
between right and wrong,
just go down
to where the death squads live.”

When you get too comfortable, you need to go out and become afflicted again.

I don’t know if I wrote before about my practice of the rosary. I began
last fall here when I could hear the shelling every night and would stay
awake worrying about those who were being killed. After many sleepless
nights, Anne showed me a way of saying the rosary beads that worked well
for Protestants. I guess I’m not the only one. If you look at the ELCA
website, there is actually a ‘Lutheran Rosary’ for Lent. I took what was
helpful from there, and it has been really good. I told someone the other
day that I was a Lutheran, “but a very Mennonite Catholic Muslim
Lutheran.”

>From my point of view and experience these past four years, it makes
perfect sense.

The other week, Sheila and I went to Baghdad al Jdida (New Baghdad) with
her host mother to do some shopping. Al Jdida is a sprawling souk a
little like Hebron or the old city of Jerusalem, so I loved it. Prices
are reputed to be a third of those in other places around town. In the
car each way, I had one of those moments of pure amazement that I am
really in Baghdad, and what a fantastic city it is, even after so many
wars. It is so beautiful. I forget to write about this. Some of it is
like Shalala Street in Hebron, with ornate, Venetian stone houses and iron
grillwork; some is gritty yet vibrant like East Jerusalem; some is
stuccoed and sandy like Gaza City; and some, like the expressways and
industrial yards, is very much like Chicago. Baghdad is a good crossroads
kind of city to live in, and very appropriate place for me to be while
facing this cross-roads of so many different places in my life.

In only six weeks, I will leave international living behind. I am fearful
that I’ll also be leaving community life behind—what will happen if my
housemates at the seminary all want to cook for themselves and stake out
their own ‘space?’ Is it possible to create intentional community in a
seminary apartment? I am afraid of being lonely. I am also afraid of
overwhelming my new roomies with my CPT friends, constant organizing of
activities, being totally in touch with global culture and totally out of
touch with pop culture; and my odd way of keeping house and home which
blends North American and Arab living. By the end of this paragraph, I
realize I am headed for a full-blown panic.

At the same time, I am eager to be in Chicago. I have had this in my
sights for four long years abroad. I need the time to process all I have
seen before I return overseas again. I think about how much I would like
to return to Palestine when I am done with seminary, but also how much I
would like to go even further east, or south. I am not sure I can stand
living and working in the U.S. before I am forty.

There are many beautiful places of retreat where I have been and wish I
could return. Last spring I was at a German Brothers’ monastery at Latrun
north of Jerusalem. There were quiet stone cells and sprawling flower
gardens for reflecting, writing, and drawing. There was Aunt Dar’s house
after September 11th, a refuge from the rising tide of nationalism. If I
did not wish to spend as much time as possible this summer with friends
and family, I would move into the Catholic Worker in Waterloo (IA) or
Toronto, or head to the first organic farm community with an open door.
Our office is a cool refuge from the ever-hotter Baghdad afternoons;
Seminary will be a refuge from the war, the war was a refuge from the
U.S., Canada was a refuge from all which is ugly and rationalized as
‘patriotism.’

My teammate Stewart commented just now that the situation in the U.S. now
“is McCarthyism on steroids.” Never mind that Stewart is Canadian, I
thoroughly agree. Why is it, though, that we have not found a way to name
this great darkness? Shall we just call it Empire, the sum of McCarthyism
and the Cold War and the arms race and the death squads and the whole
Doctrine of National Security? Were the citizens of Rome aware in the
first century of the repression of the Jews during the spread of the
grand, ill-fated Pax Romana?

I am just starting a book called _Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus
Christ_, by Klaus Wengst. I wonder if there are not hundreds of books
like this which Lutherans have never read or looked for. When I find
books like these, it is like cool water in the desert. That may sound
like a cliché, but it represents a very true and deep feeling. There is a
small oasis where the world of Christianity and the search for peace and
justice intersect, and that is where writings like these are found. I feel
the same way about Sojourners magazine. I think to be twenty-six years
old and have this feeling means that I have found a right path in life,
but a path that will be painfully misunderstood by many other people I
meet.

The weather here lately is extremely dry, and I am beginning to feel like
the alligator in the Lubriderm lotion commercials. Bleh! We had a dust
storm last Friday. My skin and lips and hair and nails are all almost
painfully dried out, in ways they never were last September at 120-30
degrees. There is also a massive amount of chlorine in the water this past
week, and just as there's nothing like downing a nice tall glass of (ugh)
bleach on a warm day, I think that is a contributing factor to my dermal
suffering. A shopkeeper handed me a bright orange tin of locally-produced
balm and for 75 cents it works surprisingly good. It is cool here in the
evenings still and I am also needing a shawl inside most days. It's been
windy, which also brought in the dust storm.

I understand all of Yahoogroups got an odd virus last week and some of you
got strange fake emails from me. Ah, technology.

Letters get long quickly and I think I should stop. It is time for church
tonight, 5 p.m. at St. Raphael’s, when the rush of the day is over in
Baghdad.

Peace to you,

Le Anne