Editor’s note: The following article is based on a reflection published this spring on the website of Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver. The author has updated it in light of more recent events in the Holy Land.
“What you are seeking is seeking you.”
– Rumi
Sometimes the distance, as Leonard Cohen wrote, “between the TV news and your tiny pain” can be a faraway/so close experience.
To me—someone who has been reporting on and from the Middle East for three decades, and whose great-grandparents were Syrian Orthodox refugees who fled Ottoman oppression for Canada in 1906—the distance between here and the Middle East can seem vast. When I go to church and hear Bible readings about Babylon and Nineveh, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, I visualize them as actual places I have been to, with real, living Christian communities. But the Christianity of North America seems a far, rather diluted cry from the intense, incense-heavy services in Aramaic and Arabic I’ve attended over the years in places where the religion was born.
Other times it is very close indeed. My life on Pacific time is often a surreal blur of sleepy late-night and early-morning WhatsApp messages to Baghdad and Gaza, as I file stories for editors in London. These are punctuated by deadline-dependent mid-morning naps, where I dream of ancestral journeys and biblical stories.
Now I can reach people trapped in war zones in a flick of a digital moment. But I can only imagine what it was like for my great-grandparents to have fled their homeland, leaving everything behind, risking Turkish gun boats in Port Said, crossing the Atlantic and going through Ellis Island before settling some 10,000 miles from their village of Karoun in the Bekka Valley—in Prince Rupert, B.C. In those days, you didn’t ever really “go back”—and they never saw their village again. Luckily their great-granddaughter did, in the aftermath of the civil war in 1992, photographing the old ancestral home and visiting relatives.
As I prepared my intercessory prayer this past Palm Sunday, I felt that familiar pang of nostalgia for friends and relatives in another time zone, remembering holy weeks spent in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Baghdad and Mosul and the scent of anise- and rose water-scented Easter bread.
I felt a strong indication to include prayers again for Suhaila Tarazi, the director of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza (owned and managed by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem) whom I’ve known for years. It’s a hospital open to people of all faiths and incomes that provides primary and emergency care as well as many other services to local residents, who are now trapped in an increasingly difficult situation.
As I sat at my desk gazing out at the Pacific Ocean, I turned on the news at the top of the hour to see that the main story was about yet another bombing of the hospital by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The strike destroyed the hospital’s two-storey genetic laboratory and damaged its pharmacy and emergency department buildings. The 101-year-old St. Philip’s Church nearby that was being used to house patients was also damaged. According to the diocese of Jerusalem, the Israel military gave a 20-minute warning to hospital staff and patients to evacuate before the attack. One child who had previously suffered a head injury died during the rushed evacuation process.
As I sat at my desk in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood, writing my prayers in “real time,” I quickly texted Souhaila Tarazi. Living in South Carolina since the state department evacuated her from Gaza at the end of 2023, she directs a team of beleaguered but resilient hospital staff from her home office. She sent me the latest updates. I told her I would be remembering her and the hospital in my Palm Sunday prayers, and she thanked me.
The next morning, I said the intercessory prayers, which celebrated the Christianity of humility and solidarity with the oppressed—exemplified by Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey—rather than the Christianity of empire. Although we had of course both written independently, they somehow tied in perfectly with the Rev. Rob James’ lovely sermon on the grace and intuitive wisdom of the humble donkey.
I went to take communion. The lady who gave me the eucharistic bread, whom I’d never met before, called me by my name and said, “Thank you for your prayers. We must speak.” I was intrigued, to say the least.
After the service, the Rev. Margaret Cornish introduced herself and her wife, Andrea Mann, who is the director of Global Relations for the Anglican Church of Canada. I had been trying to reach Andrea by email for several weeks to discuss ways to assist the hospital via the Anglican Church of Canada and the diocese of Jerusalem, but well, Mercury was in retrograde and somehow, we never connected. I soon learned that the couple had met Suhaila on three occasions at Al-Ahli Hospital, the most recent being December 2022, when travelling there with then-primate Archbishop Linda Nicholls and the national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.
They were both so concerned about the attack on Al-Ahli, the sixth since October 2023, that Margaret had written a note to the dean asking that there be a special prayer for the hospital. I’m not sure if it ever got to the dean, but meanwhile, I had already included it in my prayers.
It was a wonderful, synchronistic moment that tied in perfectly with the theme of my prayers—that we may think we are alone in our struggles, but we are all connected through the grace of God, often in ways we can’t imagine. And that, in a kind of spiritual consciousness-of-species moment, when we help others, we, as part of the family of humankind, help ourselves move through the same cosmic evolutionary dance.
When I called Suhaila on Monday to check in about damage to the hospital, and spoke Arabic to her, she asked me about my ancestry. I told her about my great-grandparents and also about my Palestinian cousin, Sami Mussallem, former mayor of Jericho, who sadly passed away recently. I had the pleasure of visiting him in 2007 and writing about the wonderful National Botanical Gardens of Palestine with a wildlife refuge he helped initiate.
Suhaila told me that, even though my great-grandparents had been living in Karoun, there was a huge Mussallem clan in Bir Zeit, a town in the West Bank. Of course, she also mentioned the indefatigable Father Manuel Mussallem, a Palestinian Roman Catholic priest and activist who lived in Gaza until recently and is now back in Ramallah.
“All the Christian families are related,” she told me, “And before Sykes-Picot, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine were all one land— Bilad al-Sham.” (Editor’s note: The Sykes–Picot Agreement was a secret deal reached between the U.K. and France in 1916 on how to partition the Ottoman Empire once the war was over.)
“Who knows—we could be cousins,” she said, and I agreed that we probably were.
The amazingly resilient Suhaila told me she was already drawing up a plan for new hospital buildings and that meanwhile, some of the wards not damaged by the bombing were back in use. Luckily, she and her colleagues had dug a well under the hospital before the pandemic, so they still had access to clean drinking water, unlike thousands of displaced Gazans.
The only real solution, she said, was an end to the war. In the meantime, however, the hospital lacked antibiotics, morphine and other essentials that were being blocked at the border by the IDF.
“I can only live in hope,” she told me, “and the messages I receive from abroad are a huge help.”
“We are all Christians,” she said, “Whether in Gaza or Jerusalem or Canada, we are one body in Jesus Christ. If one part of his body is suffering, then the whole body is suffering. And we are asking Christians in the West for solidarity and continuous praying for peace and justice.”
She had watched the intercessory prayers on the cathedral’s YouTube channel and told me they were very moving. “Thank you,” she said. “It comes from a pure loving heart—for humanity, for all victims of war, whether Christians, Muslims and Jews. I’m asking God to fulfill your prayers.”
Since I wrote about my synchronistic Palm Sunday experience, and as we were about to go to press, there was sadly another attack on the hospital on June 5. Israeli forces fired inside the Al Ahli compound, leaving, according to the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, six dead and more than 30 injured. Among the dead were four journalists and a father who was escorting his son to the surgical unit for treatment from previous injuries. Four hospital staff were among the injured.
And since Palm Sunday, the tragedy in Gaza has only worsened, with thousands of Palestinians facing famine and risking their lives to reach aid distribution points. Additionally, a war has erupted between Iran and Israel, with scores of civilians wounded and killed on both sides.
As Anglicans and many other denominations and faiths pray for an end to armed conflict in the region, I remember again my great-grandparents, who fled to Canada over a century ago. Like many in the Middle Eastern diaspora, including those glued to their TV screens today, their hearts were torn between nostalgia for their homeland and concern for the safety of their families.
Beyond my work witnessing the suffering of the displaced and dispossessed, all I can do as an Anglican and a Canadian is to pray for an end to war and occupation in the region, and for an end to Canadian complicity in arming nations perpetrating war crimes.
In the meantime, when I watch the nightly news, I often hold one hand to my heart, and one hand to the flickering screen, offering up an incantation for the land of my ancestors, for an end to any pretense of separation between “us” and “them,” between the inhabitants of biblical landscapes and our Sunday sermons, and for a world where no one will have to get on a boat and flee their homeland in flames, for the safe exile of unfamiliar shores.
Amen.
