April 6, 2025.
Dear Friends,
We will gather together remotely for our Badaliya and Peace Islands Institute faith sharing on Sunday, April 6. 2025 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm. Please join us on Zoom, or in spirit, as we encourage Inter-faith relations and pray together a peaceful resolution to the on-going bombing in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, and an end to the on-going Israeli incursions by the IDF and settlers in the West Bank. We wait with hope for a peaceful transition to democracy in Syria as they negotiate with the diverse factions throughout the country after a long civil war. As violence continuous in far too many areas of the world may there finally be an end to war as a solution to conflict in the Ukraine, Haiti and the Sudan. Our prayers are on-going for all the victims of human-created violence as well as the increase of natural disasters due to climate change all over the world.
With the current threat to democratic values both here in the United States and in Israel, may our prayers give us the courage to speak truth to power and take appropriate actions to support all efforts to protect the core values of all authentic religions that are the only means to safety for all people, including our Jewish neighbors.
Today, Christians around the world enter into the 5th week of Lent while our Muslim friends have celebrated the final celebratory days of the end of Ramadan. Given the on-going conflicts that plague our world, those of us living in relative safety and security anywhere in the world would do well to remember that our choice to enter into fasting, prayer, and almsgiving is a great privilege. To be grateful for such a life-giving opportunity is only one response to the vast amount of suffering we are witnessing every day in the news. The hope is that our fasting has transformed our lack of attention and indifference from inaction to action on behalf of those who hunger and thirst due to no fault of their own. This alone in our three-fold Lenten practice of fasting, prayer and alms giving could remind us that hunger and thirst can also be for an end to isolation and loneliness, for love never felt or given to innocent children, for community, relationships and above all, for an experience of the Divine that feeds and nurtures the deepest longings of the Human soul.
Our Lenten and Ramadan practices have goals that we surely want to remember. In Islam the community is strengthened by a month of shared Iftar dinners after each day of fasting. The self-discipline required supports self-control and self-sacrifice while almsgiving increases empathy for those less fortunate. All these are fueled by the spiritual growth and deepening of relationship with the Divine that is the result of purposeful attentiveness to readings from the Qur'an and prayer. Eid-al-Fitr, which means "festival of breaking the fast", is one of two major festivals in Islam. Given that our Muslim friends have spent the last month fasting from all food and water from sunrise to sunset each day we can rejoice with them as they celebrate the end of Ramadan together with family and friends.
In this 5th week of Lent, Christians are entering the last weeks of continued prayer and fasting in preparation for the final Triduum that calls us into the dramatic events in the Life of Christ; the last shared meal with his disciples on Holy Thursday, through the pain and suffering of the Crucifixion on Good Friday and the final joy of Resurrection at the climax of the Easter Vigil into Easter Sunday.
As we have watched the extraordinary courage and faith of the Muslim community in Gaza as they celebrated Eid-al-Fitr in tents and the rubble of war-torn homes, perhaps these words of hope from today's reading from the ancient Prophet Isaiah will renew both our communities of faith:
"Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers. Wild beasts honor me, jackals and ostriches, for I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my chosen people to drink, the people I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise." (Isaiah 43:17-21)
In his Convocation letter written to the original members of the Badaliya on February 5, 1960, Louis Massignon reminds us that this was "the 58th day of his own private fasting for a serene peace between Christians and Muslims, particularly in North Africa and the Near East." He was well aware of the suffering of minority Christians in Syria and Egypt at the time noting that traditional Arab Christianity had always been there. He wrote that "hostility to Arab Christians could be alleviated if a Jewish-Arab appeasement happened in Palestine." This letter ends with "We are more than ever certain that the heroic weapon of non-violence will finally win and that human thought ( which was capable of splitting the atom) will pierce the spiritual Heavens through the pure prayer of the meek, the persecuted and the outcasts."
Along with his friend Mahatma Gandhi, he fervently believed that personal fasting for peace with justice and all efforts at non-violent resistance to occupation and persecution of any kind were not only effective but necessary. Moreover he was convinced that the prayers of the most marginalized of human beings were as capable of "piercing the spiritual Heavens" and producing change, as all our most advanced technological and scientific human capacities. That in 2025 we are still faced with the same hostility between religious communities and the inability of Jews and Arabs to peacefully co-exist in Palestine continues to plague our world.
We must take hope in the reality on the ground where so many Palestinian and Israeli Jews are actively working together for peace despite the obstacles of those in power around them. Massignon becomes a model of hope in prayer and fasting for members of our modern day Badaliya and those who know his vision.
Peace to you,
Blessed Lent and Easter,
Dorothy
See www.dcbuck.com for all past letters to the Badaliya and Peace Islands