Smoking with the Party of God

I have once, like Moses, stood on a high place and looked over into God’s “promised and holy land” the land of Israel. It is a beautiful landscape. The hills are high and painted in sandy colours by the low rainfall and the Mediterranean sun. Like Moses my feet did not actually touch the Promised Land. I was the wrong side of the wire. I was in the bad lands of South Lebanon, the home of Hezbollah, the Party of God. Some differences were very obvious as I gazed over the impenetrable border. The houses to the south were neat disciplined and arranged in prosperous rows of uniform bright red roofs. The fields stood out from the tawny landscape as green and lush. The military infrastructure of radar stations, border roads and observation posts abundantly obvious.

On my side of the fence the Arab towns hung haphazardly to the hillsides. Intermittent olive groves seemed to blend easily into their dusty surroundings and goats wandered the wadis in a relaxed mood of laissez-faire. Some differences were obvious. Behind my back from some electronic speaker system hidden to me in the hills the long plaintive song of the Muezzin was pumped out a call to turn the mind to God at this mid-day and give Him his due service in prayer. On every lamp post and festooning every village around here interminable posters with the faces of the famous Islamic clerics in sombre robes and turbans, looking like a blend between pop idols and favourite uncles. And the insignia of Islamic resistance fighters, their symbols dominated by that of the raised automatic rifle.

Here, I fell to thinking, three Gods encounter one another. The God of the Jews who blessed and kept those who lived in the valley below me doing a conscientious job of making the land bring forth despite the daily threat of rocket attack from the hostile hills to the north. The very hills in which I stood. The God of Islam who brought dignity, purpose and belonging to the impoverished and marginalised who felt their very existence hanging by a thread and the whim of the overwhelming military power that could sweep back through these hills if and when it chose, just like it had done before. And the God of the Englishman who lived in me and was related to these other Gods, though I was not quite sure how.

Later, in the evening, I sat I outside a café with my Arab hosts. They drank strong coffee and smoked strong cigarettes. Eventually a nargila pipe appeared, the long elegant water-filled Arabic hookah and as the guest I was invited to be the first to smoke from it. Nervously I did enough to satisfy etiquette and passed it on to the next person around the table. The conversation turned to religion. This in itself was a slight shock to English ears used to a social taboo on the subject, or at best an expectation of strong cynicism. The crazy thing, my host explained, is that we all worship the same God and yet Jews Muslims and Christians seem to be unable to stop blasting each other to pieces in His name. One day, his hope was, we would all realise that we wanted the same thing and were really close to being brothers if you tore away the religious divisions. In his view there were not three Gods at play here but only one, and that one was bigger than any of us had given Him credit for.

At some unearthly late hour we left the café and drove out towards the completely deserted hotel of which we were the only guests. As we drove I pondered the talk there had been around the table. They were wrong of course. I knew then as I think I know now, that not all religions offer a clear view of God. Maybe even their Gods differ. Jesus Christ, the Galilean from down there in the valley, uniquely and once for all time demonstrated what God is really like and how we should pursue Him. Yet I did not speak up for this point of view. I could not bring myself to point out his uniqueness and their error. Why was that? I have long felt myself to be a religious coward, happy to run from a verbal scrap rather than stand and fight a religious cause. But tonight was different. In this place the raw pain of conflict and division is so visible and such a daily reality. Perhaps I wanted to believe that it might be true and that we were all stumbling forward to find the same God who had the ultimate power to unite us. Perhaps I just could not bring myself to assert that I was self-evidently right in my spiritual understanding and therefore it logically followed that they were self-evidently wrong.

We drew up to the front of the hotel and as we got out my host reached into the glove compartment and took out a automatic pistol. One of a number of weapons he had, he explained, he was never without one.

Chris

For 'Past reflections' click the links below:

The nature of true spirituality