Rose Marie Berger

IT'S JUNE. It’s south Arkansas. The humidity is so high even the horseflies have prickly heat. I am sitting on a scorching metal bench outside Burge’s diner in Lewisville waiting on a catfish po’boy. A black Lincoln hearse rolls up. The doors swing open, pumping out chilled air. Two women from the local funeral home approach the counter. They order Tiger’s Blood snow cones, to go.

I’m headed to Magnolia, another 20 miles east. My mom’s family settled there in the early 1800s. Beginning in the 1920s, my great-grandfather scooped up as much land as he could. He bought and sold timber, then mineral rights. The Magnolia Oil Field was discovered in 1938. For a while it was the largest producing field (by volume) in the United States. When oil decreased, companies shifted to bromine extraction. All sucked up from the Smackover Formation, a Jurassic-era limestone aquifer that stretches from Texas to Florida full of oil, natural gas, and mineral-heavy water. Albemarle, the largest producer of bromine in the world, is headquartered in Magnolia — a town of 10,000 with a 25 percent poverty rate.

My great-grandfather was what novelist Wallace Stegner called a “boomer” — motivated by “the deal,” a desire for property, upwardly mobile, ambitious, with a craving to get as much as he could take.

WITH HIS 78-YEAR-OLD mother in court watching and praying, Friedel Dausab calmly waited for the judges’ decision. Would Namibia’s post-colonial Constitution uphold human dignity for gay men, or would it cling to apartheid-era Calvinist laws that criminalized same-sex conduct?

Dausab, a born-again Christian, was raised in a deeply religious family. His faith undergirds his 25 years of service and advocacy for those living with HIV/AIDS. His work culminated most recently in Namibia’s landmark legal decision in June to decriminalize gay sex. Dausab was the primary litigant.

I spoke with Dausab to learn more. His testimony of faith holds strands of God’s work in history.

ONE SUMMER NIGHT in 1985, I was sitting alone in a banged-up rowboat listening to trees creaking in the breeze, held in that sweet rocking motion made by night wind on water. Suddenly, the stars began to wink out and I was caught in a full-fledged squall. Water whipped up into whitecaps. Leaves and branches swirled overhead. The shore was yards away, so I wasn’t in danger, but the storm’s speed and ferocity were unforgettable. I’ll also never forget that it happened on the Sea of Galilee.

I remember this experience each time I hear the story, told in all three synoptic gospels, about Jesus and the disciples in a similar storm. Surrounded by crowds of suffering people and after several days of healing, perhaps Jesus felt the miracle was turning into a sideshow. He told the disciples to jump into a boat at the Capernaum docks and strike out onto the Sea of Galilee. Jesus led them from the suffering of the masses on the Jewish side to a confrontation with the demon Legion that was occupying a man on the militarized Roman side. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. But first, they must deal with a mid-lake tempest and a god who sleeps through it.

LIKE MANY ISRAELIS, Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, knew people killed by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. “One of them was a very dear close friend of mine,” Cassif told Sojourners. “She actually texted me from the security room minutes before she was killed with her husband.” Many progressive, anti-occupation Israeli peace activists lived in the region where Hamas killed more than 700 civilians in one day. Cassif, whose grandparents came to Israel from Poland in 1934 as part of the Zionist movement, is a secular Israeli Marxist and a leading voice against the war in Gaza. During the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, Cassif refused Israeli military service in the Occupied Territories and was incarcerated in military prison. In 2019, he was elected to Israel’s parliament as the only Jewish member of the Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al party. In January, Cassif publicly supported South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to investigate Israel for violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention in its war on Gaza. In February, some parliament members tried — unsuccessfully — to impeach him. For this interview I spoke with Cassif in late March over WhatsApp. It was nearly midnight in Israel. He was still sipping his yerba mate through a metal straw.

Do you hold Hamas responsible for the Oct. 7 attack? Yes. Obviously, I hold Hamas responsible. That’s not to say that the government of [Benjamin] Netanyahu is not responsible in some respects, too. But definitely the guilt, the blame, is on those who killed, on those who raped, on those who tortured, and torched. And those are Hamas’ people.

Why do you support the petition before the ICJ to investigate Israel for genocide in Gaza? I do not trust the Israeli government or Hamas or any other government to investigate itself. The ICJ is the authoritative branch to investigate allegations of genocide. Israel recognized its authority in 1949, when Israel became one of the first states to ratify the convention. The bottom line is to support the ICJ in calling on Israel to stop the war — to save lives, as simple as that. The more than 30,000 deaths in Gaza, most of them women and children, the disease and starvation, this is totally the blame of the government of Israel. And it should be stopped. Stopping the assault on Gaza is the only way to save the Israeli hostages. There’s no military way to release the hostages, only a political one — which necessitates ceasefire.

IN HER MOST famous poem, “Not Waving but Drowning,” Stevie Smith offers an unsentimental vignette of standers-by on a beach watching a man drown. Is he waving to us or drowning? The title holds the dead swimmer’s response.

I recalled Smith’s line this fall when one image from the carpet-bombing of Gaza pinned itself to my memory. A girl’s hand in the rubble, waving around, trying to attract the attention of rescuers. We stand speechless before our own human brutality. We are all complicit in this supply chain of suffering.

Lent is a time of great silences. Silence can be duplicitous. Silence can be traumatic. Silence can be holy.

Last Lent, I was feeding owls on Good Friday at the raptor rehab center where I volunteer. Wings in flight across the mews are felt, not heard. A ripple of air. A slow shadow. The warning clack of a beak.

The prophet Isaiah names owls as one of the first to return after the Lord has laid waste to empires that God had found guilty of hoarding wealth and acting like there was no God. Isaiah describes the rubbled landscape: “They shall name it ‘No Kingdom There,’ and all its princes shall be nothing” (34:12). Owls are birds of desolation. In the half-light of the aviary, a great horned flicks its ears, stretches one wing, turns its yellow eyes to me.

“They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain...” —Isaiah 11:9

“CENTER THE CLAY.” I had one task for class and three hours to complete it.

Take two pounds of raw potential. Place it on the potter’s wheel. Use the strength of your hands and forearms to force the clay into balance.

For the full three hours, I failed. Unable to find the calm point of pressure to rest my human musculature between the universe’s centrifugal and centripetal forces. The clay fought back. It bucked and shimmied, slid and skidded. I pushed and pulled.

The teacher said, finally, “This clay does not yet want to be a bowl. You have not shown it how.” A gentle correction that expertly undermined my fixation with “the primacy of the real,” as French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls it. Really, shouldn’t I be able to subdue this clay?

“Wisdom speaks her own praises, in the midst of her people she glories in herself.” What a luscious, full-bodied image from the biblical book of Sirach (24:1). Wisdom has sass! In an increasingly combative society, I’m drawn to Sirach’s prudence, poetic excess, and the authoritative agency of Lady Wisdom.

I’ve been keeping phrases from Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, in mind as post-Roe legislation rolls across the states. The health of women and children (born and unborn) has been weakened, rather than strengthened. Political and social platforms ring out with dangerous nonsense about making criminal statutes apply at the time of fertilization, allowing the death penalty for abortion, or, conversely, promoting violence against “pregnancy crisis centers.”

How do we stop the howl when we feel urgently that lives are on the line? Sirach, which is part of the Catholic canon, says, “The fear of God is an abundant garden; its canopy higher than all other glory” (40:27). “Fear” means “body-trembling awe” before our Creator. Amid so much that I don’t understand and don’t know what to do about, this strange scriptural juxtaposition feels like Lady Wisdom speaking to our present condition.

YOU NEVER KNOW where you’ll see the hands of Christ.

In central Kyiv, a mural depicting two elegant hands breaking a sword is surrounded by towering apartment buildings. Painted in 2016 by Ukrainian artist Sergii Radkevych, “Fragments of Hope” was one of a series of murals organized in response to the 2014 conflict in eastern Ukraine. It was public art on a mission to inspire a Ukrainian vision for peacemaking.

Radkevych combines religious iconography with street graffiti and realism. He pays particular attention to expressive hand gestures. “Fragments of Hope” became a frequent gathering point for protests in solidarity with eastern Ukrainians in 2017 and 2019. “This is my manifesto against violence and cruelty, a call to mutual understanding,” said Radkevych at the time. When I was in Kyiv in May, after more than three months of intensive Kremlin-led violence, I was grateful to find the mural still standing.