Artists Waging Peace
Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,
This past weekend, as my schedule allowed, I attended parts of a two-day interfaith gathering at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church on Bloor Street. The conference was called Artists Wage Peace (see the Parish Photo Album in this week’s Thurible), and it was the work of the Toronto artist Robin Pacific, who just happens to be a parishioner at St. Thomas’s. The conference was co-sponsored by a number of congregations across the city — United Church, Anglican, Jewish, and Muslim communities, all lending their names to the same fragile hope: peace between Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land.
Fr. Humphrey with Robin Pacific
And across the two days came three blessings — my own, Cantor Cheryl Wunch’s, and Imama Farheen Khan’s — the children of Abraham naming the one God in three tongues, under one roof. I was asked, as one of the project’s early encouragers, to give the opening blessing, and I went gladly, though not without some trepidation, as I hardly consider myself well-versed in the art of peacemaking. But as someone who deeply appreciates how difficult it can be to establish and maintain a just and equitable peace, particularly where generational trauma is so deeply rooted, and as someone who deeply appreciates art in all its forms, and knowing that sometimes the most powerful art arises redemptively out of generational trauma, I came to this extraordinary gathering with an open heart and an open mind. My mind, I found, was constantly on guard against bias — my own, others’ — and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that people did not come with an axe to grind but in the hope of forging swords into ploughshares together.
The gathering was inspired by the book The Wall Between, by Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson. A revised and updated edition of the book has just been released. The subtitle of the first book, published just five days before the events of October 7 and its ongoing aftermath, was What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know about Each Other. The updated edition has a new subtitle: How October 7 and Gaza Have Reshaped the Narratives.
Jeffrey Wilkinson and Raja Khouri, co-authors of The Wall Between
The Wall Between refers to both a literal wall and a metaphorical one. In both senses, a wall is an honest image. It tells the truth: that the hostility is real, the grief is real, and that we do not simply break down these walls by wishing them gone. The walls themselves prevent us from doing so. No one in that room pretended otherwise.
And yet, again and again over two days, the metaphorical wall, at least, was chipped away at, bit by bit. Samia Odeh — a Palestinian Christian whose father lost his childhood home in 1948 — and Jeffrey Wilkinson, who is Jewish, performed a beautiful piece of music, with Samia on the piano and Jeffrey playing the viola. We watched a video of a Jewish father and a Palestinian father produced by the Parents Circle–Families Forum, an organization representing more than eight hundred Israeli and Palestinian families who have each lost a child or a parent to the conflict and have chosen, against every natural instinct, reconciliation over revenge. At the very beginning of the video, the Jewish father said their organization exists in the hope that one day it will not have to welcome any new members.
I will not pretend I arrived as a man without convictions, or that I shared every one I heard spoken there. A parishioner had gently wondered whether I ought to be there at all. But a peace which can only be made among those who already agree is not peace; it is merely the comfort of the like-minded. The harder and holier thing is to stand with people whose beliefs are not entirely your own and to bless the effort anyway.
We said one word more than any other those two days — peace, shalom, salaam — yet we were aware that we did not all meant the same thing when we said it. The Hebrew and the Arabic grow from a single root, wholeness, as the two peoples grow from a single father, Abraham. Yet each of us fills the word “peace” with our own grief and our own hope. So the one invitation I offered at the outset was this: do not assume. Be curious. Ask the person beside you what they mean, and then do the rarer thing, which is to listen.
It struck me that art and peace refuse the same thing, which is formula. One cannot paint a masterpiece by numbers or engineer a reconciliation by technique. Both come from somewhere that is, somehow, both from within us, and from beyond us. Both art and peace come from inspiration, an indwelling of the Spirit of peace that we breath in, and which the Spirit itself draws from us. Peace, like art, is received before it is made; which is perhaps why a gathering of artists was not such a strange place to “wage peace.”
I closed my blessing with a reference to St. Paul’s famous passage in Ephesians, in which he proclaims that Christ is our peace, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us. I mentioned it as the specific shape of the hope I carry: that a wall, however real, is never an insurmountable obstacle. We all live in hope that one day, in the words of the Psalmist, mercy and truth will yet meet together, and righteousness and peace will indeed kiss each other.
Yours in Christ’s service,
Nathan J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector
