December 16 2015
Carrie Ballenger Smith is a pianist, in between serving as pastor of the English-speaking congregation in the Church of the Redeemer in the Old City. Jonas Schaefer is a guitarist, in between working at the Ecumenical Accompaniment office in Jerusalem.
My wife Vivien is a soprano soloist, in between being my wife – a tougher job, I fear, than either Carrie or Jonas has.
On Sunday December 6, they gave an Advent concert in St Andrew’s Scots Memorial, with music by Bach, Berkeley, Fauré, Ginastera, Grieg, Hahn, Handel, and Schubert.[1]
The concert was free, but no one gets out of a Scottish church without paying.
So we held a retiring collection for the Peace Centre for the Blind in east Jerusalem. This is a training centre for blind Palestinian women living in poverty. It trains them in basic academic subjects; life skills such as Braille, housekeeping and personal care; and marketable vocational skills such as hand- and machine-knitting, crochet, weaving and crafts.
Lydia Mansour, a Palestinian woman who lost her sight when she was two, founded the centre three decades ago and still directs it today.
“I don’t know what the future is,” Lydia says. “I don’t know what the future holds for any Palestinian.”
“We are,” she adds, with masterly understatement, “in a very difficult situation.”
But that doesn’t stop her ploughing on with her work. Palestinians have a word for this: Summud, steadfastness despite everything.
The songs by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) and Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) were in French. So last Thursday, Vivien and Carrie reprised them at a brunch et récital de Noël at the French consulate, hosted by Maria Magro, the consul-general’s wife, and attended by a mix of Palestinian and expatriate women.
This time, we ended with a group rendition of Douce nuit, the French version of “Still the night” (CH4 309).
Three lines not in CH4 got under my skin:
De ce monde ignorant de l’amour,
Où commence aujourd’hui son séjour
Qu’il soit Roi pour toujours!
Of this world that knows not love,
Where today he comes to live among us
May he be king forever!
In Scotland or Switzerland, I might have sung these words as a conventional Christian piety. In today’s Jerusalem, they were almost too painful to sing.
Afterwards, during the brunch, Hind Khoury, director of Kairos Palestine, owned up to the same feeling. “We need,” she said, “to bring the world back to the simple truths of Christianity.”
God’s love. Human stupidity and stubbornness. You would think that, after 2,000 years, we would have got these simple truths.
But then, we’re stupid and stubborn.
Note
[1] Next time, they plan to focus on the second half of the alphabet.