Editor’s Note: In April 2025, GOOD NEWS Associate, Emily Provance, joined a pastoral care trip to the Holy Land with representatives from Quaker organizations—Friends United Meeting and Friends World Committee for Consultation Europe and Middle East Section. Afterwards, Emily flew directly to Northern Ireland, sparking this reflection on war, peace, and Eternity. 

ANY TIME WE WERE LEAVING THE CITY LIMITS OF RAMALLAH, we rode in a van with disco party lights inside. I took a video of this because it was so bizarre. In retrospect, I wonder if the Palestinian taxi company who supplied our van and driver did this on purpose, so we’d be less of a threat when we went through checkpoints.

Six of us came from the US, two from the UK. We were far less likely to experience intimidation or intentional delays at checkpoints than Palestinians are. Still, each time, we were boarded by very young IDF soldiers holding machine guns. They asked us questions about where we’d been and where we were going and why. They made faces to demonstrate that they did not believe us.

There were machine guns at the checkpoints, machine guns at the Israeli border, machine guns at the Jordanian border, machine guns in the hands of soldiers watching the procession on Palm Sunday…

I flew from Amman to Belfast, and on my first full day in Northern Ireland, I went with friends to see an improv comedy troupe at the Grand Opera House. There were two skits involving machine gun jokes, in which an actor pantomimed shooting people in slow motion. I closed my eyes and shrank in my chair because it hurt to watch.

You can ride a bus called the Glider now from one end of Belfast to the other. It only opened in 2018. Before that, you couldn’t take a bus through both the Catholic and the Protestant neighborhoods. You had to switch buses, due to safety concerns. But not anymore.

On Friday in the West Bank, we went to Bethlehem. We visited Dar Al-Kalima University. It emphasizes art and music and humanities, which is unusual for Palestinian culture, which tends to lean toward math, science, and business. The campus is beautiful. The university founder explained that sunlight is God’s free therapy, which is why there are so many windows in the buildings. Twice now, IDF soldiers have shot through those windows, for no particular reason except to make sure they have to be replaced.

Dar Al-Kalima’s Gaza campus was destroyed–flattened to the ground–during Holy Week in 2024. The professors and students from the art therapy program are now doing art therapy with found materials for displaced children.

70% of Bethlehem’s economy comes from tourism, and the city is nearly empty of tourists. We ate in a cafe all by ourselves. Then we stood between the Church of the Nativity and the Mosque of Omar in a place called Manger Square. Muslims and Christians have worshiped side by side there for fifteen hundred years.

What happened next might have hit me extra hard because I didn’t know it was coming. We went into the basement of the Church of the Nativity, and suddenly I was face to face with the very place where Jesus was born. I knelt, I touched the star, and I cried. That church was built 1700 years ago, and Christian pilgrims have been coming to that spot ever since. Somehow, I could feel them all. Their lives, their deaths, their suffering, their joys…it was overwhelming.

I stayed for just a moment in the stillness of eternity. And then I had to get up and move on, because I was one person in a very long line.

I told the story of the machine guns to a Friend later on, and she pointed out that it’s a heck of a thing for a joke like that to happen in Belfast, and for people to be able to laugh. It’s not so long since they couldn’t have. So could I–maybe–see it as a people healing?

Truth be told, I can’t quite get there. But I do see what she means. It never stops, the war and the peace and the harm and the reconciliation. There’s always hope and promise, but there’s never–it seems–genuine resolution. As much as we want to live in the glory of eternity, most of us just get glimpses, at least in our time on this planet.

And then we have to move on, because we are just one person in a very long line.

With love,

Emily

If you, your faith community, or your organization would like to request an online report of Emily’s experiences in the Holy Land, please feel free to write to Emily and ask. You can find resources on Quakers in Palestine and follow her travels in ministry on her blog here.

 

Image Credit: Star of Bethlehem, Church of the Nativity by Nagpreet Nagpal