The child in the cave, his mother, Mary and A Gospel for my Son

I publish, for this Christmas, with some delay, a second version of the text I had written for last year's Christmas, about the Christ, his mother, and a personal Gospel...

I cling, in a kind of tragic embrace, to the idea of a selective blindness present in our world, which I cannot understand and which seems impossible to overcome...

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Last Christmas, in 2023, a festival of atrocities, war crimes, and Genocide was already underway in Gaza, taking place in schools, hospitals, homes and residential buildings... and had as its victims those children whom Christ called to himself and the mothers of children... without, as they say in Arabic, even making the eyelashes of the so-called international society and individuals tremble...

A year later, the bloody festival continues its course. Those who already didn't want to see also continue in their paths, their tranquility affected, perhaps, only by the tedium of having to endure, here and there, the protests of those who insist on seeing, and saying, that something very wrong is happening in the world... Those who already saw, and continue to see, live the despair of discovering, perhaps once again, the tragedy and hopelessness of human life...

Faced with this permanence, this constancy, if we speak against the wind, if what we say changes little, or nothing, sometimes we can ask if we are the ones failing, if we shouldn't say things differently, if the fault of our impotence isn't, at least in part, in ourselves...

I wanted to say more, and better, this year... but fate would have it that, in the car, while traveling with my children, a song that I wanted them to understand and that I mentioned in the text I published on 12/24/2023, started to play... I then remembered the text and wanted to reread it; I thought I could republish it here on Substack, since now it would only be available to paid subscribers and it would be worth it, for some, to reread it and, for others, to discover it...

I saw, upon rereading, that it had the marks of certain urgency; I saw that it was necessary to impose more slowness to the text... Therefore, I'm not publishing now an exact copy of what I wrote a year ago, but a variation, still imperfect, but better, I hope...

I had began by saying that Jesus was probably my favorite Palestinian, that perhaps he only lost, in my preferences, to his mother, Mary.

At this point, many readers know that I am Muslim. I'm not exactly a practitioner, but being Muslim is part of my identity (more about this, which is a big topic, in future texts). But, as I grew up and lived in the West, I was always subject to the symbols and images - religious, cultural, historical, and civilizational - of the West. And this includes Christ... Churches, museums, paintings, novels, films, throughout a lifetime all this built for me the image of a man who, as an ideal, is difficult to surpass...

Somehow, and this I won't try to explain here and now, Christ's mother, Mariam in Arabic, gained for me her extraordinary dimension through the impression that Islam and Muslims have of her...

It's possible to see the two together in countless images that record one of two extreme and opposite moments: that of the baby feeding at his mother's breast and that of the mother holding in her arms the body of her son taken down from the cross... I confess I have a weakness for 'Pietàs'..."

Photo by Marie Bellando Mitjans on Unsplash

I wonder how many people among those who celebrated Christmas, this year's or those of the past, remember that Jesus was born in Palestine. I, for example, who was born to parents from a place just a few kilometers from Christ's land, always thought he belonged more to other peoples and other places than to mine. The West claimed Christ for itself but didn't want him to bring along the Palestine where he was born.

I also wonder how many will remember what was happening, and is happening, in Palestine while they celebrated.

In Bethlehem, where the Wise Men went to witness the newborn and his miracle, there was no celebration this Christmas or the previous one. Throughout Palestine there were no celebrations. Someone said that the child would stay in his cave, suffering for the massacred children or those made orphans in Gaza.

I think this someone wanted to refer to a verse from a beautiful song that I always hear in the voice of Fairuz, Lebanon's voice par excellence. The lyrics speak of a Jerusalem violated by its 1967 invaders and at a certain point speaks of the 'child in the cave, and his mother Mariam [who are] two faces crying.'

I really like this image. The woman in flight, fearful for herself and for the child she will give birth to, who was promised that hope and salvation would come from her, weeps for the pain of mothers and children, and the son weeps because the salvation he brings is not of this world.

Images like these, some phrases, scenes... serve as my sustenance: someone saw something real, precious... and found the words, found the colors, the contours...

These signs that I find along the way, this good news, sometimes make me think of composing a very personal Gospel, perhaps so that I can bequeath it to my children. In it, Christ would appear frequently.

A few images that would compose this Gospel of mine I share now. The others will appear in upcoming texts.

As it is Christmas time, the first of the contents that I will reveal here is Severina Death and Life, a Pernambucan Christmas Auto.

In this verse play by João Cabral de Mello Neto, a northeastern migrant, trying to escape a hopeless life, encounters many other sufferers and often death along the way. At the end of the play, a child is born and people dare to hope again. The qualities of the newborn are sung. Someone then says to Severino the migrant: '...it is difficult to defend, with words alone, life, even more when it is this one that you see, Severina, but if I could not answer the question you asked, she, life, answered it with her living presence.'"

"The idea of a newborn who carries within themselves life's answer was engraved in my spirit when the young woman who would become my wife and mother of my children quoted Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão, on the occasion of a niece's birth: 'a child was born - the world began again.'

And to account for a playful and joyful Christ, light-hearted, my Gospel will also contain a poem by Fernando Pessoa, the Poem of the Child Jesus. In it, Jesus becomes a child again and descends from heaven to play on earth. It's not a canonical poem and doesn't correspond to orthodoxy (which I personally can do without), but I like to think that:"

He sleeps in my soul
And sometimes wakes up at night
And plays with my dreams
Turns some of them upside down
Puts some on top of others
And claps alone
Smiling at my sleep

"What would become of us if there weren't dreams of blessed sleep, of playful Grace, of divine cradles where we could rest? The idea of Christ made child, I think now, perhaps serves to reveal to us what is sacred in children...

Yesterday, while trying to contain in my arms the energy of a playful baby, I thought that not only are children free from sin (a topic for another chapter of my forthcoming Gospel, in the voice of Ivan Karamazov...), but they are, above all, promises of life, hopes for the future, stories yet to be built...

And what a waste of life, what a crime against hope is committed by those who kill, day after day, by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands, the children of Palestine! And what to say of those who survive, of the suffering they will have experienced so early and in so little time, excessive if distributed over decades of life, and that will have violated in them all that was innocent...

It's because in this world there is so much waste, so much life and so much hope being lost so early, that my Gospel cannot be satisfied with the promise of newborns who, by appearing in the world make it begin again and defend life even when it is Severina.

Therefore, for the Gospel to inspire fighting against waste and its injustice, I would include a chronicle by Rubem Braga, Christmas Tale. In it, a couple of migrants with their six-year-old son seeks shelter, the mother about to give birth. Upon realizing it's Christmas Eve, they decide to name the newborn Jesus Christ. But the baby doesn't survive. In this case, equally Severina, the waste comes from precariousness, from poverty... My Gospel would therefore include a phrase from Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb: "if poverty were a man, I would kill it."

Finally, the last Christ of my Gospel that I will cite here and today is the one from a Hemingway story, Today is Friday. Three Roman soldiers have just participated in Jesus's crucifixion and go to the tavern to drink. One of them, the most sensitive, never tires of repeating, in admiration, referring to Christ on the cross: "he looked good up there," "he looked very good up there" (He looked good out there). The impression that the crucified must have caused him perhaps came from the prior knowledge about the martyrdom itself, from the certainty that he was fulfilling his inescapable destiny, that he was saving humanity. There must have been some serenity, some peace that emanated from the tortured man...

Today, thinking of this Christ, I look at the indescribable suffering that Palestinians are going through and I look at the children of Gaza. Many of these children don't know what purpose their own death serves, or that of their siblings and friends, their parents, their entire families. Some realize that they pay with their own blood for the right to live, as a people, in their own land, and that this price is only so high because the world has turned its back on them. I don't know if any Israeli soldier, in the taverns where victories against innocence are toasted, will be saying about the tortured children what I say: "how good they looked out there, how good they looked out there!"

They weren't and aren't Christ, but how he must love them, if he exists! Before we wake up, let's dream that he does exist, that made a child again he is welcoming them one by one in heaven's amusement park, where they will spend eternity playing with angels. To each one he will say that the price is paid and that they will suffer no more, that now they can dream at will...