Richard Littledale's
Views on the News: July 2006

The face of Corporal Gilad Shalit stares out from newspapers and websites. It is an innocent face, geeky almost - a young boy in a man's uniform smiling at the camera on an innocent day before all hell broke loose around him. There are other faces too - angry faces creased with rage, fists clenched and shouting into the air - calling for revenge. There are anxious faces - mother clutching their children close as steel clanks by and munitions rain down. And there are nameless faces - soldiers hidden in their tanks, eyes only seen through observation slits - like monstrous beauties in steel burkas. All these in the place some call the 'Holy Land' (though notably it is those who don't live there who give it that name)

How can this boiling cauldron of anger and fear be holy? Doesn't 'holy' mean 'set apart'? Shouldn't it be applied, instead, to some island paradise languishing in an azure sea with no-one to trouble it? And yet this troubled place, this 'holy land' has been fought over for generations. Pharaohs and Moors, Crusaders and freedom fighters, Judeans and Palestinians and Israelis and all those pulling their respective strings have spilt their blood and emptied their arsenals upon it. This holy place has more of the spitting volcano than the peaceful meadow about it; more of the coliseum than the cloisters.

And yet, we should not be surprised. Where God touches the earth, like electricity striking water, there is bound to be a powerful reaction. Human beings, hungry for dominance and control, want to organise and control the expression of the holy. Some want to mediate it, others want to market it and few want to share it. The historic struggle to control the 'holy' city of Jerusalem and its environs reflects exactly the kind of struggle Jesus predicted with his terrible description of swords raised by brothers against brothers and sons against fathers. The places where he trod, the locations where the story of heaven was told in the simplest ways, have been colonised, beautified and controlled. With every ornate tower and every layer of gilding the quiet voice of holy reason has been muffled further. As guardians of the holy, human beings are a pretty hopeless bunch. We should find conflict in the 'holy' land no more nor less shocking than we find it elsewhere. It is precisely because of our inability to handle the holy that Jesus had to come and walk the earth at a particular time in a particular place anyway.

Meanwhile, holy hands will be lifted in prayer for the life of a young soldier far from home, and those whose lives depend on him. Many of those who pray will neither understand nor embrace his cause - but they will pray for him anyway. In the end holiness is best left in the small hands of the faithful rather than the big hands of the powerful.