By Shadia Qubti
November 7, 2024
Since October 7th, 2023, I find myself inhabiting multiple realities – a perpetual state of emotional jetlag. Like travelers caught between time zones, I’m simultaneously living in Pacific time and Gaza time, my body and mind never quite synchronized. I wake up to morning here while following night raids there, eat lunch while tracking dawn evacuations, try to sleep while monitoring real-time bombardments. This isn’t just about different time zones – it’s about living in multiple states of being: attempting normalcy in one reality while carrying intergenerational trauma triggered anew in another.
My days follow a pattern shaped by this temporal and emotional displacement: wake up, check news compulsively, attempt to work, return repeatedly to news feeds seeking reassurance of loved ones’ survival. Like jetlag’s disruption of our natural rhythms, this constant switching between realities – between here and there, between ordinary life and extraordinary devastation – leaves me perpetually disoriented, never fully present in either space, always carrying the weight of the other.
The chronology of horror unfolds in this disjointed time: the devastating attacks of October 7th in Be’eri and other kibbutzim engulfing Gaza in their wake, babies in incubators at Al-Ahli Hospital, the mass exodus South, Saad Al-Shawwa burned alive in the bakery as hundreds waited for bread, Nahida Anton and Samar Kamal – two Christian women killed by snipers in the Holy Family Church compound, young Hind Rajab’s desperate calls, the search for Vivian Silver – the Woman Wage Peace activist whose life was dedicated to Palestinian-Israeli peace, hostages released while thousands remain imprisoned, Dr. Abu Safieh praying over his son in blood-stained medical garbs, Sha’ban al-Dalou burned alive in his tent near a hospital in Deir el-Balah, water infrastructure deliberately destroyed, children clustering around aid trucks. Disease spreading. People imprisoned in their own land. Each event triggers not just present pain but historical memory, each loss connected to generations of losses before, creating a spiral of time where past and present trauma merge.
As a lived theologian, I wrestle with God like Hagar in the wilderness – demanding to see and be seen by God in the midst of displacement and abandonment. This personal wrestling joins me to a long tradition of faithful questioning: Hannah pouring out her bitter soul before the Lord, refusing to be silenced (1 Samuel 1:15); Rizpah keeping vigil over her dead on the mountain, her grief compelling justice (2 Samuel 21:10); Mary of Nazareth – my fellow Nazarene – who sang of God casting down the mighty and lifting up the lowly, before bearing witness to her son’s cry of abandonment. These ancient words of women echo across time, giving voice to our present anguish. Perhaps the most existential question that I have been asked and wrestle with is whether God is under the rubble or God is dead.
In this company of women, we find ourselves anchored in times of crisis. From Hannah’s persistent prayer, to Rizpah’s public witness, to Mary’s steadfast presence – these women show us how to hold both protest and praise, both grief and determination. Like the wisdom of Ecclesiastes that there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to speak and a time to be silent” (3:4,7), Sumud – an Arabic word that means perseverance – teaches us this deep-rooted steadfastness – helping us hold both our grief and our hope, our rage and our love, our despair and our determination to work toward justice. Just as Advent proclaims that God comes to dwell among those who suffer, Palestinian Christians witness to this truth even in the rubble.
Also see: The Gaza Call, Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians (October 20, 2023) and Response to: A Call for Repentance: An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians (April 2024).