On April 3, 2026, a coalition of Chicago-based organizations, headed by Mennonite Action Chicago, organized a vigil to honor those who have died in ICE custody in the USA and by the extreme violence of Israel and the US against the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. We particularly called attention to the nefarious involvement of the Palantir corporation and its AI surveillance and targeting. We are outraged at the use of our tax dollars for this destructive technology.
For the action I rewrote the lyrics of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a protest song from my youth. I’m making it available here to the movement against war and authoritarianism; feel free to adapt it for your own actions.
Original lyrics and music by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson Adapted by Ruth Goring
Where have all the olives gone, long time passing Where have all the olives gone, long time ago Where have all the olives gone? Bulldozed under, every one Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
Where have all the young men gone, long time passing Where have all the young men gone, long time ago Where have all the young men gone? Hunted down by Israel’s guns Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
Where have all the doctors gone, long time passing Where have the reporters gone, long time ago Where have all the teachers gone? Palantir tracked them, every one Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
Where have all the children gone, long time passing Where have all the children gone, long time ago Where have all the children gone? Fallen under Israel’s bombs Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
Where are the people of Tehran, long time passing Where are those of Lebanon, long time ago And where the schoolgirls of Iran? Fallen under our own bombs Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
Where have all our neighbors gone, long time passing Where have all our neighbors gone, long time ago Where have all our neighbors gone? ICE abducted every one Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
Where have all our taxes gone, long time passing Where have all our taxes gone, long time ago Where have all our taxes gone? Gone to killing everyone Oh when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn
We ended the vigil with an exuberant demonstration of dabke, Palestine’s iconic style of dancing. Participants were invited in to learn some steps and quickly formed a great circle in what I’m calling defiant delight.
To survive as we face great evils, we need to share experiences of great joy!
In our time, the beast is money, racism, and domination.
The way of the beast is not the way of Jesus.
This coming Sunday I will be leading worship in our very multicultural church here in Chicago. And it happens that we are making our way through the book of Revelation, and chapter 13 is our surreal text this coming week.
I confess that it has been quite a while since I’ve read through the whole book of Revelation. But chapter 13’s account of the dragon and the beasts made sense to me immediately as I reread it today.
When you are thinking and praying every day about a genocide involving bombing, sniping, and starvation of children, women, and men with your country’s tax dollars,
and the many people around the world who care have not been able to stop it,
putrid beasts with ten horns, seven heads, and seemingly boundless power seem appropriate as representations of such massive evil.
One of the beast’s heads has been killed but the wound has healed over? I picture it flopping on its neck as the beast lumbers along, one of its dead eyes open and staring.
I wonder whether some of the heads have one horn and others two. Horns in scripture are symbolic of power and strength. The power here is utterly malevolent, and it has multiple manifestations.
We already know from earlier chapters that evil is conquered only by the Lamb who was slain—that is, by Jesus, through whom God entered our suffering and went all the way into death and hell for the world’s salvation. In chapter 13 the writer warns us that the evil of our day (the time of the original audience, but also our own) will sometimes be so vile and entrenched as to seem invincible. But Jesus’ victory-through-suffering still stands, and we must stay centered in that Love.
Because our congregation includes a whole range of literacy and education levels as well as multiple languages, after Revelation 13:1-8, 10b is read, a couple of the pastors and I are going to read out the following explanation in English, Nepali, and Kinyarwanda:
In every culture there are stories of dragons and other beasts: powerful forces that are hard to understand and to oppose.
Revelation 13 uses the language of beasts to picture the powers of this world.
This beast has seven heads and ten horns. It is scary!
The writer of Revelation is showing us the powerful evil in the world system.
In our time, the beast is money, racism, and domination.
The way of the beast is not the way of Jesus.
We are surrounded by the beast and its power, but we choose the way of Jesus.
We choose peace and justice, endurance and faithfulness.
When we pray for Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and other places where people are suffering, we are praying against the beast.
It is a long, hard battle, but Jesus triumphs through his life, death, and resurrection.
Before the ruin when the sea was green breaking to white and children chased each other when the sun was life and they picnicked: olives, hummus, bread
After the ruin with my sister I walk among giants of rock on the south coast of Oregon Angels, old and black, chant their subduction the clash of volcanoes, islands and small continents shoved up against the continental plate
In Gaza the ruin has not ended With no thought of beaches hounded children crouch in tents Their parents seek just a little flour for bread
Dear angels of subduction we set our hands on your vast shoulders we ask for your strength we pray against ruin
Before we rose, in the daylight of Gaza bombs rained on the camps and demolished demolished one father, four children in a tent
One mother is left and she has no feet
What is this world What is this crashing What raided the house of our belonging left doors swinging on broken hinges What suffocates us all What ruin
Dear sentinels, dear Old Ones we are not strong like you we need our feet we need gentleness and food Dear God in heaven come to the beaches of Gaza and the tents, come now
Tell us how we live in this bombing or far away from it with helpless hands
I walk out to one of the giants lean against its ancient bulk A wave rolls in over my feet How do I live
Good Friday worship can awaken a whole raft of emotions: love, gratitude, sorrow—and sometimes rage. In the final weeks of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote, “Christians stand by God in God’s hour of grieving.” What does that mean for us now?
I walked home from church last night in a hot rage. Actually there was a mess of emotions—tender desire to stay awake with Jesus in his suffering; gratitude for the creative devotion of those who had crafted a series of sensory meditations to help us do that; distress over the loss of a beautiful Palestinian girl-child, which I had learned about on social media earlier that evening, and a beautiful Palestinian boy-child’s loss of limbs.
And fury at the broken promises of my country.
In eighth grade I was in the USA with my family, and in home room at Milburn Junior High School that year we were shown jerky films of skin-and-bones survivors of Nazi concentration camps. I will never forget those naked forms of human beings, beloved of God, starved to barely-aliveness. Barely able to walk, weighing barely enough for gravity to hold them to the earth. Those films came with solemn assurances that now we had the United Nations, we had an international system to make sure the Holocaust would never happen again.
Habiba and Mahmoud would beg to differ. The very country that claimed credit for stopping the Holocaust is now supplying the bombs raining down on the tents where their families are taking shelter. And that very country has been blocking the United Nations from putting an end to the genocide.
And it is my country. And many, many of us around the world are desperate to stop the violence, and thus far we have failed.
So I have no Easter platitudes to offer. I will go to church again on Sunday morning, and I’ll take joy in the resurrection story—I will cling to the hope it provides. But in my heart, until Israel’s crazed violence against the Palestinian people and land has been brought to an end, I will keep trying to stay awake with Jesus. Because Jesus is suffering with Mahmoud, and with Habiba’s bereft family, and with all of Palestine.
Habiba’s name means Love. She was killed on Good Friday.
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This evening as I walked toward Lake Michigan, I suddenly had the thought I’m almost exactly the same age Mom was when she died.
Then I thought, I have the life Mom would have wanted. Well, maybe she wouldn’t have wanted the public protest aspects. But among all my sisters and me, she would see the scope of possibilities she longed for, the freedom to take up space in the world.
As I approached the water, gray aqua and green against gray blue, a song I’d learned for our God’s Love Knows No Borders action came to me. It’s called just “The Wave,” and the songwriter, Miser, performs it as part of a longer song; but others have pulled out just one stanza and one repeated phrase, singing them in counterpoint.
It’s very odd to me, but as I age I become more aware of the ways misogyny has affected me throughout my life, and how I’ve been carrying an underground anger about it. This was where my thoughts turned next. The church in which we girls and women weren’t supposed to voice prayers aloud, even when we had an Easter hat or a Catholic doily pinned to our hair (we tried to obey certain scriptures very literally). The work as a bilingual secretary for $1.75 an hour, from which I was driven home to change clothes the day I wore a perfectly modest dress whose split skirt showed in the back. The husband who said the Bible gave him the right to demand sex on his schedule. The boss who didn’t want to promote me because I was so good at detail work—“you are irreplaceable.”
The resentment was mostly buried for decades. In the contemplation that retirement allows me—you will laugh, please do laugh—it has come into my awareness partly through online mahjong games that I often play. Certain pieces/symbols are masculine in my mind, and I find myself trying to rid the digital board of them as quickly as possible.
I try to keep the flowers and the birds, and to end each game with them. It’s surprising how often I succeed at that.
I started singing “The Wave” softly as I walked. And on the way home, there was no one at the beach piano. I found an octave in which most of the keys were not yet stuck, and played it.
So simple, and still one note couldn’t sound, but it was carrying me. Though I’m not sure what the songwriter originally intended, the song is saying to me that the pain and struggle of this time sometimes washes over me like a long wave. But “there will be better days”: waves can also buoy us. We rise and sink, and rise again.
I have happy, warm relationships with my brothers, my son, many male church friends, writers, artists, activists. When I encounter misogyny, I can back away and leave it to God. When it’s expressed against another woman, I can speak up to support her.
Despite the limitations my mother experienced, she had a beautiful, meaningful life, and she never stopped growing. When her time came, she let the wave of death wash over her with peaceful abandon: she knew she was headed toward greater Life. I pray to be like her.
My book has launched! Anyone who has caught sight of me here or on other social media in the past couple of years knows that for a while I’ve been writing and thinking about the medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich and creating botanical art to accompany key excerpts from her writings. Now these meditations are available in a lovely little collection published by Anamchara Books.
The work has been a beautiful journey for me: it involved not only learning a lot about Julian but also learning digital art techniques—some via online classes, some by trial and error. All writing is discovery, and this writing led me into my pain and failures but also into breathtaking experiences of the immense and tender love of God.
What does it mean to be “oned” to God? For me it has meant centeredness in God’s steady presence, release from nagging anxieties—and also new freedom to act in public solidarity with God’s beloveds who are suffering. The song that God sings over us is a song of suffering-with, of being-with. It is for sharing, for as Julian says (in Ellyn Sanna’s paraphrase), “The happy comfort revealed to me is big enough for us all.”
On the sad anniversary of Israel’s intensified attacks on Gaza, recognized around the world as a genocidal campaign but supported unconditionally by my own government, I have written a letter that I will be posting in the following online forms. If you feel moral injury as I do, you are welcome to copy and adapt this letter to share with your own electeds. Here are sites for my representatives, along with links you can use to communicate with yours:
Dear President Biden, Vice President Harris, Senator Durbin, Senator Duckworth, Representative Schakowsky:
The Earth has made a complete orbit around the Sun since October 2023, and thanks to all of you, the world has been witnessing the first genocide of the twenty-first century during these twelve months.
As Israel began carrying out its revenge and targeting the civilians of Gaza, you seized the opportunity to assist it with countless lethal weapons, including 2,000lb bombs, which it has used to incinerate refugee camps, killing whole families, and has dropped on other homes and on schools, universities, churches, mosques, markets, and farms. It has targeted water plants and left people drinking fetid water from puddles and ditches. It has committed one war crime after another. Its snipers have gleefully targeted older women like me, its snipers have shot children in the head. Its soldiers film themselves laughing while they humiliate prisoners. These videos have been posted on social media for the whole world to see.
You have wrinkled your faces in expressions of empathy and urged Israel to minimize civilian casualties and investigate a couple of the many reported incidents of human rights abuses. You know full well that Israel will not investigate its misdeeds honestly.
While supposedly waging this assault in the name of freeing the hostages held by Hamas, Israel has killed a number of those hostages, again with US weapons.
About a dozen employees of UNRWA were accused of participating in the October 7 raid or supporting it some way. UNRWA promptly fired those employees. But instead of lauding its quick response, you cut off support for UNRWA, the only source of food for thousands of Gazans, and you influenced other Western governments to do likewise. With trucks carrying aid blocked by Israeli soldiers and settlers at all the crossings, the people of Gaza who have not been killed are starving. They walk the streets like ghosts.
Rep. Schakowsky, months ago you justified voting for a bill that included another huge sale of weapons to Israel with a long statement arguing that it was the only way to get desperately needed food aid to Gaza. Do you not understand that dropping boxes of food is stupendously offensive when you have also provided Gaza’s enemy with massive weapons and artillery to kill those hungry people?
President Biden and Vice President Harris, you claim to be working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Surely you are aware that Hamas is not the one putting up obstacles to a ceasefire agreement. It has agreed multiple times to US-backed proposals. Netanyahu’s government is the intransigent party every time. Indeed Israel sent assassins to kill Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Netanyahu knows that his administration will fall apart if he says yes to a cessation of hostilities. And he has absolutely no positive reason to say yes, given that the United States continues to blithely send weapons at the rate of two shipments every single day.
You are violating multiple US laws each time you send those weapons to Israel. We are under obligation to stop arming any country that commits human rights abuses in its conduct of war. But somehow you see yourselves as above this law.
Emboldened by your encouraging words (“we will never abandon Israel”), Israel has increased its violence in the West Bank. And now Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria . . .
I am deeply ashamed of you as representatives of the country where I vote and pay taxes. You seem blissfully unaware that as you enable the destruction of Gaza and its people, you are also inflicting profound moral injury on the people whom you were elected to serve and represent. Moral injury happens when great evil is done in our name and we are powerless to stop it. The people of the United States do not approve of your support of Israel’s carnage, and we have been letting you know in polls, petitions, phone messages, street protests. But you do not listen to us. In this election season you are probably glad to be running against Trump and all the Project 2025 people, because their plans are so horrific that when we shut our eyes to Gaza, you seem like the good guys. But we know. Even ardent Democrats know that you are injuring us as you wrap yourselves in the Israeli flag. You are injuring the whole world.
Do you remember Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force serviceman who immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy last February, crying out “Free Palestine”? Did you dismiss his agony because he wasn’t your constituent? Aaron saw your complicity in genocide—a complicity that we all share as taxpayers. You are using our money and you are killing our souls as you arm Israel so that it can starve, torture, and kill the people of Palestine.
I am seventy years old, a mother and grandmother, an artist and writer, a follower of Jesus. I live very modestly but have a rich and beautiful life. And on this anniversary I am contemplating Aaron Bushnell’s action. I am wounded by what you are doing in my name, and I’m wondering what desperate public step I could take to wake you up.
You probably wouldn’t care much because I don’t donate to your campaigns. And since you can see the images of Gazan babies killed by US bombs and you keep sending the bombs anyway, you wouldn’t be moved by any sacrifice I might make. You have political reasons that completely override public or personal ethics.
It is exhausting and heartbreaking to live in the world that you are destroying. But I believe that somewhere in your core, you, like me and like every human being, still have a soul that longs for God and reaches for the good. Will you begin to shut out the political pressures and listen to your own soul? Are you able to reverse course—to repent, to use an apt biblical term? You don’t have to stop being a politician: you could actually start listening to your constituents and help to assuage our moral injury. You could uphold US law and impose an arms embargo. You could save dollars that way and direct them toward reparations for the people of Gaza and meeting urgent needs for healthcare, education, and housing here in the USA.
You could. Will you?
In grief and necessary hope,
Ruth Goring
Chicago police gathered around me in June 2024 as I lay shrouded on Franklin Street in front of the building where AIPAC has its local office. Along with ten others, I chose arrest and jail in order to make vivid the deadly consequences for Gaza of our country’s unethical Middle East policies.
For a good while now in my newsletter and on my Instagram page, I have been exploring Julian of Norwich’s wisdom via botanical images and short meditations. Because the phrase for which she is principally known—“all shall be well”—can easily become sentimental, I’ve been slow to write about it. But I have thought about it, a lot, and the time has come to take it up. And to write about this in a longer form seems important.
First, the word well. Julian uses it frequently to express her desire for the world, so I looked up the etymology—she wrote six and a half centuries ago, after all! Well in her day was understood to mean abundant, as desired, satisfying, lacking nothing. Julian was essentially seeking the Hebrew state of shalom: peace, well-being, healthy relationships, love.
Julian asks God about wellness for the world more than once. How can things become well, when evil seems to permeate the world so thoroughly? Wouldn’t all have been well if sin had been prevented in the first place? Couldn’t God have thrown up an impenetrable barrier against it?
To accompany Julian’s question, I drew a single leaf from the peacock plant. Peacock leaves display a striking green and white pattern, as if painted. In my drawing I repeat the leaf in a symmetrical arrangement to symbolize what my own mind wishes for: perfection as symmetry, clean and free of blemishes or suffering. Julian longed for such innocence and worried hard over God’s reasons for allowing sin. “I ought much to have given up this disturbing wondering,” she admits ruefully, “but nevertheless, I made mourning and sorrow about it without reason or discretion.”
I’m glad the questions troubled her. They trouble me too. I will never forget one night in my young adulthood when, having learned of a Colombian baby born with a genetic abnormality that caused chronic pain, I tossed, turned, and wept in bed. The child was receiving tender care at my parents’ foster home, but still, how could a good God have allowed this? How could God ever make it up to little Diana?
You may well have endured a night like that. Or a day, or a week, or many months. You may be Diana, suffering incurable chronic pain.
How can all be well?
* * *
I was tempted to leave the question hanging and try to do justice to “all shall be well” in a later post. But I won’t. Here’s how I understand God’s response to Julian’s anguished cry.
I chose to draw part of a bald cypress tree in late autumn to accompany the words Julian heard Jesus say. I think you’ll see why.
Jesus tells Julian that sin is “behovely.” I retained this Middle English word because there’s some discussion among translators about its meaning. The phrase “it behooves us to ____” incorporates a more recent version of the term: we need to do x, it is the right thing to do. Behovely could mean necessary. It could mean appropriate. The late Father John-Julian, whose Julian translation I’ve been adapting, chose inevitable here.
Jesus doesn’t answer the how-question directly, but he seems to be saying that sin (which has no being in itself but is parasitic on God’s good creation) is an occasion of something beautiful. Because of Adam and Eve’s fall, the Second Person of the Trinity fell into the creation and identified with its suffering, becoming the Child of Humanity. The story of God’s involvement with the world is still being told. It is a story of redemption, of movement toward shalom.
The Lord doesn’t say shalom, of course. Jesus uses Julian’s own word, well. I find it sweet that Mother God offers Julian this mirroring, the way a human mother repeats her toddler’s words to affirm them and maybe help the child to pronounce them clearly.
Julian has rebuked herself for her desperate struggle, but Mother God does not scold her. Quite the opposite.
Your desire is good, Mother God is saying. It is my very purpose. The promise is never conditional: indeed all shall be well—abundant, lacking nothing, satisfying.
* * *
Julian’s earlier showings include strange and gruesome visions of Jesus’s sufferings on the cross. I am not drawn to those images, but Julian found them marvelous and comforting. I think she was able to believe God’s assurances of wellness—well-being and restoration of all that is damaged—because she had seen Jesus suffering with us.
The healing of all things does not involve a magic wand. It’s not the detached action of a god who is playing a cosmic game. Jesus suffered damage just as we do. The need for things to be well is personal for Julian’s Lord.
The “when” that goes unvoiced in Julian’s question is implicitly eschatological, and another day I will write about her blazing insight into the Last Things. For now, let’s simply burrow into the promise.
All shall be well, and all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well.
Oh child, Mother God says. Your desire is not too much for me. You don’t even know how much and how many things need to be set right, to be brought into wellness. It is more than you can ask or imagine. I promise you, though, that restoration is for all. Not just for humans, not even just for creatures that breathe. Every kind of every thing shall be well.
If you want to explore Julian’s theology further, I highly recommend Amy Frykholm’s May 2023 article “Julian the Theologian.” And there are more writings and podcasts to check out on my Julian’s Porch page (see menu).
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I have always loved Psalm 121 (text below). It’s one of the Psalms of Ascent, which pilgrims to Jerusalem would sing as they walked toward the celebration of one of the three annual feasts. The opening phrase—“I lift up my eyes to the hills”—is so simple and evocative. It reminds us of those moments of quiet awe when we’re out in creation and can rest our eyes on distant hills or mountains.
I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
[Our Creator] will not let your foot be moved; the One who keeps you will not slumber. The One who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil; the Lord will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.
Psalm 121 (NRSVUE)
However, recently I’ve gotten a different vibe from this psalm. Creating an illustration to be included in The Peace Table Bible storybook brought this to the fore. Of course before beginning my image, I read the psalm again and meditated on its narrative. Why is the psalmist (or singer) lifting their eyes? It doesn’t seem to be for refreshment or awe. The speaker/singer needs help. And it’s not that a rescuing army is about to sweep over the crest of the hills! It’s God who will be the source of help.
“The Lord is your shade at your right hand,” promises the psalmist, so that “the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.” This song is about a trek through a desert landscape where sunlight can be harsh and unrelenting, where night brings other dangers.
So I decided not to sentimentalize Psalm 121 in my illustration. I chose metal vintage-watch pieces for the sun, moon, and stars. On the left the figure—singer of this psalm—is panting with the effort of climbing under the sun’s glare. On the right the pilgrim has made it over the hill but must sleep in the open air in darkness, vulnerable to human raiders or wild animals. God’s help is needed for every step along the way.
More recently I’ve been crafting a picture book that tackles climate change and plastic pollution, and seeks to enchant readers with a vision of the beautiful communities of humans and other animals, plants and air and mountains, that can emerge when we take up the work of restoration and healing. This is a pilgrimage we’re invited into today: the journey of changing our lives to lessen climate change and keep Earth inhabitable. Let’s find songs that remind us of God’s loving attentiveness and help all along the way. Let’s find rhythms of joy and mutual care.
As always, you’re also invited to sign up for my newsletter, which will bring more art and meditations to your inbox!
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Ruth Goring 