Foregoing comfort, convenience and the familiar in Gaza
Mar 10, 2009
Harry Gunkel
working in a West Bank clinic (Janina Zang photo)
returning to Gaza (Suhaila Tarrazi photo)
Foregoing comfort, convenience and the familiar in Gaza
Like most of his fellow MAPM classmates and graduates, Harry Gunkel, M.D., is a seeker.
Dr. Gunkel graduated in absentia from Seminary of the Southwest in May 2008 with a Master in Arts of Pastoral Ministry degree - the predecessor of the master's programs in the newly-launched Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation at Southwest.
Before entering Southwest in 2001, he had criss-crossed the country as a neonatal pediatrician and medical school teacher in both Los Angeles, Calif., and LaCrosse, Wis., as well as being a pharmaceutical researcher for a drug company in Columbus, Ohio. Later he would teach at the University of Texas Medical Center in San Antonio and then returned to that city to retire ... but not quite.
Dr. Gunkel - who is interested in all things spiritual - saw an advertisement for Thomas Keating's 1999 Harvey Lecture at Southwest and called a San Antonio ecumenical center who sent him to the seminary website. Reading about the MAPM program online led to a phone call to Dr. Corinne Ware, then MAPM director at Southwest and a 1989 seminary graduate. "I signed up for the program while talking to Corinne," he said.
He commuted from San Antonio (a 60 to 90 minute drive) to attend seminary classes on evenings and weekends in Austin from 2001 until his graduation last May - except for a two-and-a-half year leave to work for the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) in Washington, DC.
"My MAPM years were really wonderful. I loved every minute of it. My fellow students were very interesting to be and talk with. The faculty is superb. The program often attracts people who are a good way through their life and enroll frequently for non-academic reasons," he said, reflecting Dr. Ware's oft-repeated definition of his classmates as the "something-more people."
"I hope to be able to audit classes in the future," he said from his San Antonio home - just back on furlough from Palestine where he currently is a Volunteer for Mission of the Episcopal Church USA.
Dr. Gunkel went to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage during his seminary studies. "I became very interested in the area and its people. I did not want to be a missionary but I wanted to do something," he said. After training from the Episcopal Church Center's Mission Office, Harry asked for and was assigned to the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem (Israel, the Occupied Territories of Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
He began work in the diocese in November 2007 and turned 60 years of age there in early 2008.
He stresses that it is difficult to describe his experience as a missionary - "It's all encompassing and life changing. It changes your world. Changes your political views. Changes your ideas of justice and non-justice. You hear the Gospel differently. You hear the Word of God differently."
Dr. Gunkel explains there are two types of mission work - task oriented work that easily falls into a schedule and less specific work like what he does - ranging from working in medical clinics to helping out as needed in villages. "I often asked myself - ‘What am I doing here'?"
"But ... I am going back in the Spring!"
In Dr. Gunkel's blog - missiontojerusalem.blogspot.com - he wrote from the West Bank - "a retired American priest with 20 years of mission work left to return to the States for awhile. He did not look forward to life back in America - too easy and comfortable." "Some of us like danger," he told Harry.
"It's not that missionaries are adrenaline junkies," Dr. Gunkel writes ... "I think it's the danger of stepping into new experiences and daring to forego comfort, convenience and the familiar. The danger of wondering what's on the other side of what we think we know. To become friendly with what's alien. To allow yourself to discover that the people you thought were violent and dangerous are in fact gentle, generous and funny.
"And the people you thought were meek, humble and peaceful in fact have a monstrous streak in them. To look at yourself being scared and grumpy when you're cold and tired and don't understand anything anybody is saying. And to see yourself, also, waiting at the checkpoint, when you have a choice, with those who don't."
"In the Gospels, Jesus calls his disciples and they just go. I used to wonder what they expected when they did that? Now I think they didn't expect anything. I think this mission business doesn't have room in it for expectations, for measuring things that way. I think it's more about just walking on, following who/whatever called us, full-faced into what lies ahead. Not wondering who or what we'll meet there, but just meeting them. Learning that the alien which we've so carefully crafted our lives around (race, nationalism, religion) really isn't. That we can meet someone on a hot dusty road in the Occupied West Bank, find a way to communicate, and wind up sharing tea. I've learned that on the road this summer. It's been wonderfully dangerous."
Recall the news accounts in July 2008 that a man drove a bulldozer into a bus in Jerusalem and three people were killed? Dr. Gunkel wrote in his blog - "The event in Jerusalem last week was plastered all over the internet and all the newspapers. I assume it also received TV coverage in the States, from the notes of concern I received. It was said a ‘Palestinian,' who was immediately dubbed a terrorist, was responsible. That version feeds the mythology that some want to perpetrate, but I must tell you it's not true. The man was Arab and was an Israeli citizen living in Israel. His motive had nothing to do with politics or religion. He had a history of mental illness and was pissed at a man who owns the bulldozer company. He did what he did to get that man in trouble."
"Sad isn't it? Just a sick man with revenge on his mind. No Palestinian, no terrorist, no politics, no religion. But it became so in callous, wanton deceit and the world responded dutifully as it always does. Poor, poor Israel, the beleaguered democracy under constant attack by these terrorists," Harry wrote.
Dr. Gunkel brings the horrors of everyday life for Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank to his readers - plainly and bluntly. "People detained into their houses by armed soldiers, food and water running out, medical help denied, shot if they venture out. Democracy." ... "One of the challenges here is to always stay alert to the horrific abnormality of this way of life. If we forget that and get used to the Occupation and oppression, we are lost ...
"The sheer relentlessness of Occupation is one of the things that makes it so difficult. You know when you wake up every morning that it's still there. You still can't go wherever you want or do whatever you want. You will have to endure that checkpoint again today. You still have to remember to take that ID card with you. You still know that soldiers with guns control your life. And when you go to bed tonight, you know that it will be there again tomorrow. This is hard."
Yes ... Harry Gunkel is going back.
