THE GIFTS THAT WE RECEIVE

by Joe Shea

American Reporter Editor-in-Chief

Dec 2 1997

At church Monday evening, the Gospel reading ended and Fr. John Brennan, a Jesuit who served in Shanghai, China in the 1930's, opened his sermon by saying, "Peace will come from Israel." The words came so abruptly I was taken aback until their Biblical context began to unfold. But even then, they seemed terribly germane to my life.

Tuesday morning, The American Reporter welcomes eight distinguished journalists from the best publications and broadcasting outlets in the Middle East, and our conversation will surely be an empty one if it does not turn to peace, Israel and the emerging shape of the Arab world.

The visitors are Hussein Thabet, deputy editor-in-chief of Egypt's Al-Ahram (the leading newspawper in the Middle East) and Mahmoud Mahmoud, economic editor of Al Wafd, Al-Ahram's rival in Cairo; Yaser Abu Hilalah, Senior Editor of Jordan's daily Al Ra'i; Majed Al-Sabej of Kuwait's Al-Anba'a daily newspaper; Mohammed Lhourd, director of Morocco's Asharq regional weekly; Hamdi Farraj, director of Al-Ru'aa TV in the Palestinian Authority; Faouzi Snoussi, foreign editor of the daily Le Temps (The Times) of Tunisia; and Mohamed Al-Hammadi of the United Arab Emirates' Al-Ittihad newspaper.

These men live and work in a region that will have the pivotal role in the establishment of peace in the coming century. As individuals, our State Dept. and its United States Information Agency believe they can make a substantial contribution to that goal through their work as journalists for the best publications in their respective countries. For all of us, though, I think there is a recognition that Israel, our most reliable ally in the Middle East, is indeed the nation in which peace must first arise.

Our meeting takes place under a curious alignment of the stars that permits those of us in the Western Hemisphere to see six of the planets in our solar system very near to dusk. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Neptune and Uranus are strung out like travelers in a caravan headed into the great voids of Space beyond. The sixth planet we can see is Earth, which lies at our feet, and is more dense, mysterious and beautiful than all of the others combined. Our place in the caravan is more difficult to see.

After I came out of church and stood looking at those stars last evening, I was surprised when two stepbrothers from my neighborhood, both from very poor families that came here from Mexico to work, rode up on the older one's bicycle. They had just finished sweeping our street and I gladly doled out their paychecks for last week's work. Unexpectedly, they invited me to dinner with them at In 'n Out Burgers, a good fast-food place next to Hollywood High. It turned out that by reading 15 books, they had earned three free meals and, since they were only two, thought I would enjoy the third.

We went and ate and afterwards, worked up an invitation list for the upcoming invitation-only Christmas party the Police Athletic League puts on, and they agreed to contact the 24 kids on the list before tomorrow night so we could hand them in on time. They hurried off to do their homework, and I walked up to Hollywood Blvd.

The lesson of that encounter is that the world is full of gifts, given freely and with love, and that people are the keys to and the holders of those gifts -- not governments. I didn't expect the gift of words I heard in church that so entranced and inspired me, nor could I be unmoved by God's gift of a string of diamonds stretching into space. The boys didn't know I'd be where they met me, more than a mile from where we live, and were happily surprised to get their pay, which is proviuded as a gift by a Hollywood institution, The Palladium. They had been given a gift by the burger chain, and in turn, they shared a gift of food with me. As a result, I was able to enlist them in time to contact all of their friends, so they would all get gifts from a caring group of police officers. I couldn't help but be reminded, thinking of this, of another line from a Gospel several months ago: "Give the gifts that you receive."

I am a poor man, and I have only my gifts as a person to give to my new friends from the Middle East. Whatever I have to give them cannot be wrapped up and carried away, reopened at home and set on the mantlepiece. It is only the gift of my humanity, and it is the same gift each of these visitors brings to me. And if we have sat beneath these stars together, and broken bread, if we have shared who we are with each other and made the peace of friendship among ourselves, who can say we may not share it with others on our path? Who is to say there may not be as much abundance in our meeting as in my meeting with those little boys? And like those two stepbrothers, with learning and a deeper understanding, are there not more gifts from God awaiting those in Israel and the Arab world who give their gifts to the world?

The peace that must come first from Israel is the peace of a stepbrother, beneath the same stars and the same God that swells above us all. It must arise there because the Holy Land is the ancestral home of all our faiths; in Israel lies the fountainhead of the great river of human faith that is God's gift to us. In the spirit of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Rabin, from our faiths must flow in one river, must go in one infinite caravan, the gift of peace that we give back to God. Welcome, my friends. -30-

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