Canter Bridge

A perfect chaos absorbs the street of Cairo, the most splendid disregard for safe conduct that the mind can imagine.

It is as though millennia of human experience in self-preservation have been sucked out of the atmosphere, leaving men and women to fling themselves moth-like into the lamp, banging time and time against glass, seeking out with obsessive will the consuming flame, loving ten times more the wick than the placid darkness where a moth might fly all night long to its heart’s content.

Although I have driven in Latin America’s exuberant recklessness for many years—and passed many of its victims along the road—there is nothing quite like Cairo when the traffic is up. Had not one trained himself years ago to trust the driver when there’s nothing you can do anyway, the car would be filled with gasps and cries. Feet would be pushed through floorboards, handles pulled off of doors. The unsettling prayer of the condemned would have slashed the air, once, then again.

Instead, I ride in self-taught bemusement, wondering at the visceral longing for collision that seems to course through the nervous system of five million Egyptian drivers (and the one right there!), driving them to distraction and into each other’s vehicles. When observed for a time, the spectacle has its own beauty. Like an ant hill. Like the migration of the wildebeest. Like a meteor shower where no electrical lines have reached.

An acquired taste, no doubt.

Jerry managed the acquisition years ago. This Brit colleague picks me up later that day in Cyprus, the Mediterranean island that once stumbled forward under the Union Jack, but now sulks under the divided rule of Turks in the north and Greeks in the south. It is a place where English tourists have not quite bought into the whole post-colonial thing as they fling their white, beery bodies with abandon into the burning rays.

I have come to know Jerry, this transplanted denizen of the Middle East, some time before through collaborative labors on the part of the separate organizations he and I lead. Now, finding ourselves on the same evening flight from Beirut to Larnaca, he cancels my taxi and drives me to my hotel in Nicosia.

I mention that I’d been in Cairo that very morning—’I was deported from there in 1996′, he informs me as though mentioning an ingrown toenail he’d had lopped off—and had found the traffic a hedonistic ritual of self-destruction even after having driven for a decade and a half in Latin America. ‘I find it very relaxing to drive in Cairo’, Jerry reposts. This is Jerry’s way. ‘You’ve no one to worry about except the guy directly in front of you, who can do whatever he wants. Of course, the beauty is that you can then do whatever you want as well, without worrying about the people behind you.’

Oh. I hadn’t thought of it like that. Suddenly, an incipient order stalks the chaotic scene I had known, a plausible coming-to-terms with what had seemed to me merely alien and hostile.

Days before I had ventured the border crossing between Jordan and the Palestinian Territories on a tight itinerary. What I had hoped would take an hour instead stole six of them. Israel’s understandable security concerns conspire fiendishly with the strategy of making life for the Palestinians as irritating as possible. The result is the crossing of the River Jordan at what Jordanians call the King Hussain Bridge and Israelis call the Allenby.

The Jordan at that point is at most an ambitious trickle. The challenge of getting across it is hardly topographical. It is, rather, acutely political. Several kilometers comprise the dead zone between Jordanian passport control and its twin on the Israeli side. And Jordan is one of the Arab countries that enjoys a peace treaty with Israel.

Flyridden and inhabited by Palestinians who have made greater or lesser peace with the inherent humiliations and by tourists who just want to experience this thing once, ‘the bridge’ is a black hole of insatiable hunger for the time of a passenger who dares to traverse it en route to Jericho, Rammalah, or—for that matter—Israel proper. I am bound for Bethlehem to check in on friends at Bethlehem Bible College, a small speck of sanity where hatred, bitterness, and despair are held in check by hope in the midst of an environment that is both claustrophobic and conflictive.

I love Bethlehem and the warm Arab hospitality that greets me on every visit. ‘The crossing’, on the contrary, is a bet against chaos, an unlikely gamble that it’s proximate disorder might prove this one time more agile than the more predictable gauntlet that is flying into Tel Aviv and driving up to Jerusalem and Bethlehem in a taxi.

This time I lose the bet in spectacular fashion. For six hours, the no man’s land of Jordanian casualness about everything and carefully calibrated Israeli bureaucracy consume my day. There are of course serial outbreaks of grace. A Palestinian-American man who makes cheesecake in Los Anglees instantly recognizes my dilemma as I am foolishly caught without Jordanian dinars at the window where one pays the exit tax. He steps forward, pays for me, and will not accept reimbursement in any currency. In the wake of his generosity, we exchange tales. ‘You guys don’t believe in Saint Mary do you?, he asks. I explain that we admire, even revere her, but that we don’t pray to her nor kiss the coin with her emblem on it that he carries in his wallet and hoists out for me to study. ‘But remember her to me when you do’, I ask him. He agrees to do so.

Sitting beside Arab women in the waiting area on the Israeli side, screaming appears the common way to make oneself heard. Richly cloaked Palestinian women, each with a face that seems to have been sculpted by centuries, glance at me in the next seat over. Their look suggests a combination of alienation and interest, but not hatred. I am stuck here with them. In that respect, we are fellow citizens, shared pilgrims on the chaos road.

They have lost homes. I am short only six hours. In the grand scheme, there is no comparison, only contrast. Yet for the moment shared experience joins what everything else would put asunder.

Young Israelis charged with the hardening task of guarding their nation’s borders are turned angry too early, though the cameraderie among themselves behind half-closed doors reveals the softer side they cannot allow to accompany them into the waiting area. Even so, a twinkle appears for an instant in the eye of one or two of them whom I engage in a way that does not compromise their imperious role. Grace flickers past just slowly enough to allow itself to be glimpsed. Even here, amid the shouting and the smell and the hatred, there is something good. Not very good. But not purely evil. Chaos is not free to rule, only to primp and strut.

The Cairo airport is a microcosm of weirdness. On my way out of Egypt, everyone is shouting. My luggage trolley wants only to go sideways, turning me into a metaphor for the whole shambolic swirl of things as I careen diagonally across the parking in roughly half the direction I actually intend to go. A crowd gathers around the two men directly in front of me at the luggage security post who are screaming in each other’s face and are now this far from fisticuffs. Eventually, a uniformed man waves one of them away. My bags go into the machine directly behind them. My luggage, everywhere else a matter of routine, is here declared overweight. I will have to pay. Yet the ATM is broken and the change quiosk abandoned. Elaborately swathed Arab women join their menfolk in arguing their fate with an immigration official. Everywhere, passengers move quickly and sweatily to positions where we then stand and wait.

As always on this Middle Eastern foray, the passport-stampers and eyeball-searchers allow themselves a genuine smile when there moment with this American traveler is done. It is not appropriate to like Americans, but perfectly fine to recognize the presence and humanity of this one. Chaos has its limits, politics its place, hatred the corral into which it must stumble when its running hour is done.

Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous ‘serenity prayer’ addresses that chaos which one cannot change:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Like most prayers, it is an invidious excuse when instead of a prayer it becomes a motto. As a declaration of identity, Niebuhr words become a cosmic letting of oneself off the hook, cowardice dressed up in pious colors, an absolutely convenient state of inertness.

As a prayer, the theologian’s lines are just the opposite: an embracing of chaos as part of the pilgrim’s vocation. There are some things one cannot change. It does no good to shrink from them, still less to scream against their vanity.

The biblical writers feared chaos. It turned their trust in Yahweh into the only bulwark against its deconstructive, faith made the stronger by the specter of collapse. One can live, even thrive, they would instruct us, in a world where chaos runs wild within its given sphere.

Fear, retreat, bigotry, evasion, attack: these do not address the issue, for we do not control the chaos. We merely live well as it thunders around us in noisy circles.

A sophisticated sense of balance works its way into the life of the wise man or woman. She learns to let chaos be. Life, even ordered sectors of fruitful gardening, can occur undisturbed by its roar.

Peace lies outside its whilting grasp. Indeed, sanity can even walk into its storm without becoming madness when it knows itself and its divine Sustainer. Courage comes into its own, sometimes, when it renounces the need to domesticate what can only be wild. It finds its order there, grasps deeply the things it can shape, loses its fear that chaos wrote the rule book, owns the outcome.

Peace passes understanding.