Although I am now living in a dominantly Palestinian community, to date I have learned very little Arabic. My wife and I were going to rely upon our 9-year-old daughter, but we quickly discovered when she began correcting our pronunciation that she does not have the patience to be a teacher.

As for patience itself, this community has much to teach. Early on I was told by a visiting librarian at the college that we had moved into an "IBM" culture, a culture dominated by three oft-repeated words or phrases: in shallah, "if God wills;" bucra, "tomorrow" (or - as is often the case - the day after tomorrow - or next week - or next year); and mallesh, which, roughly translated, means, "never mind."

They are phrases which may have their roots in the Muslim tradition and, certainly, they have the occasional foothold in the Christian tradition, but I am equally sure their prominence across religious boundaries in Jerusalem is also a function of life there. With only a limited degree of autonomy, in a land where injustice and anger dominates, it is difficult to plan, and some are more able to plan - and do - than are others.

Reminders of the resulting uncertainty abound. Some of them are structural. The average annual income of those living in the Gaza strip is less than $500 a year. Israel still controls a third of Gaza, leaving 5,000 Jewish settlers with 84 times the land and 16 times the water available to 800,000 Palestinians. And the apparent progress toward peace leaves the needs of the Palestinian community largely unmet. Indeed, recent events have left Palestinians feeling more isolated and less hopeful than they have for some time.

The price, of course, is also personal: Fatmeh and Tayseer were undoubtedly planning to nurture a new child when a random bullet fired by a settler passed through their living room window, her body and into the wall beyond. Iyad was planning to check some of the details relating to my flight to the U.S. when a stone was thrown through the window of his van, striking him above the eye, coming close to killing him.

In shallah, "if God wills." The question soon becomes difficult to discern: Is the conditional character of an "IBM" culture an expression of faith, a specific outlook on human spirituality, or is it fatalism, latent in all of us, spurred on by the degree to which we succeed in controlling the environment in which we live?

Exaggerated by the lack of control that people felt and still feel in other parts of the world, the answer may be difficult to find and it may well be that the complex interplay between environment and theology is such that it becomes impossible to separate the two. But the accelerating differences between the world view of Christians in the U.S. and in Jerusalem lead me to believe the context is of decisive importance. You will find Arab Christians who plan and Americans who wait on the will of God, but on balance, the one does not plan the way the other does - and the other does not wait on the will of God in the same way. In spite of the fact that life is less predictable than we like to think, for Americans "in shallah" lacks the force it possesses in the Middle East.

Arising out of this realization, one might argue that we find in Jerusalem a corrective to our "Western ways," a lost spiritual resource. And, certainly, I have no doubt this is the case. For some time now, Americans themselves have called upon us to confess the "drivenness" of our culture and the bankruptcy of our unguarded faith in the future we fashion for ourselves. Others have argued that this confidence in the future has already collapsed. More than a decade ago, Henri Nouwen cautioned us that we have become part of the world without a sense of history - that we are people for whom "only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable" (Wounded Healer, 1972:8)."

Even if this is true, however, the way in which we experience our dependence upon God is fundamentally different. The unpredictability of life is something which one senses far more keenly in Jerusalem, and no number of parallels drawn with our "nuclear'' world will ultimately diminish the distance. If the emphasis upon contextual theology has taught us the value of expressing our faith as it is shaped by the setting in which we live, perhaps it has also underlined the extent to which we each speak about our faith in a language which is not entirely accessible to one another, nor capable of replication across the boundaries between those contexts.

Anthropologists who study the experiences of children like my daughter, who is living in Jerusalem, refer to her and others as "third culture" children - children who are from one culture, but are not living in it; who live in another culture, but are not entirely a part of it. As a result, they create their own rare blend of both. The fact that they do underlines the impossibility of ultimately eliminating the distance between the differing contexts in which we live. To suggest that Americans ought to live an "IBM" faith, or to suggest that the church of Jerusalem should embrace our "IBM'' culture, is a kind of theological esperanto. It is a "nice'' idea, but unlikely to catch on.

Having said this, the ability to listen and learn from one another remains, and if it is impossible to refashion American spirituality in the image of the Palestinian church, it is also dangerous to accede to what I would describe as the increasing "parochialization'' of our church. As we turn inward, questioning our relationships with the larger Anglican Communion, the national church and even the dioceses in which our parishes are located, we ensure an ever greater ignorance of the spiritual resources available to us.

Worse yet, perhaps, we help to ensure a future church that is far more divided than it ever has been before. The church in the West, having attempted over centuries to impose its understanding of the Christian faith upon the rest of the world, is now perilously close to severing all of the ties between itself and others. Ultimately this parochialization possesses a logic of its own which we dare not ignore.

If the walls we are prepared to build between our parishes and the world can be justified, then there is little room, if any, to argue that the parishioner is without the right to sanction his or her parish by withdrawing from it. It is a regressive logic without boundaries, without moorings in our baptismal vows and without any clear sense of what it means to be the church. Ultimately it is a logic which threatens to create a divided church without a means of drawing on its diversity or its common resources - a church characterized by profound and unjust distinctions between the haves and the have nots.

As our spiritual home, the church in Jerusalem symbolizes a very different vision of the church - a church which is diverse, but should be unified; a church which speaks a variety of languages, but professes one faith; a church which lives with a variety of challenges, but needs to face them together. The dynamics at work there are archetypal, even if the church's response is less than exemplary. The church of the empty tomb, it is a reminder of who we are, a symbol of what we are called to be, an example of what is at stake and what might be possible.

In shallah!