Miguel Pérez was still a minor when in June 2009 he finished the selectivity and enrolled in Fine Arts with the desire to savor the honeys of a bohemian and nihilist life. That same month, far away from the Santa Maria de Gracia neighborhood where he grew up, photographer Menahem Kahana immortalized three Israelis from the Yitzhar settlement by stoning four young Palestinians south of the West Bank city of Nablus. Twelve years later, the young lover of the avant-garde now paints Byzantine iconography in his spare time left by his work as a parish priest in the church of San Justino, just eleven kilometers from this area of confrontations. There, the reporter Jaafar Ashityeh captured on June 29 the image of three local farmers trying to extinguish the flames that a group of settlers had caused to devastate their olive groves.
Under the eternal shadow of the conflict, this Murcian found in the Middle East a point of light to cling to in order to escape from “a very strong existential crisis.” He was 17 years old and was “dying inside” when the Catholic organization Neocatechumenal Movement promised him that in the Christian faith he could find the freedom he craved. “So I believed it and in two months I was in the seminary in Galilee,” he says. In the heart of the Holy Land, north of Jerusalem, Miguel found himself removed from the noise of the bars and the paintings in which he expressed his “most anguished feelings” to compose a new canvas sheltered from the ascetic life of the convent.
At the age of 17, Miguel left the Santa María de Gracia neighborhood and headed to the Galilea seminary to escape from “a very strong existential crisis.”
A journey punctuated by constant threats of abandoning the secular path that in 2011 led him to face a baptism of fire on the shores of the Red Sea. In the city of Eilat, where tourist luxury hides the misery of the desert, the young Neocatechumen discovered the true face of suffering. “It was a very strong experience to see the people who lived there in terrible conditions,” says Miguel. All that human dissolution put my feet on the ground. Although he did not spend 40 days and 40 nights or overcome three temptations like Jesus of Nazareth, the Murcian 20-year-old found himself “alone in the middle of the desert” and suffered “bad experiences with some people.” In the capacity that he developed there to “love the other in his weakness”, the religious from Murcia found “a joy that he had never experienced before.” “From that moment on, I understood that following God is the best thing that could have happened to me,” he confesses.
From Jordan to Palestine
Determined to give his life to the Church, the fourth of the ten children of the Pérez Jiménez family finished his theological studies in 2016 and was sent as an itinerant catechist to one of the largest parishes in Amman, Jordan. A land that, impervious to the conflicts that plague its neighboring countries, still retains “a Bedouin mentality.” Clans work there. If I want to get a State document and I have someone of mine inside, I will have it very easy; if not, it will be much more complicated, “he exemplifies. With no blood ties to turn to, the Murcian’s main safe-conduct was his position as a priest, a double-edged sword that paid him “all respect” but forced him to “live up to that status.” Thus, it is common for priests to participate in the encounters held by the elders when there is a conflict between clans: “In those meetings you cannot remain silent, you have to take part”, highlights Miguel, who still doubts his use of Arabic: “You carry that in your blood or you don’t, but I defend myself.”
As fate would have it, Miguel crossed again to the west bank of the Jordan River last August, although this time to a region “very different from Israel and Jordan.” To the north of the West Bank, where the borders put up real walls, is the city of Nablus, ruled by the Palestinian National Authority. With a Muslim majority, this city is home to one of the last strongholds of Samaritans on the top of Mount Gerizim, while on its outskirts is Jacob’s well, where the Bible tells that a woman from this small community met. Hebrew and Jesus Christ. At this crossroads of creeds, the Murcian priest, only 29 years old, is in front of the church of San Justino, in the Rafidia neighborhood.
From there, he witnesses the “pleasant atmosphere” in which the three faiths coexist and the “intention” shown by the West Bank to “maintain that coexistence.” And it is that day to day is “very hard” when your land is besieged by the settlements of a power like Israel, which “threatens your existence, your independence and your identity.” A life accustomed to the vertigo of the razor’s edge in which the crescent, the cross and the menorah are wrapped in the same flag. «Here the citizen question unites them. The Christians themselves are Palestinians and the Samaritans, although their roots are Jewish, they are also Palestinians and they are all proud of it, ”Miguel details.
The missionary path
As a Spanish parish priest in Nablus, the Murcian not only represents Christians, but his figure represents a flash of warmth in the cold of the conflict: “They all wish to be in Europe and are grateful when they see that they have a European living with them and that he is happy, “he describes. He also acts as a confidante with his faithful, who convey to him concerns shared by Westerners such as “secularization” and “family disintegration”, but above all the suffocation caused by the neighboring country: “They have the feeling that they will never be able to be free or fulfill their dreams because Israel will always be there to try to oppress them. However, after spending seven years on the other side of the border, Miguel tries not to take part: «I am very attached to the Palestinian people, but I do not lose the objective sense of saying that here there are already two nations, two peoples and both they have the right to be ».
“The Palestinians have the feeling that they will never be able to be free or fulfill their dreams because Israel will always be there to try to oppress them.”
A balance that right now seems impossible and that condemns the Palestinians to live without “a strong state” and with “the feeling that at any moment this could end.” Miguel himself has been implicated “in situations from which he did not know how to get out” on both sides of the border, either due to “misunderstandings at the checkpoints with Israel”, as well as threatening glances in neighborhoods where it was “wrong received “as a Christian or took him for” an Israeli spy. ”
As if it were TE Lawrence himself, in addition to learning to deal with the problems in this corner of the world, the Murcian priest has embraced his way of life: «For many years I have been certain that I am where I have to be and not I imagine myself in another place ». There is little left in him of the young man who only wanted to “paint and die in despair”; Now his aspirations are to follow the path of the missionary “with the freshness of the first Christians, without being fixed in one place or having things established.” Although the search for a freedom that he intuits in surrendering to Christ and in the ups and downs of an endless conflict still prevails in Miguel: «I prefer a situation of continuous insecurity to a routine in which you only have to follow the line that has been set for you. I still have that revolutionary.
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