A young Muslim woman wanted to organise an Interfaith Vigil because she believed in the importance of the different faiths acting together to express concern about the appalling violence unleashed on October 7th and continuing on an unimaginable scale in Gaza, spreading to the West Bank, Lebanon and elsewhere.

      She was in touch with sympathetic Orthodox Jews who were anti Zionist and horrified by the way the State of Israel was perpetuating the oppression of the Palestinians, stating that this was in variance with the values of Judaism. She wanted to include Christians in the Vigil but didn’t know any and was referred to me.

      Through contacts a number of us worked to publicise the event throughout the Christian community, to obtain their support and prepare a contribution. As we were unable to find a member of the clergy to speak at the event we just had to do the best we could. As the initiative had come from the Muslim community who had extended their hand of friendship to us we felt it important to respond.

     We had no idea what to expect but wanted to take the opportunity to mourn the terrible suffering on all sides of the conflict and to focus on expressing our love and compassion for the victims, embedded in the life and witness of Christ.

     A few of us got together from different denominations and prepared a short address, a Taize chant, a prayer and an invitation to extend the hand of peace amongst all of us in the crowd and to those suffering in such a horrifying situation, 

     All our emotions are touched in times like these. A variety of emotions were expressed during the vigil. There was a beautiful, heartfelt poem, the Rabbi who increased our understanding of his group’s perspective on Judaism and its refusal to be drawn into a position of hatred and violence. There was a speech from a prominent political activist empathising the necessity of putting pressure on our Government to stop the supply of arms to Israel and its complicity with its government and there were other impassioned contributions.

     There was a large crowd of over a thousand and it commanded a lot of attention in  a public space in the City Centre, outside Waterstones.

     We had hoped for a much larger Christian presence. It was intimidating to be such a small group speaking out at such a large event, when none of us had had any experience like this before. We hope that our contribution was meaningful despite being such a “still, small voice”. 

Gill Myall