The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I visited my grandfather that night in the hospital, his face blue and swollen to twice its normal size, the thoughts asleep in his head. Beside him, a machine quietly drew the lines of his breathing. I took his hand, and I remember finding his face to be beautiful, the way something familiar can change so quickly that it startles you into consciousness, seeing it as though for the first time. My grandfather’s face remained a flower in bloom, and though he stayed alive for two more days, at last they unplugged him.

  After he had died, someone handed me the green rosary beads my grandfather held in his hands while dying, and said, “Take these. You are the only one of us who still believes in God.” I grabbed hold of them tightly.

  Or did they really say that? Where are those rosary beads now? Perhaps I have only invented the memory to give myself a purpose in that brutal, terrible story, to make my role more than that of a bystander. The police never discovered who executed him, or why. I have spent the last half of my life wondering. I am plagued by the realization that, walking among us, in our daily life, there are present those who are capable of unspeakable crimes, and we have no way of knowing who they are.

  I was barely a teenager, so confused with my changing body and hormones that I did not know how to make space for an executed grandfather in the narrative of my life. My family tried to pretend that nothing had happened at all. It was as though my grandfather woke up one day and simply disappeared. There was no funeral held to honor him. No one could explain why he had gone. We simply took the ashes of his body and poured them in the river, afterward wiping the white chalk and dust from our hands. It was seventeen years, almost to the day, after his wife’s suicide.

  AS A TEENAGER I TALKED TO FLOWERS, carved names into my bed, and became a novice in the madness I believed was my birthright and destiny. I saw trees morph out of walls, with long, terrible limbs reaching out to tear me apart. By age fourteen I was chronically depressed. Despite the fact that my psychiatrist always insisted that I was not crazy, only deeply sad, I had grown up with the shadow of my grandmother’s life as such a heavy presence that I could not help but conclude that I had inherited her disease. Though I never met her, in some ways she seemed closer to me than most of the women I knew—for though I was one of four children, I was that child who inherited the “Cantu genes,” playing the piano since my childhood, speaking with imaginary friends, living in not quite the same world as my classmates. My mother and I grew increasingly distant after her father’s death, and as she coped by escaping inside of herself, I escaped into terrible dreams and visions and became obsessed with the legacy of my grandmother. I began to suspect that we possessed some special kinship of understanding that tied us beyond time and the dead.

  I am sure that my mother was afraid of me. My life was a story that she had seen before, and she knew how it ended. I was already writing poetry, and I soon discovered the confessional poets, memorizing the verses of Sylvia Plath, staying up late reading Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Theodore Roethke beneath my sheets each night. I became mesmerized by their descents into depression, madness, and addiction. In my mind my grandmother was my own link to these people, the human embodiment of all that was sad and passionate, and I alternated between wanting to be her and wishing that I had been born earlier, so that I might have learned how to save her life. I secretly believed that surely, if she would have met me, she would have recognized herself in me, would have wanted to live to see me grown. But she was dead, and I wasn’t planning on staying alive much longer.

  When I was fourteen, I swallowed so much aspirin that I was sent to the emergency room. A few months later, I found myself checked into the psychiatric ward of Santa Rosa Hospital after swallowing thirty-five Tylenol. But unlike the hospitals of poetry, there was nothing romantic about the lonely white room I inhabited and the fists pounding against the neighboring walls. It was the most humiliating moment in my young life, and I was angry and frightened. The two weeks I spent living among child drug addicts, victims of sexual abuse, and teenagers hallucinating and screaming in the middle of the night proved to be so traumatic that I vowed never to try to die again. It wasn’t exotic—it was horrible. My fascination with death very quickly transformed into a total commitment to staying alive, which I executed with determination and vengeance, not through any love of life, but from the simple fact that failing at death had proven to be such a brutal and terrifying alternative.

  Not long after my stay in the hospital, my parents divorced, and I stayed with my father, who quietly helped nurse me back to health. I willed myself into being well enough to play varsity sports, to go to the prom. I graduated from high school and moved from Texas to Vermont, distancing myself from my past as much as possible, not letting anyone know that the ordinary girl who wore Birkenstocks and composed essays on James Joyce had in another life been holed up in a mental hospital, chatting with phantoms. I became a model student, studied poetry and religion, hiked in the mountains, and gradually allowed my family history to fade into the background of my mind. I told almost no one about my past. Still, it seemed that the moment I stopped chasing after death, it came to chase after me. I was rescued in the waters off Costa Rica a few moments before drowning, miraculously walked away from a car accident unscathed, and was pulled through a window to safety after nearly being crushed in the crowds of President Hafez al-Assad’s funeral procession. Despite the fact that I often found myself falling into depression, I told myself that I was through with courting death—and if death was intent on finding me, then I was determined to give it a run for its money.

  Then, in March 2002, in the same month in which both of my grandparents died, my aunt Loretta, the second daughter of Enrique and Elida, walked outside of her house in rural San Antonio to check her mail. As she lifted the letters from the mailbox, the driver of a school bus full of young children suddenly and inexplicably pulled into reverse and drove over her. She was killed instantly, the letters falling like leaves from her open hands.

  My family, when we spoke about our secret history, christened our past the March Curse. No one would admit it aloud, and yet I knew that each and every one of us worried that one day, it might come in the morning, quietly, and take us. We were educated people, and none of us really believed in curses, of course, except in very exceptional cases. Even the most cynical people would admit that the Kennedy family was cursed, for example. And due to certain unexplained cosmic circumstances, so were we.

  For years, while walking down the street, I would sometimes be seized by a sudden fear that someone was following me. Doors creaking terrified me. I was afraid to be alone in houses. Every few hours, I would think that someone had found his way inside.

  I was afraid that gunmen would climb through the window. I was afraid every time I saw a parent spank a child, I was afraid of too-violent films. I was afraid of driving a car, afraid that I would lose my way, lose the keys, hit someone accidentally. I was afraid of ordering pizza on the phone, or of asking salesclerks for help finding my size. I was afraid of deli counter men.

  I was afraid of leaving the stove on. Of acquiring a disease that could go undetected. I was afraid that death might come when I least expected it, in an Express Mail envelope delivered by post, in the folded pink pleats of honey-baked ham.

  Somewhere, in the midst of my fears, as I increasingly traveled abroad, I came to feel at home in countries with a history of war. That is why, even after the Middle East fell apart, I couldn’t stop coming back. At least there, I knew that I was not crazy. I was right to be afraid. Everyone was afraid.

  So I bought my first copy of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, and in the conflict-ridden world of the Middle East, to my surprise, I reinvented myself. In America, I couldn’t talk to salesclerks, but in Lebanon, I could interview refugees. In America, I was so frightened and disoriented that I often lost my way home at the end of the day, but in Turkey I could hitchhike alone to a site in the middle of Kurdistan and arrive at a village not even marked on t
he map. My family’s past made me an expert at navigating chaos, in surviving in the wild on my own, in connecting with those people strangled by the fear that everything might be lost to them—suddenly and completely without warning.

  Life made sense in the Middle East. It was simply the ordinary, human world where I was accustomed to feeling lost and exposed, now made visible.

  Until, after a year of reporting in Lebanon, I packed up my bags one day and told myself, Stop it. Stop it stop it stop it. This isn’t life you’re living—running from one country and one house to another, living out of suitcases. At least try to live like everyone else.

  And I had tried, with my entire heart, moving to Boston, living in my own language, renting a house, falling in love, until I was placed on an airplane straight back to chaos.

  Before I left America, when people learned that I was moving to Syria, they all said the same thing: You are so brave. It made me want to cry.

  I am not brave. I only want to live long enough to be an old woman and have babies. I want an impossible life.

  2.

  AFTER TWENTY MINUTES OF WALKING, the monastery is finally hanging over me, suspended on the other side of the cliff and just beyond grasp. I try to finish the last flight of steps at a half run, my heavy breaths merging with the sounds of clanging goat bells and the incessant barking of dogs. Finally, human voices. How strange, to hear anything alive in this dead, silent place.

  I reach the top of the steps, running my hands along the rough outer walls of the monastery, glad to have something solid to place my weight against. My hands follow hewn stone all the way to the edge of a front entrance, a miniature iron door half the size of my five-foot-three body pushed open, revealing a tiny passageway designed to make those who enter bow in penitence. Doors of humility, they are called, and I remember the famous narrow gate to the kingdom of heaven, mentioned in the Gospels, and explained by Amma Theodora, the desert mother:

  Let us strive to enter by the narrow gate. Just as the trees, if they have not stood before the winter’s storms, cannot bear fruit, so it is with us; this present age is a storm.

  I bow deeply and enter the narrow passage, the back of my head grazing the stone ceiling. When I raise my head and lift my body to its full height again, I am standing within the monastery walls where I will spend the next month of my life.

  As luck would have it, I have arrived on the second day of Eid, the Muslim feast marking the end of the month of Ramadan, and the monastery is flooded with Arab Christian pilgrims taking advantage of the days off from work, giving the monastery more the air of a picnic site near fairgrounds than a house of pilgrimage. Mixed groups of teenagers are flirting together in Arabic, tourists snap photographs, while dozens of women run back and forth from the monastery kitchen to low tables placed outside, laying out dishes of thick yogurt, olive oil, flatbread, goat cheese, fresh green olives, and sweet black tea for the afternoon meal.

  The intimidating shadow of a six-foot-four Italian hovers over the masses, watching them carefully. Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, the famous abbot of the monastery, manages without difficulty to look over their heads and glimpse me standing at the edge of the courtyard, no doubt looking slightly overwhelmed by all the commotion. He lumbers at me with outstretched arms that nearly cover the entire span between us. It seems impossible to me that a single human being can occupy so much space.

  “Stephanie! Ya Ahlan wa Sahlan! We were waiting for you to arrive! How are you, fine?” His voice booms, his Arabic carrying a singsong cadence, his English affected by so many other accents that its source is impossible to place, though his overenthusiasm certainly hints at his Roman origins. He smiles behind his graying beard and throws his arms around me, his hands making two solid thumps on my back. Then he takes a step back and sizes me up like a rugby player. “So, are you ready?”

  I smile, blushing. I’m not ready.

  I had met Paolo for the first time five years before, during my first, brief trip to Syria, and a second time two years later while I was working in Lebanon. A giant, Arabic-speaking Jesuit parading about in the desert is not easy to forget, and he quickly won me over with his bellowing laugh and deep passion for the local people, encouraging me to learn Arabic and pursue my studies in Islam. I had always admired him, particularly his fluency in Arabic and his engagement with local Muslims, and though he had suggested that I do the monthlong Spiritual Exercises three years before, it had taken a broken heart, a brutal election, and a war in order for me to finally take him up on his offer.

  I have always been somewhat shy, making Paolo an odd choice for my spiritual guide. An Italian who has lived in the Arab world for some twenty-five years, he is a bear of a man, with a giant frame and a voice to match, which can often be heard delegating twelve tasks at once in the local village dialect of Arabic, which he speaks perfectly along with French, English, and his native Italian. He looks less like a priest with a doctorate in theology than the patriarch of a traditional Arab village. On this particular afternoon, he is wearing a black keffiyeh wrapped around his head in the style of local villagers, and beneath his green shirt and smudged khaki pants, his bare feet slide back and forth in cheap brown plastic house sandals one normally wears only in the shower. Every so often he puts on a pair of glasses with enormous, boxy frames, the lenses so thick that they comically magnify his eyes.

  Paolo is legendary in the region, a man famously eccentric, unquestionably brilliant, and most controversial for his insistence on the Christian vocation to love Muslims and Islam. His close friendships with sheikhs from various Islamic schools, his thorough knowledge of the Quran, and his open-door policy toward the thousands of Muslims who visit the monastery each year earn the admiration of many, and the scorn of many others. Some Syrians don’t trust him, thinking that any European who chooses to spend his life in a desert valley in the Middle East is either crazy or a Zionist spy. Other Muslims and Christians alike call him a mystic and a saint, majnoun b’Allah, crazy with God, one of the holy fools famous throughout Eastern monastic history. Some local Christians, suspicious of his relationship with Islam, think that as an Italian he can never truly understand how vulnerable it feels to be a Christian native in the Middle East as Islam becomes increasingly radicalized, and as Christians are targeted in Egypt and Iraq. I have never agreed with all of his opinions, yet I admire him deeply and have always viewed him as my spiritual father and inspiration, sharing his fear that if Christians in the Arab world do not develop a new approach to Islam, their already shrinking communities will soon be in danger of disappearing forever.

  Perhaps I love Paolo most because he embodies the rare faith that life can be built in the ruins of history, that the tragic story of the modern Middle East is not a tale without ending or beyond repair. In 1982, he was a twenty-seven-year-old Jesuit student living in Beirut in what was one of the most terrible years in modern Middle Eastern history. At the height of the already devastating Lebanese Civil War, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and then Beirut in an attempt to battle the PLO, and thousands of civilians were killed in air raids. That same year, terrible massacres occurred in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila on the outskirts of the city, where Lebanese Christian forces protected by Israeli troops killed at least hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians. In Syria, President Hafez al-Assad responded to a rebellion by the Muslim Brotherhood by sending Syrian forces into the city of Hama, where they killed thousands in a matter of days. And throughout Lebanon, members of warring factions continued to slaughter one another.

  In the midst of this, Paolo experienced what he calls a death in his heart. Searching for a place to retreat in silence, he fled to rural Syria, where he hiked through the desert mountains in search of the fabled abandoned ruins of the ancient monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi. There was no clear trail, but after searching he came upon what appeared to be the path of the monks who had lived there hundreds of years before. He followed the indentation in the rock until he arrived at the
top of the mountain, carrying clean water, candles, and a flashlight. The door was locked shut. It was a night with no moon, and sunset had fallen by the time he finally forced the door open. The crumbling church stood before him, the roof destroyed, giving the structure a new roof of thousands of stars. When he cast his flashlight along the walls, he was astounded to see the faces of medieval frescoes, illuminated in the dark, staring back at him.

  Paolo remained in the ruins for ten days of prayer. He climbed the mountains surrounding the monastery and meditated in the grottoes once used by ancient desert monks. Finally, in the midst of his prayer, he received a revelation that he would rebuild the monastery out of the ruins, creating a new order of monks and nuns who would live in a shared community, dedicated to prayer, silence, and hospitality, a shared witness in the heart of the violence of the Middle East. Yet they would add to their vocation something not found in the rules of other monastic orders: the promise to dedicate their lives to dialogue with Islam and to the millions of Muslims living in their midst.

  More than twenty years later, his small community of monks and nuns make their home in this monastery nestled between Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon, where they receive thousands of Muslim and Christian visitors each year. The magnificent eleventh- and thirteenth-century frescoes in the chapel have been restored, the faces of saints and angels Paolo had witnessed that first night now recognized as some of the most important frescoes in the Middle East. While the region’s Christian minority disintegrates and an increasing number immigrate abroad, the monastic community remains, often fasting with the monastery’s Muslim workers during Ramadan, praying the Mass in Arabic, and enforcing Arabic as the common language of the community. After September 11, the community changed their name to al-Khalil, the name given by God to Abraham in the Quran. Abraham—the father of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, who one day opened his tent to welcome strangers and in doing so welcomed the angels of God.