Father Paolo believes that if Muslims must suffer because of their own bad clerics, the tragedy of fundamentalism, and the growing stigma against Islam worldwide, then he will not allow them to suffer alone. To remain Christian in the Middle East means to live as a witness in the heart of violence, to choose to be among those suffering, and by that choice to transform suffering through love. It is his refusal to see Muslims as “others” that makes Paolo a scandal, and when he declared to an American magazine after September 11 that “I cannot but declare that I am a Muslim,” many church officials believed that he had gone too far. Yet I had been deeply touched when he had explained his reasoning to me. “When you love someone else, you appreciate his way of sitting, eating, drinking, you hope his hopes, you excuse his difficulties, you recognize his gifts,” he said. He explained that he could not but be a Muslim, because the Muslim world he had lived in for the last thirty years was now more familiar to him than the world of his youth, and we offer our hearts to those we love. Love, he taught me, is never abstract. It is always searching for a body.
This is why I have come to him. I know that Paolo will not allow me to escape the reality of what I have experienced in the Middle East these last years, just as he will not allow me to escape the story of my own family. It is against his theology to turn one’s back when those we love are suffering. If I am going to face my life after all of these years, then it is probably best to do so in the middle of the desert in Syria, where I have nowhere else to run.
No, I am not ready for the Spiritual Exercises. What I do not dare tell Paolo, at the onset of a month of silence and prayer, is that I no longer pray at all, that my afternoons in the mosque in Damascus are the closest I have come to seeking guidance in as long as I can remember. For the most part, God and I are no longer on speaking terms.
I eat lunch quickly, gather some bedsheets, and pull my backpack onto my shoulders again. Then I cross a bridge, ascend another hundred stairs, and arrive on the other side of the valley at the women’s monastery, where I look for the room that will become my new home.
PAOLO HAS ASSIGNED ME the “bishop’s room,” a kind of deluxe suite in the monastery, named so because it is usually reserved for the bishop when he comes to visit. The simple, spartan room is built directly into the cliff face, and a large chunk of mountain juts through the far wall, creating a makeshift altar holding an icon of the Virgin and Child. The rest of the room consists of a bed, an oil heater, and a bathroom also built directly into the cliff face. The windows look out onto the mountain and into the valley below, where a line of red desert hills remains visible in the distance. “This is not just any place where we live,” Paolo reminded me. “Remember that hermits once spoke with God in the place where you use the toilet.”
The bishop’s room is the architectural opposite of my house on Straight Street, for here everything looks not inward, but out toward the desert, making me completely invisible in my room. Here there is no need to hide from the world outside. No one can watch me from my windows, save for birds or angels, which are the only company I am prepared to receive just now.
I unpack my belongings and place the few books I have brought with me on the windowsill: the Quran, the writings of St. Ephrem the Syrian, the chapters on prayer by the Egyptian hermit Evagrius, Origen’s writings on the creation of the world. Two out of the three Christians have been declared heretics. In my impulsive preparation, I have forgotten my Bible, a notebook, or a change of socks.
Who would have guessed that I would end up here? Growing up attending Catholic schools, I thought that nuns were limited to old women with wrinkled hands who drilled us in arithmetic and who monitored my clothes to make sure that my maroon plaid uniform reached my knees. I never had aspirations to imitate their spiritual lives, just as I had no real desire to acquire a spiritual life of my own. My religious upbringing was in many ways more one of identity than of belief. I carried a glow-in-the-dark rosary in my pocket and made the sign of the cross before I shot free throws in high school basketball games, but these were mere superstitions. I very rarely prayed. I was raised to be fiercely independent, and to ask anyone for help, even God, had seemed to me a betrayal of my Girl Scout pledge to be prepared to survive in the wild all on my own. I also, deep down, refused to believe in a God who required my prayers before he would help me. Then as time passed and more and more tragedies streamed in from all directions, I no longer cared if God existed. I came to feel that a God who would cast so much horror on a single family, and on the life of a child, was not worth believing in.
Only two exceptions remain in my mind.
For a brief period, when I was eleven years old, every day after school I walked to the grotto behind my school and I waited to see if the Virgin Mary would appear to me. In religion class we had watched a film about Mary appearing to a group of children in Medjugorje, and I thought that as long as she was visiting other children she might make time in her schedule to come see me one afternoon. I went every day for weeks, but she never came. Several years later, I confessed these afternoon vigils to my father, and he admitted that for years he had also waited in the garden outside of his high school seminary, hoping that Mary might arrive.
The second exception was more recent. After I graduated from college, I had decided to celebrate by traveling to Costa Rica for a month. One afternoon I was wading in shallow waters on a beach in Montezuma, and I looked up to realize that I had been sucked out away from the coast. I was stranded, trapped simultaneously in an undertow and a riptide. It was impossible to swim against the current, and so I treaded water, helpless as my body was sucked under and out, toward the line of the horizon. As the waves washed over me, I ducked below the water and held my breath for as long as I could, coming up between waves. My thoughts became fuzzy, the world around me dimming like a lightbulb going out in a room. I knew that I was almost out of oxygen and that I would soon pass out and slip beneath the surface.
I looked straight into an oncoming wave at my final meeting with the Divine.
That’s it? I asked him. That’s really it?
It was almost anticlimactic. I had been waiting all of my life for that moment, fighting against the inevitable. It had been written in my destiny like the stars. Like the others in my family, I would die in a tragic and untimely accident.
That’s it? I asked him again. There was no tunnel of light, no vision of my life passing in front of me. It seemed that death was only a quiet passing into the dark.
No one answered. And yet when a man on a bodyboard miraculously managed to fight against the tide and rescue me, I found the strength to cling to his neck with a ferocity that I had not known that I had.
I have never forgotten that afternoon, facing God, and asking him, That’s it? Maybe that miraculous rescue should have been the answer. But it has always remained a question, for all of these years, as I traveled through the war-torn regions of the Middle East, through ancient monasteries and sacred places now scarred with far more suffering than solace. I had carried that question in my heart day after day as I holed myself up in a library in divinity school, flipping through ancient texts, hoping to come upon a God I might recognize hidden somewhere in a story, a prayer written a thousand years ago, a word.
That’s it? I can’t stop asking. It is as much a challenge as a question, as though I am somehow still that same eleven-year-old girl, waiting to see whether God will abandon me or save me.
I REST A FEW HOURS, and as the light fades, I hear the bells clanging across the valley to announce the evening prayer. I descend the long flight of stairs to the monastery, climb a dark and narrow corridor, and arrive at the door to the ancient chapel. Here I remove my shoes, as I would in a Muslim house, and lift the door cloth to enter the dimly lit church. All around me, the faces of those at prayer are illuminated as they sit quietly on carpets with only candles for light, above them the ancient, astonishing frescoes staring calmly ahead. I could be in the eleventh century. We all stand, as Paolo and t
he monks and nuns face the altar and bow down and put their heads to the floor, three full prostrations, an ancient Eastern monastic tradition, the same prostrations that Muslims perform in the mosque. I cannot make myself bow with them. I am not ready to face God again just yet.
They look so serene, those monks and nuns, so full of purpose. The Eastern legend says that the monk leaves the world to take on the cloak of a stranger, to become nobody, that he becomes a stranger among strangers, a desolate wanderer who carries the entire world within his heart. It is in this sacrifice that he is given a particular gift, to transform the entire world within himself through prayer. So he walks, alone, carrying the world within his broken body, connected to others through breath and dreams, separated from all and united to all.
As for me, I lack the courage to make a decision as radical as living my life in a monastery in the desert, and yet I have still managed to end up almost completely alone, a stranger among strangers, carrying the broken world inside of my heart.
3.
MASS IS FINISHING INSIDE the ancient church, the smoke and incense clearing from the air. Paolo takes his place near the iconostasis and calls the names of those who will soon begin the Spiritual Exercises, and we gather around him in a circle, rubbing our hands together, shivering. The sun has fallen, and in the heart of the desert the monastery is freezing.
We are four. Dima is a Syrian novice at the monastery, loud and boisterous, with long, wavy locks of brown hair. At twenty-four, she has been in the monastery for two years, the only two years she has spent away from her family, who live in the nearby city of Homs. She will use this next month to decide if she should take her final vows. Earlier that day, as I had watched her cradling a visitor’s baby, I wondered briefly if she wouldn’t be just as happy as a mother, teaching English literature, which she had studied in university. She is deeply religious, but also, like many female nuns in the Arab world, she has found in the monastic life a freedom to chart her own destiny, in a world where choosing not to marry is always revolutionary.
Rania is a Damascene icon restorer who spends her days peeling back layers of smoke from the blind eyes of saints. Quiet and unsure of herself, and still recovering from the loss of a dear friend, she is also considering the novitiate. The last of us is Charles, a Lebanese novice monk who had left the monastery and is now trying the monastic life a second time, and myself. I try not to focus on the fact that everyone around me is contemplating a monastic vocation. Paolo hands us our copies of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and I wonder how it is that I have decided that a dead man who lived in the sixteenth century should play such a critical role in my life.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, designed his famous Spiritual Exercises in an attempt to place Christians in line with their destinies. He believed, and Jesuits today still believe, that all human beings have a calling and that the purpose of each human life is to discover a vocation. The Exercises move through four stages: the Fallen World, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, and in the coming month we will experience each of those events in full. In the second week of the Exercises, each of us will make a choice that will change our lives forever. Thousands of priests, monks, and nuns have chosen their religious vocations during their month of silence.
The Exercises are also famous because they demand a highly unusual, exhausting form of prayer. At the monastery I will suspend time and space for a month, gradually relinquishing my hold on the exterior world, and enter into the landscape of the Bible. I will leave the scenery of Damascus behind, its Ottoman houses and arching windows, the Baron and his endless cups of coffee, imagining instead the places in the text, the Roman roads and ancient markets, the Sea of Galilee and the desert near Jericho, trying to live inside of them as I would walk on any road in ordinary life. I will occupy my own mind, perhaps a more frightening terrain than any country to which I might travel.
The rules are uncompromising. We cannot speak, except to Paolo every evening, for an hour. We must eat apart from the rest of the visitors, in the kitchen alone, in silence. We should each keep a notebook of our thoughts, our fears, strange dreams we have at night. Despite monastic tradition, we should not fast, at least in the beginning, because we will need the energy that food provides to pray, for lengthy meditation is both rigorous and exhausting.
“Everything you do this month—your sleeping, your reading, your walking—will become holy,” Paolo says in his loud, deep voice. “Think of this month as an appointment between yourself and God.”
Unfortunately, God has a track record of canceling our appointments, taking a rain check so that he can oversee a war in the Balkans or create a new species in the Australian coral reefs. He doesn’t even call to reschedule, leaving me waiting at the corner café all afternoon, near tears. What will I say to God should he choose to arrive now, after all that has happened? Should I ask him why? Attempt to forgive him? Have I collected enough rain checks by now to ask him to resurrect the dead?
“Don’t read the Bible too quickly,” Paolo is saying. “Read just one or two sentences, and then sit down with those words. Close your eyes. Then breathe. Wait for the characters in the story to appear, slowly, in front of you. Then, once they have settled down, ask them questions. Then wait until they give you a response. This month, you will live inside of the text. You will travel on the same roads that Jesus traveled. You will drink the same water and eat the same bread. You will walk beside the disciples. Then, in the midst of all of this, you will be allowed to walk into your own pasts.”
I spend the next several days walking alone in the mountains, trying to teach myself to pray again, to accustom my body to silence, the way a climber might go early to base camp to prepare his body for the altitude. Riyadat al-Ruhiyye, we call this month in Arabic, which can be translated not only as “spiritual exercises,” but also as “spiritual sports.” As if to acknowledge what a toll it can take on the human body to simply open one’s eyes.
It is the evening before the Exercises will begin, and the late afternoon sun is already falling over the distant hills. I walk out into the desert alone and lie flat against the red stones dividing the mountains in two, letting the cool rock beneath me press into my back. It will snow soon. The desert is waiting for it. All around me the desert is empty and silent, an absence more than a place, the ancient hermits’ caves staring down at me with their hollow, vacant mouths. I open the Bible to the book of 1 Kings, to the story of the prophet Elijah fleeing Jezebel and escaping into the desert, and begin to read.
Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went for a day’s journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it, and prayed that he might die. “I’ve had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay under the tree and fell asleep.
All at once an angel touched him and said, “Wake up and eat.” He looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again.
The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Wake up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.
I close my eyes, waiting for the memory of the desert to peel away from the backs of my eyes. After a few moments, only blackness and silence. I have never known such silence could exist. Slowly, the air fills up with shapes, and the vacancy becomes a battlefield, a vast open space of bodies and red dust, and through it trudge hundreds of angels, exhausted, yellow with fatigue, their wings torn and barely hanging on their backs. They carry baskets of bread, covered with small blue napkins to keep them warm. The smell of the loaves is barely discernable, the smell of my mother’s hands when I was a child.
The wounded bodies on the ground have lost their color, an
d against the red ground they look strange and ash gray, as though they have inhaled some terrible poison. The angels lean over them noiselessly. Every now and then a hand touches a face and I can see the contrast, life against death, until the body beneath that hand warms for a moment and leans again toward the living.
I see myself among the dying, lying on the ground.
The angels continue their slow, anguished walking, weighed down by their wings. The desert changes shape. They walk through the streets of Bethlehem. They walk through a portrait of Baghdad. In front of a refugee camp in Lebanon, strewn with sewage, one of the angels stops and simply stares.
I open my eyes and hurry back to my room. Tomorrow, the Exercises begin.
4.
AT SEVEN THIRTY THE NEXT MORNING, I throw on my clothes and scurry down one hundred stairs as the bells commence in their clanging. It is still dark, and Paolo and the others are already waiting in the ancient chapel, wearing long white gowns. We begin: the sign of the cross, three full prostrations all the way to the ground, the head pressing lightly against the floor, and the single plea in Arabic. “Rhamna.”
It is the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer Eastern monks repeat all day long, silently to themselves, until it becomes as close to them as their own breath. Again and again, the monks and nuns call out the line until the words disappear and change into a cry. Rhamna, known to me in my childhood as kyrie eleison. Have mercy on us.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 12