The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  When I emerge from the small chapel and into the light of the wide-open courtyard, Paolo is waiting nearby.

  “I can’t believe you made me do that,” I say, breaking into a smile. “Al-Masih an Qum, Christ is risen!” I tell him shyly, giving him the traditional Arabic Easter greeting.

  He opens his arms wide. “Huq an-Qum! Truly he is risen!” He lifts me up in his arms and swings me around in the air. I can feel my body in his arms, rising.

  4.

  EVERY DAY SINCE I have returned to the monastery this Holy Week, I have taken a long walk alone into the desert, rediscovering those wild places I used to hide in during the Spiritual Exercises. I have sat there, silently, and prayed. Every day, without fail, that same electric feeling I experienced during Incarnation has returned, the world breaking open, and heaven and earth becoming one.

  These moments give me the courage to keep coming back, to keep wrestling with whatever it is I am meant to discover about my life out here. I think I’m getting better at listening for the answer, at not trying so hard to force my own agenda on the universe. Unfortunately, lately I’ve discovered that even in prayer I can be a bit of a control freak, the spiritual equivalent of that annoying date who begins the night with, “I thought that we could eat at an Italian place around the corner and then catch a movie. Is that okay with you?” Too often in my prayers, I’m just looking for a sign-off on decisions I’ve already made. Which is, of course, not a prayer life at all, or a relationship. It is a projection.

  But the Quran has taught me to be more patient, not just with God but also with everything and everyone in my life, including myself. I love what Muslims say about the Quran, that it descended, in Arabic, that it was revealed, which in some way means that we have to wait around to receive it. I used to trust that feeling when I wrote poetry, and I’ve decided that I want a life like that. I want something bigger than me to be slowly made apparent, which I guess my Catholic-school nuns would say means I’m now open to discovering grace.

  Frédéric has been great in all of this searching, acting not so much a guide as a companion on the journey. He doesn’t try to force me into any boxes or ask me to be someone I’m not comfortable with. He never objects that I spend more time in the mosque than in the church and that along with the Quran I’ve also taken to reading Buddhist texts in the mornings before I get out of bed. He, after all, made his way to the monastery via the Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries of India, and so such a wayward spiritual journey makes sense to him. Recently I heard him speaking to some very skeptical young European tourists who asked him how he, of all people, could believe in Christianity (he looked so very normal, after all). He shrugged good-naturedly. “I think that the thirst for something greater than us is human, not Christian,” he said. “I searched for the meaning of my life for many years, but eventually I always hit a wall. But then I felt something on the other side of that wall, the”—he put out his two hands and made the vaguely Italian gesture that universally means “What is that word?”—“I guess I call that space God. But people can call it whatever they want.”

  Today Frédéric and I are taking one of our many walks together. We meet in front of the tiny, heavy door to the monastery and set out on the narrow path into the desert, under the vast blue sky. A hermit, in this case a jolly and rather balding British autoworker, has taken residence in a nearby cave, and I wonder if he is watching us, two tiny dots against the mountains. We descend into the canyon, our steps falling in line with each other, climbing up and down red stones, until we arrive at a path worn faintly into the riverbed that I have never noticed. I look up and see a hidden cave open to the light, two flat stones set up as chairs inside it.

  “She’s my secret home in the desert,” Frédéric confides. “Her name is Madeleine. When I finish restoring her, I hope that I can come to live here.”

  So this is the woman of his life. Frédéric’s Madeleine is an ancient hermit’s cave the size of a small room and first inhabited many centuries before. The ashes of medieval hermit fires are still hidden beneath the earth among the remnants of a simple, ancient kitchen. The sound of birds singing filters in through the opening, and we can see the outlines of almond trees blossoming white and pink.

  We take our seats on the two flat, round stones, and he offers me a mandarin hidden in one of the pockets of his robe. I sit and watch him undo the rind in a single loop and then split the fruit into pieces.

  “Tell me about your retreat,” I say. He has recently gotten back from a solitary seven-day retreat of silence and fasting in the desert, which explains why he looks so different than he had two weeks ago in Damascus.

  “It was hard,” he says. “I hiked up to the hermit’s cave of Mar Maroun to live in silence.” He points out into the mountains until I see the distant, open hole of a cave, barely visible and high up on the opposing mountain. “Every day I had a small routine—I woke up in the morning, I prayed, and then I read from the Psalms. I carved a cross from these pieces of wood I discovered, struck by lightning.” He reaches into his pocket and shows me a few slabs of hard black wood. “Then, in the afternoon I went for a walk in the desert. I came back at night and played some music, and then I went to bed.”

  “What about the Quran?” Before he had left, Frédéric asked me if I could recommend a few verses from the Quran to read. I had sent him the verses on Mary, as well as a few beautiful chapters from the very end of the Quran.

  “That’s what’s so odd,” he said. “Every time I’ve ever been on a retreat, I went with a question. But this time I didn’t have a question. I just sat there listening. I spent a week alone on the mountain, waiting. For the first few days, it wasn’t hard to fast. But then after three or four more days, I felt so weak that when I went to take my walk in the afternoon, I had to concentrate just to put one foot in front of the other.

  “Then, on the fifth day, I completely collapsed in the cave. I didn’t have any energy left, and I felt like I was taking a step toward death. I just lay there for a while. Then I took out the Quranic verses you sent me and read them aloud. Here.” He pulls out a small notebook from his pocket and begins to read his own handwriting:

  N’avons-Nous point ouvert ta poitrine

  Et déposé loin de toi le faix

  qui accablait ton dos…?

  En vérité, à côté de l’adversité est la félicité!

  Oui, à côté de l’adversité est la félicité!

  Even without knowing French, I recognize that he is reading Inshirah, the verses Muslims recite in times of deep difficulty.

  Have We not opened your breast

  And removed from you your burden

  Which weighed down your back…?

  Truly, with every difficulty there is relief,

  With every difficulty there is relief.

  “It was like the words were expressing exactly what was in my heart. When I was finished, I just sat there, at the bottom of the cave and in the dark. Then suddenly I was completely, I don’t know, filled up. I wasn’t weak anymore.”

  I smile. “Do you know what, Frédéric? I asked a Muslim woman from the mosque what you should read on your retreat. I told her that you would be praying and fasting for a week. All she said was, ‘Your friend is imitating the practice of the angels, who do not eat, and do not sleep, and spend their lives worshipping God.’”

  He grins, and for a moment I remember with clarity what the desert fathers said about monks—that they could participate in the lives of the angels.

  “How did you know that you had a calling?” I finally ask him.

  He laughs. “I’m not even sure if I know what that means, to have a calling. I have always possessed… what I would call a spiritual thirst. But I was never clear how that desire would take shape. I’ve always thought that the question of a religious vocation is something natural for each religious person to face. But it only needs to be a question. In my mind, the novitiate is as a relationship of love before marriage. You stay
as long as you feel that it is your place, and then if you are not happy, you leave. And to leave is not a failure—it is an answer from God that he desires something else from you. I’ve been here for three years now, and that night in the retreat last week was the first time I really felt certain that this is where I’m meant to be.”

  These last days of walking in the mountains, I’ve been filled to the brim with a feeling that I’d thought I had imagined—the world becoming electric, again and again. I’d convinced myself long ago that what happened to me during the Exercises was a dream. But now I’m beginning to wonder if it meant something after all. How does anyone know when he has truly been called? I remember the words of Jesus during the Exercises:

  I was just walking by, and my heart called him.

  Frédéric looks across the cave at me. “Listen, Stéphanie, I know that you’re still trying to understand your choice. It’s easy enough to tell that by watching you. I just want to say that you shouldn’t try to know everything already. It’s all right to make mistakes, as long as you can remember that God is faithful to you in your mistakes. I was always clear that I came to the monastery simply asking a question for time and God to answer. I always said that I carried the desire to become a monk, and if God wanted something else from me then… he would open that door and guide me there.” He stops for a moment and looks out at the hermits’ caves and the lines of goat trails lacing the mountain opposite us. “But this much I can tell you—the monastery is a place we come to learn how to love. That is the only thing I have known for sure of my time here—that we come here simply to be novices in love.”

  We speak for a while longer, and then I watch him climb down the cliff and walk alone back to the monastery. I stay by myself and watch him disappear and then the sun slowly set after him. I stand up in the cave, think again, and then sit down again on the floor of Madeleine, holding my face in my hands.

  The truth is, I had hated God, not to mention St. Ignatius, after the Exercises. I had thought of them as aggressive parents who force their children to be doctors when all they want to be is ballerinas. I had blamed the Exercises for trapping me in a monastic choice—and they had, though this was no one’s fault but my own. As long as the world had been crucifixion, then I had no choice but to abandon everything and intercede, to throw myself in front of the car to save the baby. I had made the only choice I was capable of making up there on the mountain, given the world as I had come to understand it. But now I am beginning to think that I wasn’t as much wrong about my choice as I was wrong about the world.

  I kneel down on the hard earth of the cave and close my eyes and make one last appeal for an answer.

  “I want a vocation in love,” I pray. “Teach me how.”

  5.

  April

  THREE DAYS LATER I take my first plane ride since Christmas, watching from the window as Damascus disappears and we rise over the turquoise sliver of the sea. I land in Morocco, to a different continent and a different Arabic altogether, full of unfamiliar sounds and expressions not resembling any Arabic I have ever heard in my life. Fez is brimming with the smell of leather shoes and spices, and men dressed in long, dyed robes with hoods over their heads duck in and out of the narrow lanes. After so many months in Syria, I thought that I had seen most of what was exotic about the East, and yet Fez, with its Moorish architecture and the nearby feeling of the Sahara in the air, catches me by surprise.

  I take a train to Casablanca and then switch over to a bus that climbs slowly into the green and lush mountains, finally groaning to a halt in the quiet village of Chefchaouen. It is breathtaking. The houses are nestled among forests and streams of running water, the facades whitewashed and then detailed in different shades of blue. I find a room in a quiet pension and then I spend my evening walking through the blue streets, dreaming I am gliding upon a colonnaded sea.

  I am like some hybrid form of human in Morocco. Though after all of the political intrigue and tension of Damascus I was eager for a break, after eight months of living in the house off Straight Street, I can’t make myself talk to the foreign tourists from Spain and Italy, feeling more a stranger around them than any of the Arab locals who at least slightly resemble the shopkeepers I converse with every day. Yet my Arabic in no way resembles the local dialect of the Moroccans, which is so far from standard Arabic that almost no one else in the Arab world understands it. As a result, I speak to everyone in the Syrian dialect, they answer me in formal Quranic Arabic, and Moroccans simply assume that I am a Syrian on vacation for a few weeks, escaping the political crisis with Lebanon.

  “You know, we don’t get many Syrians traveling in these parts,” the man at the newspaper stand tells me, smiling in approval when he hears my accent. “We see plenty of Spaniards, French people, and Americans, yet never Syrians. How has life been since Hariri was killed?”

  “Al-hamdulillah,” I respond automatically, “Thanks be to God,” because we have to thank God when things have been difficult, after all.

  I spend the day wandering the markets, speaking with shopkeepers instead of buying souvenirs. Their tea is so sweet that it stings my teeth. After joining some Moroccans for dinner in the evening I make my way back to the pension, fishing the key from my pocket and unlocking the blue painted door. I take a shower and then sit alone on the floor of my room mildly confused by an attack of sudden homesickness. The strange thing is, it’s not home I miss. I miss Syria.

  So I take out my computer, and I spend the next hour scanning through photographs, one by one, taking in the images of this bizarre and surprising year of my life. I begin with a picture I took of Mark on my last day in Cambridge, him standing at the door, ready to drive me to the airport, wearing his black-framed Russian glasses. For the first time, it doesn’t hurt me to look at that photograph. It is the only photograph I ever took of him, in all of our months together, the first time I had ever used the camera I purchased for my year abroad, so that he is slightly out of focus. Later, when I had attempted to sharpen the image, everything else in the photo except for him had sharpened instead, the peeling door frame and tar-colored front door taking on an exaggerated, almost ghastly quality. Now I can’t help but notice how ugly that house is, the outside painted an unfortunate combination of purple and gray. It was not at all the quaint, cozy brownstone I had been conjuring up in my mind for months. The Baron was right. Perhaps the house off Straight Street, with its corroding wooden frames and cold marble tiles, is the most beautiful house I’ve ever lived in after all.

  Then I come upon those photographs I had taken at the Umayyad Mosque when I first arrived in Syria, women with their gowns caught in the light, those children spreading their arms out like birds. There are Syrian Christians dancing the dabke in the streets on the Day of the Cross, their arms draped around one another’s shoulders and feet kicking in the air. I inspect my neighbors carrying an icon of the Virgin Mary past my front door and light catching on the stones of Palmyra, perhaps the loveliest ancient Roman city in the world. I sit beside the Euphrates River, and the abandoned Byzantine cities in the north. I watch the Baron, cutting his fingernails at his front door, his slip-on house shoes contrasting against the pale tiles of our courtyard. I examine Mohammed, laying out his carpets like gowns of color and light, and Muslims bowing down to pray. I look at the view of the monastery from the desert path, the stones cradled between two mountains and the clouds casting their shapes below.

  Finally, after an hour of sifting through photographs, I arrive at the pictures from the previous week at Mar Musa. In the first photograph, a procession of local Christians snakes through the valley, carrying the body of Jesus. In the next, the faces of saints stare down from the walls of the church. Musicians play drums and tambourines in the courtyard on Easter morning.

  Then I stop.

  There are two photographs of Frédéric. In the first, he is smiling and looking to the side, a sly gleam in his eyes. Laugh lines frame the corners of his mouth. His hair is tousled al
l over his head. I remember taking that photograph, watching him trying to suppress his grin. The moment I finished, he had burst into laughter.

  Then I turn to the second photograph. This one is altogether different. Here, he is looking straight at me. But then again, he is not just looking at me. He is looking through me. He is looking at me like a man has never looked at me before.

  Then I know. Of course I know. How many times had I seen him early in the morning and felt something move in my heart? How many times had we walked together through the desert, each one of us confessing those private fears we had never dared express to anyone else? How many times had he been waiting for me, at the top of a flight of three hundred and fifty stairs, with a glass of tea in his hands?

  It is just like that moment in the Spiritual Exercises when you know your experience is true, because the voice is telling you the single sentence you are least prepared to hear, and so you must believe it.

  Stephanie, it says. You are in love.

  6.

  A WEEK LATER, I climb the steps to the monastery, my hair long and loose on my shoulders, my skin brown from hours of walking beneath the Moroccan sun. I might actually be sick. My stomach is turning, and though I have walked these steps dozens of times they feel different. I am walking to him now, walking in response to that calling in my heart, to his words on the phone: Come soon. I am not coming to pray, or to wait in the desert for apparitions. I am coming to see the face of a man. And of course beneath my excitement I cannot help feeling, This is wrong, this is wrong. Everything about this is wrong. Even though it doesn’t feel wrong at all. It feels like a key, finally sliding into a lock and turning.