Wonder Beyond Belief by Kermani Navid; Crawford Tony;

Author:Kermani, Navid; Crawford, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Paolo Dall’Oglio

SEPTEMBER 2012

From one second to the next, the driver and the two nuns in the back seat become nervous. They say nothing; I can tell by their necks stretching towards the windows, the driver’s neck right out of the side window; I can tell by their fearful looks, and by their breathing, which betrays the racing of their hearts. They must have seen something troubling, but the parking lot of the Mar Musa monastery ahead of us is empty, the bare, jagged mountains rising steeply behind it, the land all around us flat, as if undressed. I too crane my neck out of the window on the passenger side and discover below the monastery, which looks as if chiselled into a gorge five, six hundred feet above us between clay-brown cliffs, a few dark figures with white cloths around their heads. And, yes, the figures are carrying rifles. I know that three monks are – were? – expecting us in the monastery. The armed men may have already penetrated the compound. We would have no way to help them, I can see that, in the middle of the Syrian desert where hermits fled almost two thousand years ago to escape the world, St Jerome right nearby, in the middle of a country turned Muslim, in the middle of a war in which army and rebels have different motives for kidnapping or killing the members of a Christian order, who are completely unprotected and surrounded by a lawlessness in which criminals are a still greater threat.

‘They could be hunters,’ one of the nuns in the back seat whispers to me.

The driver stops right in front of the gate and checks, leaving the motor running, whether the lock has been broken open. No, it hasn’t, he assures us; that suggests hunters, the nun explains, hunters from the neighbourhood, because fighters or robbers would have come with a car to carry off the monastery’s last possessions. The monastery has already been robbed three times, although after the first robbery there was hardly anything left to steal: the livestock, the tools, even much of the furniture taken. I already know better than to ask any questions about the thieves, much less about police, investigations, or protection.

The founder of the order, Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, is one of the few Christian leaders in Syria to denounce the state’s massacre and defend the people demonstrating for freedom. He urged his own church not to draw a line between its fate and that of the people as a whole: if the future of the Christians really depended on aligning themselves with injustice and oppression, then their future was already finished. In 2012, Father Paolo was banished from the country for his criticism.

If there is one thing I admire about Christianity – or perhaps I should say about those Christians whose faith not only convinced but conquered me, robbed me of all my reservations – if I were to take just one aspect, one attribute as an example,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.