Beirut

I have just returned to Beirut again after a refreshing month and a half in the UK, Belgium, Syria, and Jordan. I went there for some holiday, but also to do some service with the communities there. It was a blessed time to be with the brothers there and to catch up with old friends from my time in Belfast. A few highlights and thoughts from the last few months:

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I finished the school year at AUB and managed to do well despite myself. I reflect on the year there and how different it was than any year in Arizona would have been. The different classmates, conversations, concerns, days off for assassinations, being stuck on campus till 10:00pm because of potential riots, etc. all were parts of the experience. More importantly than these or what I learned in the classroom was what I learned about myself: how far can I be stretched, what really can help me get through a hard time, and how to relating to a completely different culture.

We also finished a good year in University Christian Outreach (UCO). About 150 young men and women gathered nearly every other Friday throughout the academic year for worship, teaching and fellowship. We had a presence at all of the major universities in Lebanon, and hosted outreach events at each one. I led a team called The Creatives. Our job was to be creative… something I never considered myself very good at. Luckily, I was leading the team and so had lots of actually creative people with me and all I had to do was filter ideas, find the money, and organize how we will split the work between 9 very busy university students. The hardest part was following up once each project was underway; but with time I became comfortable enough to do it and in the end we managed to finish just about all we set out to do. From entertainment activities at mission trips and retreats to videos explaining what UCO is, from Polo shirts and t-shirts to brochures and newsletters.

We finished our household together at the end of June, the breaking of the fellowship some called it. There will be three of us returning to the same house this coming year, three moving out on their own or back with their families, and three leaving for the UK or Michigan. The interest to join this coming year’s house has been very high and it looks like we will have two houses of about 8 guys, a big number if you know the size of the house. Immediately after we closed the house I left for a month in the UK. After a short and wonderful visit with my cousins in Macclesfield, England (just outside Manchester) I went to my old stomping grounds in Belfast and worked in the StreetReach project and then at Youth Initiatives, fitting in plenty of time to relax and enjoy the long summer evenings with friends from the community there. I even got a chance to see Aunt Patti in the south for a few days.

The culmination of my time in Europe was a large conference of about 650 people from the Sword of the Spirit from all over Europe and the Middle East. There were English, Scottish, Irish, Spanish, Polish, German, Belgian, Russian, Armenian, Lebanese, American (only a few of us…), Austrian, and even a family from New Zealand. I was asked to manage the stage for all the big events, so I was kept on my toes. It was a wonderful time for me despite being busy: inspiring talks, great company from so many countries, a true symbol of our ecumenical unity with over 8 different Christian denominations present, and a beautiful setting in the (mostly) warm Belgian summer. A particularly inspiring talk was given near the end of the time calling young men and women to live “generous lives.” You can read some of my reflections on this in the September issue of the magazine Living Bulwark at www.swordofthespirit.net/bulwark/

As a perfect cap to a great summer one of my best friends from Arizona, Aaron Linderman, came to visit me for about three weeks. Our adventures were epic (as good adventures always are…) as we made our way alone into Syria to Damascus, then down to Amman, through the deserts of Jordan to the Dead Sea, Mount Nebo, Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba and the Red Sea and then back again to Beirut! For a full account of our exploits you will have to check back later.

Well, that is about it for me. I begin my final year of University in a couple weeks and will be glad to have some normality return to my life.

The Beginning of Summer

With the end of finals earlier this week, summer officially has begun in Beirut. The reference temporal reference point for activities... "so, are you doing that before or after the war?"

I plan to travel in less than two weeks to a series of mission trips, conferences and holiday in London, Belfast and Belgium. It should be an exciting summer for me, but a real worry of what will happen here while I am gone and its effect on my ability to return hangs over my head and clips the wings of the excitement I should feel now.

I am looking forward to these trips none-the-less and it will be nice for me to taste some western cultures again. I grew up rooted in werstern civilizations and studied and lived and appreciated all that they have and have given to the world. Now I am living in the Arabic culture that claims (and in some areas rightly so) to have been the ones who introduced all these things to the Europeans centuries ago. Why are we so very different then? Why so at odds with each other?

The answers to these and other questions in my next book...

Checkpoints and flowers

I realize that you have probably seen the news by now that there is some significant fighting in the north between the army and a group of Palestinian's (Fatah al-Islam) refugee camp called Nahr al-Bared. There have also been two bombings in areas that have nothing to do with the camp, one Christian area and one primarily Sunni. There have been dozens killed from both sides and I am feeling very sad today. The militants are not a mainstream group with much support, so most people do not seem too worried about the big players getting too involved. I pray they are right. I have a close friend at uniersity who is a young Palestinian woman and I spoke with her today about it. Things like this can often make people long for their homeland (I feel it some), and for the Palestinians that is very hard because they no longer have one. Having faces to put with what the news only ever calls "Palestinians" can change your view on the whole picture. As I walked to class with her today the weather was beautifully clear and warm, the Gardenias where in full bloom and smelled like heaven. She commented that "it is such a nice day that you could easily forget that a few kilometers from here people are killing each other." She is right; I pray our hearts never harden to those suffering so near us.

We are safe and we are still going to University and taking exams etc. Most people are trying to find a balance between that pressure and realizing that there is a real fight going on out there. There are loads of checkpoints and more tanks and helicopters and machine gunned soldiers than I have yet seen. We have been stopped at a number of checkpoints and I have had my first few opportunities to test my Lebanese ID and so far I have passed each time. Many people are on edge understandably and it is hard for me to watch the Lebanese get more and more demoralized each time something like this happens (and there really have been a lot this year). I can try my best to encourage them, but there is only so much that words from a foreigner like me can do. My presence I know is helpful, and even more my decision to stay on when I could have easily left. Each time I tell someone about it their face lights up and I get some kind of slap on the back and a big Ahlan wa Sahlan. God's plan is unfolding day after day and I am glad to be in it.

God save this country, and protect its people.

Almesiah qam! Haqam qam!
(Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!)

It is Easter in Beirut, I suppose it is Easter everywhere... this year. We were blessed in our household this year that the Orthodox and Catholic Easter fell on the same date (not all that common). We have two brothers in our house who are Orthodox -one Greek Orthodox and one Armenian Orthodox. As we celebrated we actually got tired, all the dishes and setting up and hosting and praying and going to church (for 3 hours eastern masses) etc can wear one out. As we got to the final celebration it was just our household left, a core of 9 guys and 2 new brothers who will be joining us next year.
Everyone was exhausted, but we were exhorted to press on. Why? Because we have come to realize that whether we mourn or we celbrate, the main reason is not ourselves -feeling bad or having a good time- but rather the reason we do it is because there is an objective truth, reality that we are remembering. In celbrating Easter, one might say we "celebrated hard." Not with the parties one thinks of for university students, but with most of our waking hours in the last 5 days dedicated to prayer, meditation, preparation, eating, hosting, fellowship, and cleaning, and cleaning (no dishwasher...). Yet, as we came down to the end of the day on Easter sunday, we were joyful, we could say with pleasure that though we may have been tired, it was right and good to give praise and honor once more to the Risen Lord, to never cease to proclaim his saving deed and to revive again in us a gratitude for the new life we have in God because of what happened on this day so many years ago. I pray that you have a blessed Easter season; not just a "normal" one, but one that opens your eyes and hearts more to the Love that was poured out and then raised up in the person of Jesus.

Labels: Easter

“…BUT BY PRAYER AND FASTING” #3

What then is fasting for us Christians? It is our entrance and participation in that experience of Christ Himself by which He liberates us from the total dependence on food, matter, and the world. By no means is our liberation a full one. Living still in a fallen world, in the world of the Old Adam, being part of it, we still depend on food. But just as our death –through which we still must pass- has become by virtue of Christ’s death a passage into life, the food we eat and the life it sustains can be life in God and for God. Part of our food has already become “food if immortality” –the body and blood of Christ Himself. But even the daily brads we receive from God can be in this life and in this world that which strengthens us, our communion with God, rather than that which separates us from God. Yet it is only fasting that can perform that transformation, giving us the existential proof that our dependence on food and matter is not total, not absolute, that united to prayer, grace, and adoration, it can itself be spiritual.

All this means that deeply understood, fasting is the only means by which man recovers his true spiritual nature. It is not a theoretical but truly a practical challenge to the great Liar who managed to convince us that we depend on bread alone and built all human knowledge, science, and existence on that lie. Fasting is a denunciation of that lie and also proof that it is a lie. It is highly significant that it was while fasting that Christ met with Satan and that He said later that Satan cannot be overcome “but by fasting and prayer.” Fasting is the real fight against the devil because it is a challenge to that one all-embracing law which makes him the “Prince of this world.” Yet is one is hungry and then discovers that he can truly be independent of that hunger, not be destroyed by it but just on the contrary, can transform it into a source of spiritual power and victory, then nothing remains of that great lie which we have been living since Adam.

…In summary: from a symbolic and nominal fast –the fast as obligation and custom- we must return to the real fast. Let it be limited and humble but consistent and serious. Let us honestly face our spiritual and physical capacity and act accordingly remembering, however, that there is no fast without challenging that capacity, without introducing into our life a divine proof that things impossible with men are possible with God.

“…BUT BY PRAYER AND FASTING” #2

Why is death and death alone the absolute condition of that which exists? The Church answers: because man rejected life as it was offered and given to him by God and preferred a life depending not on God alone but on “bread alone.” Not only did he disobey God for which he was punished; he changed the very relationship between himself and the world. To be sure, the world was given to him by God as “food” as means of life; yet life was meant to be communion with God; it had not only its end but its full content in him. “In Him was life and the life was the light of men.” The world and food were thus created as means of communion with God, and only if accepted for God’s sake were to give life. …God –and not calories- was the principle of life. Thus to eat, to be alive, to know God and be in communion with Him were one and the same thing.

The unfathomable tragedy of Adam is that he ate for its own sake. More than that, he ate “apart” from God in order to be independent of Him. And if he did it, it is because he believed that food had life in itself and that he, by partaking of that food could be like God, i.e., have life in himself. To put it very simply: he believed in food whereas the only object of belief, of faith, of dependence is God and God alone. World, food, became his gods, the sources and principles of his life. He became their slave. Adam –in Hebrew- means “man.” It is my name, our common name. Man is still Adam, still the slave of “food.” He may claim that he believes in God, but God is not his life, his food, the all-embracing content of his existence… His science, his experience, his self-consciousness are all built on that same principle: “by bread alone.”

Christ is the New Adam. He comes to repair the damage inflicted on life by Adam, to restore man to true life, and thus He also begins with fasting. “When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He became hungry” (Matt. 4:2).

Hunger is that state in which we realize our dependence on something else –when we urgently and essentially need food- showing thus that we have no life in ourselves. It is that limit beyond which I either die from starvation or, having satisfied my body, have again the impression of being alive. It is, in other words, the time when we face the ultimate question: on what does my life depend? And, since the question is not an academic one but is felt with my entire body, it is also the time of temptation. Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is the proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food. And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. He refused to accept that cosmic lie which Satan imposed on the world, …that lie a self-evident truth not even debated any more, the foundation of our entire world view, of science, medicine, and perhaps even religion. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life, and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day.

What then is fasting for us Christians? …Tomorrow’s reading

...BUT BY PRAYER AND FASTING

Since moving to Beirut 8 months ago I have gotten much more in touch with my eastern Christian roots. Spending most of my time among them, I have become influenced in some ways that I am grateful for, and some that I will perhaps drop if I ever return to the west. One of the things that I have loved is access to the Orthodox tradition (especially through the family of one of the Orthodox brothers in our house) and to the writings and wisdom of one of the riches Christian traditions in the world.

During Lent we are reading excerpts from a book by Fr. Alexander Shmemann called Great Lent. In a chapter on Lent in Our Life I have found a beautiful view of fasting, as I have never seen before, rooted in Scripture and church teaching, and springing from the deep experience of the author. I will post it in three segments. I pray that it will spur you on to love of the Lord this Lent through prayer and fasting.

There is no Lent without fasting. It seems, however, that many people today either do not take fasting seriously or, if they do, misunderstand its real spiritual goals. For some people, fasting consists in a symbolic “giving up” of something; for…others, it is a scrupulous observance of dietary regulations. But in Both cases, seldom is fasting referred to the total Lenten effort. Here as elsewhere, therefore, we must first try to understand the Church’s teaching about fasting and then ask ourselves: how can we apply this teaching to our life?

Fasting or abstinence from food is not exclusively a Christian practice. It existed and still exists in other religions and even outside religion, as for example in some specific therapies…. It is important, therefore, to discern the uniquely Christian content of fasting. It is first of all revealed to us in the interdependence between two events which we find in the Bible: one at the beginning of the Old Testament and the other as the beginning of the New Testament.

The event is the “breaking of the fast” by Adam in Paradise. He ate of the forbidden fruit. This is how man’s original sin is revealed to us: Christ, the new Adam –and this is the second event- begins by fasting. Adam was tempted and he succumbed to temptation; Christ was tempted and Ha overcame that temptation. The results of Adam’s failure are expulsion from Paradise and death. The fruits of Christ’s victory are the destruction of death and our return to Paradise. The lack of space prevents us from giving a detailed explanation of the meaning of this parallelism. It is clear, however, that in this perspective fasting is revealed to us as something decisive and ultimate in its importance. It is not a mere “obligation,” a custom; it is connected with the very mystery of life and death, of salvation and damnation.

In the Orthodox teaching, sin is not only the transgression of a rule leading to punishment; it is always a mutilation of life given to us by God. It is for this reason that the story of the original sin is presented to us as an act of eating. For food is means of life; it is that which keeps us alive. But here lies the whole question: what does it mean to be alive and what does “life” mean? For us today this term has a primarily biological meaning: life is precisely that which entirely depends on food, and more generally, on the physical world. But for the Holy Scripture and Christian Tradition, this life “by bread alone” is identified with death because it is mortal life, because death is a principle always at work in it. God, we are told, “created no death.” He is the giver of Life.

How then did life become mortal? … tomorrow’s reading