Lebanon: Sisters living a kayros of faith and hope
The Lebanese community of the Dominican Sisters of Charity of the Presentation is made up of a French sister, a Burkinabe sister and two Mexican sisters. It is only a year since we arrived in Ghodrass, a village in the mountains of the Keserwan district, a Christian district.
The country is organized into districts, in the south, primarily Muslim districts; in the north, Christian districts. Similarly in Beirut: to the south are preeminently the Muslim districts and to the north the Christian districts. Lebanon is the Middle Eastern country with the largest Christian presence (approximately 37% of the population).
We share with you something of what we are experiencing, bearing in mind that the absence of an Arab sister in the community makes it difficult for us to understand the way in which the Lebanese, even the Christians, understand and live the conflict in the Middle East; we see that they carry in their hearts the consequences of decades of war in this region of the world.
We see sad faces, tired, worn out, worried (very worried), distrustful; if it is true that before September 17 of this year, work was already scarce, salaries were very low and many families had emigrated, “now all this will get worse” -the neighbors say-. Prices have gone up; thank God basic necessities have not been scarce; the products of the basic food basket have little or no clientele, many owners of these businesses have closed to emigrate.
The directors of the Ghodrass home for the elderly have been in trouble, its volunteers are mainly French, but recently, the French government has asked its citizens not to travel to Lebanon and those who were already there have been asked to leave the country: from one day to the next, the elderly found themselves with fewer hands to take care of them.
In our village, especially in the first weeks of October, we heard detonations and we could see the smoke, it was a missile attack on the nearby Muslim neighborhoods (7 km? 10 km?). The constant sound of planes flying over the territory made us think: “There goes death”.
The parish groups that had booked a date in our house of prayer have cancelled, the parish priests prefer prudence.
Some families in Beirut write to our dear Sr. Henriette asking for prayer, things are in constant tension there. The families who had nowhere to flee or those who decided not to leave[1] , pray to God that the missile does not fall on or near their homes, they speak of sleepless nights, in full anguish; someone else asks for prayers for a missing person (malignantly the first to be missing are the doctors[2]).
The four sisters of the community decided to stay in this proven country, we believe that our stay is, in itself, a missionary act. We asked ourselves what we could do to accompany the pain of the Lebanese? We decided to do it with Eucharistic adoration: is there a greater good than the Eucharist? With our neighbors, we do it four days a week.
For us Sisters, living this situation has been a kayros of faith and hope; an impulse for a daily review of how we live our consecration; a daily renewal of the Fiat; the realization of our personal fragility and littleness; an immense desire for inculturation; a renewed awareness of the immensity of God’s gifts received in daily life, sometimes ignored because of their “obviousness” (health, house, daily food, drinking water, a good night’s rest, clean clothes).
“It is in this context that the small Christian community of the Middle East is continually put to the test, even today, as it was in the time of our martyrs. From Gaza to Lebanon, from Syria to Iraq, from Egypt to Sudan, there are many of our brothers and sisters in faith who suffer every day. But alongside these tragedies, we must also remember the wonderful fidelity to Christ that they know how to give. We must recognize the strength and beauty of the witness of not a few young Christians, for example, who, on the walls of the churches destroyed by bombs, not so many years ago, wanted to write: “But we forgive you!”. This is the way to be a Christian in the Middle East”[3].
Hna. María de los Angeles Flores
[1] Leaving is not so simple, people fear that, by leaving their houses empty, they will be occupied and then they will not be able to recover them, since the law favors the one who lives in the house. The preceding wars taught them painful lessons.
[2] So it was in the other wars that doctors were threatened, kidnapped, disappeared or killed.
[3] From the homily for the canonization of the Martyrs of Damascus, October 21, 2024, given by H.B. Pierbattista Card. Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
