Prayerful Reflections On October 7, 2023
One week after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoum was stab twenty-six – 26 – times with a serrated military-style knife with a seven-inch blade.
He was born in the United States; he was Muslim.
The Plainfield, Illinois first grader was murdered in his family’s home by an assailant who shouted, “You Muslims must die!” His mother was stabbed more than a dozen times and, at this writing, was still in the hospital.
Please!
Please, share this with others.
And we will pray these lessons, which we’ve presented before in different ways, will find root in just one heart moved ever-so-slightly closer to Kindness.
Having spent part of his childhood in Algiers, the youthful was assigned to a French Army “pacification” force in Algeria in 1959. There he developed a friendship with Mohammed, a Muslim police officer with whom he enjoyed weekly strolls and discussing politics, culture and theology.
“Since the day when he had asked me, quite unexpectedly, to teach him to pray, Mohammed made a habit of coming to talk with me regularly. He is a neighbor, and we have a long history of sharing… One day, he found the perfect formula for calling me to order and demanding a meeting: ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve dug our well!’ Once, to tease him, I asked the question: ‘And at the bottom of our well, what will we find? Muslim water or Christian water?’ He gave me a look, half-amused and half-rueful: ‘Come on now, we’ve spent all this time walking together, and you’re still asking me this question! You know very well that at the bottom of that well, what we’ll find is God’s water!’”
Once, when the two were confronted by Algerian rebels, Mohammad step forward, saving de Cherge’s life with the words “He is a godly man.” The father of ten was found murdered in the street the next day.
"In the blood of this friend, I knew that my calling to follow Christ meant to live, sooner or later, in the country where it was given to me the greatest gift of love".
Returning to France, he resumed seminary studies that had been interrupted by military service and was ordained a priest in 1964; after novitiate (initial training in vowed religious life) at a Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappist) monastery in France and two years at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, he joined the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Atlas in Tibhrine, Algeria 1971. (The Trappists live a life of poverty, silence, prayer and labor and, upon completing their years of training, make a promise of permanence – except under extreme circumstances, to live the rest of their lives at their particular monastery). In 1984, the community of monks elected him as their prior (local superior).
“Everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters
or father or mother or children or property, for my sake,
will receive a hundred times as much in return
and will inherit eternal life.”
Jesus – Matthew 19:29
With the beginning of the Algerian Civil War, a time of barbarous unrest, religious leaders of all faiths and denominations were targeted. After being taken from their monastery by a group of marauders on March 27, 1996, Father de Cherge and six other Tibhirine Trappists were beheaded on May 21.
The seven Trappist martyrs and twelve other Christian martyrs of the Algerian Civil War were beatified – formally declared “Blessed of God” – on December 8, 2018.
[We told the story of Christian Cherge and the Trappist Martyrs of Tibhrine at Authentichealers.com on October 21, 2022 - Protecting Our Freedom To Love Everyone Because That Is Our Choice — Authentic Healers.]
Between December 1, 1993 and January 1, 1994, the prior wrote to his family in France what has been called the Spiritual Testament of Christian de Cherge. After the terrorist attacks of Saturday, October 7, we present it for your prayerful consideration.
“If it should happen one day — and it could be today — that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. I ask them to accept that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure. I ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering? I ask them to be able to associate such a death with the many other deaths that were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.
“My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I share in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in that which would strike me blindly. I should like, when the time comes, to have a clear space which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of all my fellow human beings, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
“I could not desire such a death. It seems important to me to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if this people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder. It would be to pay too dearly for what will, perhaps, be called ‘the grace of martyrdom,’ to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam. I know the scorn with which Algerians as a whole can be regarded. I know also the caricature of Islam which a certain kind of Islamism encourages. It is too easy to give oneself a good conscience by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists. For me, Algeria and Islam are something different; they are a body and a soul. I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I have received in Algeria, in the respect of believing Muslims – finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel I learned at my mother’s knee, my very first Church.
“My death, clearly, will appear to justify those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic: ‘Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!’ But these people must realize that my most vivid curiosity will then be satisfied. This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills — immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of his passion, filled with the gift of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and to refashion the likeness, delighting in the differences.
“For this life given up, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God who seems to have wished it entirely for the sake of that joy in which everything and in spite of everything. In this ‘thank you,’ which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my brothers and sisters and their families – the hundredfold granted as was promised!
“And you also, the friend of my final moment, [my executioner], who would not be aware of what you were doing. Yes, for you also I wish this ‘thank you’ — and this adieu — to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours.
“And may we find each other, happy ‘good thieves,’ in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both.
“AMEN! INCHALLAH!
Algiers, 1st December 1993
Tibhirine, 1st January 1994
Christian+”
(Translated by the Monks of St. Bernard Abbey, Leicester, England)
Anxious to bring an end to the Fifth (and final) Crusade, Sultan of Egypt Malek al-Kamil promised a Byzantine gold piece to anyone who delivered him the head of a Christian.
By August 1219, his armies had successfully defended the stronghold of Damietta (on the Egyptian Nile delta), killing 5,000 crusaders.
The sultan could never have expected was what came next.
Unarmed, the man who would be known to the world as Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and his companion Brother Illuminatus cross the battle lines; they were badly beaten by the Sultan’s forces and brought before the man who might well have been the most powerful warrior of his time.
Franciscan historian Bonaventure (1221-1274) tells us:
“The sultan asked them by whom and why and in what capacity they had been sent, and how they got there; but Francis replied that they had been sent by God, not by men, to show him and his subjects the way of salvation and proclaim the truth of the Gospel message. When the sultan saw his enthusiasm and courage, he listened to him willingly and pressed him to stay with him.”
History tells us Francis greeted the Sultan with the words “May the Lord give you peace,” similar to the traditional Muslim greeting of, “Assalam o alaikum” or “Peace be upon you.” The Sultan was quickly enraptured by Francis’ holiness. [“May the Lord give you peace” was the traditional greeting of St. Francis to all he met.]
Francis and Illuminatus stayed several days in the Sultan’s camp, sharing the Gospel and praying with him. During those days, Francis and the Sultan spoke of their religious/spiritual traditions and, as the monks prepared to depart al-Kamil’s camp, they refused all gifts and earthly honors except an ivory horn that is still on display in Assisi.
Inspired by Francis and his companion, al-Kamil began treating Christian prisoners of war with surprising kindness and proceeded to negotiate for peace. Unhappily, the intransigence of the Europeans (really the Portuguese Cardinal Pelagius – 1165-1230, who fancied himself a military genius but wasn’t) prevented a meaningful truce.
In August 1221, after the Christians (under the egotistic Pelagius) again rebuffed the Sultan’s offer of peace, Kamil diverted the waters of the Nile – destroying the food supplies of the Europeans and their horses and trapping the crusaders in waist-high water and a quagmire that would have ultimately resulted in their agonizingly slow death, forcing their surrender on August 20. (Pelagius snuck off in the dark of night, taking the Crusaders’ supplies with him.)
Rather than extract a devastating revenge, al-Kamir showed generosity. For fifteen days he provided daily stores of bread, pomegranates and melons for the surviving troops and feed for their horses and other animals - until they were able to abandon their Egyptian lands.
Strategic? Perhaps.
Tactical? Perhaps.
The influence of Francis and his humble respect? Please God!
Estimates range between one million and three million deaths during the 177 years of the crusades against the Muslims (1095-1291).
Because there were no contemporaneous accounts, we can only suspect that Francis was profoundly influenced by hearing the Adhan – the Muslim call to prayer – five times a day and the constant repetition of Islam’s ninety-nine names of God. Perhaps it was this experience in the camp of the Sultan that caused Francis, two years before his death (1226), to entrust his own prayer to Brother Leo:
You are holy, Lord, the only God,
and Your deeds are wonderful.
You are strong.
You are great.
You are the Most High.
You are Almighty.
You, Holy Father are King of heaven and earth.
You are Three and One, Lord God, all Good.
You are Good, all Good, supreme Good,
Lord God, living and true.
You are love. You are wisdom.
You are humility. You are endurance.
You are rest. You are peace.
You are joy and gladness.
You are justice and moderation.
You are all our riches, and You suffice for us.
You are beauty.
You are gentleness.
You are our protector.
You are our guardian and defender.
You are our courage. You are our haven and our hope.
You are our faith, our great consolation.
You are our eternal life, Great and Wonderful Lord,
God Almighty, Merciful Savior.
Perhaps.
AMEN! INCHALLAH!
May the Lord give you peace!
May the Lord give all of us peace!
And, at the bottom of the well may we all find God’s water.