Animal entrails, boiled oxen shoulder blades, oracles, sea shells, runes, sand, clouds, cards, numbers, vision quests, dreams, spirit possessions, talking to dead people, star and planet mythologies -- all crowded my explorations and vied for attention. Legend has it, Elvis Presley prophesied his own demise when shortly before his death he looked at a cloud and saw the face of an unhappy Jesus (I don't know if this is true). We are a very creative species, when it comes to looking for ways to further confuse ourselves about the nature of reality and the place of our minds within it.
I visited two professional readers in Lebanon, one in east Beirut, near Sassine Square, whom I met at Cafe Najjar, and the other in Sarba, near Jounieh, at a cafe named La Tasse. In Jordan I had success in mercantile coffee cup reading but was asked to be discreet about it. I spent the better part of a year reading coffee cups for my family, friends and colleagues and developed a weekly ritual with
a colleague who seemed to possess some kind of gift of guessing.
This particular colleague was one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing of the Sibleen school bus in 1982. Back then, she was a late teen on her way home on one of the UNRWA's Vocational Center buses. Despite being clearly labeled, the bus was bombed by an Israeli airstrike during the brutal siege of Beirut. But eventually, as always, and in light of the ongoing carnage, people moved on from
the human debris. I tell my friend that her gift of seeing must be due to her facing death so closely. She describes to me in filmic detail how debris fell and instantly killed survivors who had crawled out of the burning bus with her and who were standing meters away from her when they got hit. I think of a short story by Nejmeh Habib, in which the author imagines those moments just before the bus was bombed and I tell her about it. She horrifies me with details of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, even though I spent sometime in pictorial archives and have familiarized myself with
what I thought was enough material to de-sensitize me. Evidently, I was wrong.
I recline in my seat as my friend continues with deciphering the symbols in the cup. I don't know where I'm going to find me a husband and three children, but she insists, and the boy comes first, then two girls. We do not need to have another discussion about why I won't marry the man from Tyre she had suggested to me. In the absence of the epistemic scaffolding needed to sustain a discussion on sexual orientation, we forgo such a discussion.
Lebanon had a way of connecting me to my cultural Christianity not possible in other contexts. It might be the Virgin Mary statues and shrines that you find on every second street corner, in stair wells or even out in the middle of nowhere, and in some areas of Muslim-majority concentrations like Saida. Or, it might be the locals' obsession with knowing you according to whichever confessionalism you were born into. One of the two saw me unusually declare Christianity on a daily basis.
Legend has it that Mother Mary made a miraculous apparition at Our Lady of Beshouat -- a tiny little town north of Ba'elbeck in the Beqaa Valley. Our lady of Beshouat first witnessed the miraculous apparition in 2006, when a visitor and his mother, two Muslim tourists from Syria, noticed that the statue's eyes were moving. Word got around and several people confirmed with similar reports.
It turned out to be a very lucrative summer for the small town, which until then was accessible by dirt road only. The site for the church goes back to the 1740s, where a statue of the virgin was found in one of the caves, resulting in the building of the church.
Reaching Beshouat was another one of my failures in Lebanon, it was snow season and the rental car had no muscle. Add to this the spate of kidnappings and road ambushes at the time and I had to contend myself with a distant promise to fulfill the quest in the future -- when Lebanon's far north would no longer be perturbed by rogue militias, road ambushes and kidnappings. Yes, I had aged and yes, I had officially become a cowardly adult. A younger Samar would have thrown caution to the wind and figured out a way to deal with quick sand and avalanches to reach Beshouat on the new year's eve. Instead, I ended up having a minor car accident with a young man named Charbel! In addition to the legend of our Lady of Beshouat, Lebanon has several stories of miraculous magnitude. But by far, Lebanon's most posthumously active saint is Mar Charbel, born Youssef Makhlouf in 1828 and who died at seventy years of age.
The hermitage in which he spent twenty-three years of solitude has to be one of the most beautiful, quiet places on earth and is located in the town of Annaya, north east of Beirut. In the winter you can't see the valley below because of the fog and you are surrounded in hip high snow all around. In the summer the weather remains sufficiently cool because of the altitude and you get a good
chance to breathe easy and free your mind from the horrors of its daily content: car bombs, dispossessed refugees crossing from the Syrian border, chemical weapons, suicide bombers killing their next of kin, aid money being mismanaged and getting wasted, professional beggars swindling people, while people who are in actual need are too proud to beg. Growing up, Mar Charbel didn't mean much to me, although, perhaps he should have since a minority of Palestinians are also Maronites, especially those living in the far nothern Palestinian village, now razed, called Kifr Bir3em where my mother's family is from.
It wasn't until 2011 and when I was living in Berkeley that I came across the legend of Mar Charbel at a friend's house. My friend is a Catholic by wishful thinking, but you do find religious iconography throughout her decor. Her research expertise revolves around central America and Spanish literature. al-Andalus sums up the extent of her encounter with the Arab world. For this reason, I was surprised when I noticed a plaque from Mexico above her stove. The picture was of Mar Charbel with Spanish writing on the bottom thanking him for the miracle he performed in Mexico. The Plaque also shows two women (perhaps it's the same woman), with one bleeding by the way side.
I naturally, inquisitioned her about where the plaque came from, the story of the women in the picture, and if she knew who the cloaked guy was. She didn't know Mar Charbel and could only guess that he had performed a miracle on the woman.
Several years later, in Lebanon of 2013 or 2014, a Muslim refugee from Syria told of her miraculous encounter with the Saint, alleging he cured her cancer. The famous Egyptian actress, Elham Shaheen, claims he had cured her mother and appeared to her. The list of his alleged apparitions and spiritual surgeries is quite extensive and multi-national and the narratives have unusual commonalties. One young man experienced what might be linked to enlightenment during one of his meditations at the hermitage in Annaya and claims to have received severe burns on his upper arm shortly following his experience of what can be described as "oneness with God."
What I like about the Mar Charbel legend is that it portrays him as a universalist Christian, metting out miracles to non-Christians as much as followers of Christ, and he is said to have been a friend to prostitutes and other outcasts during his lifetime. When he was asked his opinion on taking up arms against the Turks he was against violent confrontation. It is somewhat ironic that Mar Charbel's
iconic face came, for a short period of time, to be seen as an indicator of allegiance to the Lebanese Phalangists of the early civil war period. al-Kata'eb and their crew were responsible for the most heinous massacres of Palestinian innocents the country ever saw, including the massacre not only of Christian but Maronite Palestinians, as is the case with the fall of the Palestinian refugee camp in Dubayeh in the 1970s. As Maronites and Phoenicians, distinguishing themselves from all that which is Arab, Muslim and inferior, al-Kata'eb proudly saw themselves as the true custodians of a Lebanon partitioned in their favour by the French after the world war. To this day, the country's president can only be of the Maronite order. So much of the Christian message is often lost on Christians and it is nice to be reminded every now and then what the message was supposed to actually be.
No comments:
Post a Comment