Witness in the desert

The highway north of Damascus snakes through unrelenting desert. After about 80 kilometers a small road heads east from the town of Nebek into the Great Syrian Desert. The border with Iraq lies further on.

There in mountain caves in that desert, early Christian hermits lived out an ascetic existence, ultimately forming small monastic communities. One of these was Deir Mar Musa, founded in the sixth century by St. Moses the Abyssinian.

In this harsh and empty wasteland, the monastery is indistinguishable from the surrounding mountains. After a long haul up 800 steps, one finally reaches the fortress-like building that housed this religious community, which flourished in the 11th and 12th centuries and slowly declined until it was abandoned in the 1830s.

Entrance is through a low stone doorway into a dim light. One is startled not so much by the dramatic change from brilliant sun to semidarkness, but by the fact that life could be carried on here at all or that any vision could reclaim this ancient place. This is after all the desert--the Syrian Desert at that. The combination of an all-encompassing barrenness and isolation with that of a nation reviled by the West seems too unlikely a source of hope.

Yet Deir Mar Musa is alive and witnessing to both its contemplative past and to the great need for religious dialogue in a world bent on destruction.

Today the small monastic community of Khalil, extraordinary in its aims and composition, inhabits this craggy terrain.

Its story began in the 1980s when a young Italian Jesuit, Paulo Dall'Oglio, a student of Arabic, visited the abandoned site. Inspired by the great French scholar of Islam Louis Massignon and the modern desert father Charles de Foucauld, Fr. Dall'Oglio took up the promise to love Islam.

He was ordained in the local Syrian Catholic church and began working with that community to restore the monastery. In 1991 an ecumenical community of Syrian Catholic and Orthodox men and women was formed. Khalil members take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and make promises of contemplation, work, hospitality and love of Islam. They follow a daily rule of prayer, meditation and Eucharist, carried out in Arabic. This rule is entered into by other laypersons who join the community for shorter periods of time. This little band is linked to the wider world not only by means of its purpose but also through electronic communication, making their remote community accessible to all who have interest in their work.

It is to the contemplative life that the community gives priority, and it serves as the basis for reinventing the earliest relationship of Christians and Muslims, that of peace and respect. The community's sacred labor is hospitality, the welcoming of the other and the continuing dialogue among believers in Allah, God of reconciliation and peace. Fr. Paolo tells me he is chastened and humbled by this commitment; he lives in hope and trust that the community's vision may somehow be realized.

The center of the monastery is its 11th-century church embedded deep in the mountain interior and entered through a series of small doors. Its arched vaults, rugged floors and painted fresco walls create an ideal space for prayer. The iconography depicting Mary, the saints and the judgment of sinners provides links back to the community's Byzantine origins. People come to pray, visit, retreat and study. Workshops and seminars on Islamic-Christian dialogue take place in a new building that has been quarried out from some nearby caves.

Outside the church, the simple tasks of making a livelihood go on: tending goats, making cheese, harvesting olives, assisting the many seekers, Christians and Muslims, who make the steep climb to the monastery. As an agricultural community eking out a living from this rough place, the community is keenly aware of its natural environment, protecting its harmonies and living simply within it.

Human efforts, no matter how visionary, are dwarfed by the vastness of desert and mountains that surround Deir Mar Musa. In the cliffs encircling the monastery, one finds the caves of ancient hermits and one experiences, as they must have, the "thinness" of this place, where the emptiness is filled with a presence awful and unrelenting.

In the brutal heat and dust of summer, in the snows of winter, this small community daily witnesses both to the faith of its forbearers and the hope that Abrahamic peoples can someday be reconciled. Theirs is the work of purification, what Fr. Paulo calls "the jihad of the soul." It is the beginning point of the transformed life, pursued in the desert, a witness to believers everywhere.

[Dana Greene is professor of history at Oxford College of Emory University, Atlanta.]

Related Web site

Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi www.deirmarmusa.org

COPYRIGHT 2006 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning