To Announce A Year of the Lord's Favor (continued)

Crucifix, Santiago de

Compostella

Yesterday in the posting of the letter of Mr. Michael Rogers, SJ, to the Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I mentioned the letter which Dom Christian de Chergé, Prior of the Cistercian (Trappist) community of Our Lady of Atlas in Tibhirine Algeria had written to the Islamic terrorist whom he foresaw would one day take his life.  I have always held Dom Christian’s letter is one of the most important spiritual documents of the twentieth century.  I had thought I had posted the story of the Monks of Atlas and Dom Christian’s letter on this blog only to realize yesterday that I hadn’t: so here it is.  You might see a dramatization of the monks’ story in the film: Of God’s and Men.

Asmall monastery of Cistercian monks, the Monastery of Our Lady of Atlas stood in the remote Algerian desert village of Tibhirine. It monks, all French nationals, had come to live in the desert among some of the poorest people in Algeria. They did not come to proselytize but rather to proclaim the Gospel by witnessing to the local Muslim population the good will and dedication to the service of the poor of those who follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ. One of the monks, 82 year-old Brother Luke, was a physician and he provided health care for the locals. Other monks used their various gifts to help the locals as well. The monastery itself employed several locals for various odd jobs that brought some money into the local economy. The monks enjoyed excellent relations with their neighbors but early in the Morning of March 27, 1996 seven monks were abducted by Muslim Fundamentalists. Several others were not discovered by the kidnappers and managed to escape. The monks were held hostage by the Armed Islamic Group, demanding the release of one of their founders, Abdelhak Lavada who had been sentenced to death. The monks were killed on May 21st, their severed heads discovered ten days later. Lavada, who was not directly involved in the monks kidnapping and assassination was released from prison in 2006 under the Algerian president’s “charter for peace and national reconciliation.”
Dom Christian, the prior of the community, had in some way foreseen his fate--as holy people so often do--and written his Testament three years before. It was opened only on the Pentecost Sunday subsequent to his death. I believe that it forms one of the great pieces of spiritual literature of the modern era. 

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 in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. To accept that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure. I would like them to pray for me: how worthy would I be found of such an offering?
I would like them to be able to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones allowed to fall into the indifference of 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, and even in that which would strike me blindly. I should like, when the time comes, to have a space of lucidity which would enable me to beg forgiveness of God and of 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 to me important to state this. I don’t see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will be called, perhaps, the “grace of martyrdom” to owe this 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 contempt in which Algerians taken as a whole can be engulfed. I know, too, the caricatures of Islam which encourage a certain idealism. It is too easy to give oneself a good conscience in identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists. For me, Algeria and Islam is something different. It is a body and a soul. I have proclaimed it often enough, I think, in view of and in the knowledge of what I have received from it, finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel learned at my mother’s knee, my very first Church, precisely in Algeria, and already respecting believing Muslims.
My death, obviously, will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naive or idealistic: “Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!” But these must know that my insistent curiosity will then be set free. 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 as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, 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, playing with the differences.
This life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God who seems to have wished it entirely for the sake of that JOY in 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, O my friends of this place, besides my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families, a hundredfold as was promised!
And you too, my last minute friend, who will not know what you are doing, Yes, for you too I say this THANK YOU AND THIS “A-DIEU”-—to commend you to this God in whose face I see yours. And may we find each other, happy “good thieves” in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. . . AMEN!

To Announce A Year of the Lord's Favor ...

Crucifix in the

Abbey Church

of Saint Remi,

Reims

We have a new pope and there is, hopefully, a new breeze coming through the Church, a wind--a Holy Spirit driven Wind--that stirs our hearts with a renewed focus on the Gospel and bringing the Gospel to all in need.  Here is a proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ--a message of hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace in the face of the hatred and violence--signs of the evil one--that threaten our world. 
Jesuit scholastic, Michael Rogers, just a few months shy of his upcoming ordination, posted on his Facebook page this letter to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber.  I want to bring it to your attention as an example of contemporary Christian spirituality.   I had wanted to compare it to the letter of Dom Christian de Chergé, the prior of a community of Cistercian (Trappist) monks at Tibhirine in Algergia, who were murdered by Islamic terrorists in 1996.  I thought I had printed Dom Christian’s letter—which I think is among the greatest spiritual documents of the twentieth century—elsewhere in this blog, but I hadn’t.  So I will post that in my next posting.  Mr. Roger’s letter is not, to my mind, of quite the same depth as Dom Christian’s but then Mr. Roger is both younger and was not himself a target of the terrorism.  Mr. Roger’s letter is something far more eloquent than I could have produced and I think it does give us something to think about in terms of how we, as Christians, face the awful questions of violence and terror as well as how we address the role of religion—for good and for evil—in our world.  
Dear Dzhokhar,
You don’t know me, but you tried to kill my family.
You couldn’t have known, but my brother ran bandit in the marathon and trained for months. My sister-in-law was an amazing and supportive wife, as she always is, and was ready to run the last five miles with him. Your bomb was at the finish line that they were trying to cross.
My mother, father and sister were waiting for them at the finish line. You didn’t know it, but my mother thinks that she saw you down there. My sister is only three years younger than you, and you set off a bomb in front of her.
You don’t know me, but you tried to kill some friends of mine.
One of my best and closest friends was working in the store in front of which you or your brother laid down a bomb. That bomb exploded, and gave her the worst day of her life.
I was a high school teacher, and your bomb wounded one of my most promising students with shrapnel.
Dear Dzhokhar, you tried to destroy a community that I left behind for Rome, but from which I draw so much of my strength and identity.
You killed a child who was a part of the community who made me the man I am today. Martin may have grown up to be a BC High boy...and his family is well loved in the community which surrounds that school.
You tried to drive a city which gave me courage in the face of cancer into complete and utter fear. But you tried to do this to a city that knew how to make a 10-year-old unafraid.
Dear Dzhokhar, you may have crossed the threshold of the building in which I lived to compete in an athletic event, but we have never met, and you tried to kill my family, a friend, my students, and destroy my community.
Dear Dzhokhar, you failed. Did you ever think that you would make it out? The U.S. captured Bin Laden and Saddam...there was no chance you would escape. This is not the measure of your success, though. Dear Dzhokhar, you failed because Boston was neither bowed nor afraid. You set off a bomb, and the city gave blood for victims. You escaped initial capture and the city opened its doors to strangers. You were at large and making more bombs, and we gathered in prayer at Garvey Park and the Cathedral. You went on a rampage, and people stayed home in an orderly fashion and opened their homes to the police during the search. Dear Dzhokhar, you failed, because light cast out the darkness, and the man who knew that his boat just didn’t look right wasn’t afraid to call it in to the police.
Dear Dzhokhar, for all of this, I can’t hate you. Today I thought about the fact that you are only 19...you are just a kid. You must have been so afraid today. You were a victim like so many are victims, you were brought something you shouldn’t have been brought into because you likely didn’t and couldn’t know any better.
I am glad that you are going to prison, and I hope that you will have many long years there in Supermax in Colorado. I hope that no one I love will ever be threatened by you again, but I can’t hate you.
I can’t hate you because whatever you brought into Boston was enough hate for a good long while, I won’t and can’t hate any more.
I can’t hate you because I remember being 19, and I thought many things were a good idea that weren’t. I never would have went where you were with that, but I was certainly not an adult at 19.
I can’t hate you because, even though you did unspeakable things...somehow you are still my brother and your death can never be my gain.
I can’t hate you, and not just because I am a Catholic, and a Christian, and because in a couple of months I will be a priest, I am a human and I simply can’t hate you.
Dear Dzhokhar, I still have hope for you.
The rest of your life will be in prison. I have seen men change their lives there. I hope that you won’t be executed, because I know that we can hold you, safely, for the rest of your life.
I can’t say what your story might be there, but I know that I, as a Christian, and you, as a Muslim, believe God to be merciful...so I can’t help but have hope for you.
Dear Dzhokhar, you’re a kid. I can’t hate you, or fear you. I am glad you are in custody, I am glad you can’t hurt anyone else or yourself anymore, but I can’t hate you...and I won't fear you.
Dear Dzhokhar, I will pray for you. Next year, when my friend and my brother cross that finish line on Boylston, your brother’s cause will have lost for good; but I will pray that you will know, somehow still, the love that my brother, sister-in-law, mother, father, sister, friends and students all have given me.
Dear Dzhokhar, I will pray for you. When the first pitch is thrown on Patriots Day at Fenway, I will pray that somehow you will know joy...the joy that makes us fully human and offers the possibility of real repentance...the joy that Red Sox baseball fills me with every year.
Dear Dzhokhar, I will pray for you next year when the first shot is fired in the annual reenactment of the battle of Lexington and Concord, that you will come to know that peace and love are the only ways in which world will ever be changed.
Dear Dzhokhar, I don’t and can’t hate you. I am glad you are in custody, but you are just a kid, and you lost. I will love and pray for you, because somehow your sin was turned for good, and my community and the people I love will only be stronger in the end.
Dear Dzhokhar,
Godspeed,
Mike