The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  The Spiritual Exercises were no exception. During our month of silence, Dima couldn’t help but talk a little bit every day. She knocked on my door to bring me cookies and tea. She bounced in and out of the valley in the afternoons. But then, like the rest of us, she slowly fell apart in the aftermath. I had found it grueling to see her exhausted and confused by post-Ignatius depression, confined to her room for long periods after I had returned from Christmas, circles under her eyes. It had seemed particularly unfair.

  Yet something has changed since I saw her last. Now her face is smooth and serious, with a fresh self-awareness I have often seen in mothers of newborn children.

  She hugs me tightly. “My sister,” she calls me.

  “Ya ayoonie, my eye,” I call her back. “How has it been here?”

  “You can’t imagine. It’s been full every day.”

  “That must be difficult.”

  She shrugs. “What can we do? We’re all helpless. All I can do is pray and pray.”

  She looks exhausted but oddly confident. I reflect on what she has just told me: All I can do is pray and pray. It doesn’t sound like nothing. It sounds like resisting.

  “Are you better now, Dima?”

  “I’m better. It was difficult for a long time, but I think I’ve passed to the other side now. I’m at peace with my choice.”

  For the first time, I don’t see her as a young girl. I suppose that this is how crisis transforms us. She has chosen to be a nun, to try to intercede on our behalf, but even I am surprised to see her choice made so visible. Seeing her here, I can’t help but be grateful. I know that she has been watching over me from the mountain these last weeks, praying for me, for all of us. I never thought that such a small gesture could give me comfort. But it does.

  “I missed you, Stephanie,” she tells me.

  “I missed you too, Dima. I missed the monastery.”

  “And I missed your laughter.”

  I laugh, and then she nods. “You see?”

  We sit together, side by side on our small wooden stools, and as I place my head on her shoulder for a moment I hope that I haven’t lost her completely, that this business of saving others won’t snatch her away from being the dear, boisterous, and slightly rebellious woman I love.

  “Stephanie?” she finally asks me.

  “Yes, Dima?”

  “How do you keep a man from Homs busy?”

  “How?” I answer, barely able to conceal my smile.

  “You put him in a circular room and ask him to find the corner.”

  I laugh in relief.

  23.

  THE NEXT MORNING FRÉDÉRIC ASKED ME, “So, Stéphanie, do you want to wash the dishes with me?”

  “You’re washing the dishes?” I teased him. “I thought you got all of the guests to wash the dishes so that you could go off and meditate.”

  “Ikteer funny, inti,” he said. “You’re very funny.”

  “I haven’t washed dishes in months, Frédéric. You’ll have to remind me how.”

  Mountains of dishes awaited us in the monastery kitchen, more dishes than I had ever seen in one place. Here there was no avoiding the task. When a monk asks you to wash dishes, you wash. Ora et labora, the Benedictine creed says: work and prayer, the two pillars of monastic life.

  We settled in the kitchen, Frédéric filling giant aluminum vats with boiling soapy water, two vats of clean water beside them for rinsing.

  “So, does washing dishes with you mean that I have to chant the Prayer of the Heart and breathe every time I scrub away the eggs?” I asked, laughing.

  He pretended to be scandalized. “Don’t joke about that. When I was in the monastery in Athos, every night the monks gathered to peel potatoes, and one of them was assigned to recite over and over, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy, in rhythm to the peeling.” He mocked a face of exaggerated piety and pretended to peel an imaginary potato in the air with a rhythm like someone fingering a rosary. “Then the abbot would point to another, ancient monk, who would rasp, Christe eleison, Christe eleison, Christ have mercy, and all of the potato peeling would slow down.”

  I laughed. “I guess they’re pretty serious about their vow to pray without ceasing.”

  He started working his way through the piles of breakfast plates before he asked, “So, do you know any songs by the Beatles?”

  Now this was my kind of novice monk.

  We spent the rest of the morning scrubbing dishes clean and singing, me in my mediocre voice, Frédéric in his luminous, monastic tenor. “Hey Jude” became “Get Back,” Lucy flew out in her sky with diamonds, we walked the long and winding road. Finally, of course, because we were in a monastery after all, we belted out “Let It Be” in homage to Mother Mary, Frédéric inventing half of the words and singing in his French accent: “When I find myself in rhines and runnels, Mother Mary runs to me…” I was covered in soapsuds and my clothes were sopping wet, at some points he managed to nail about one word in every five, but I didn’t care, because for a single moment the war was completely gone, because nothing was real, and we were just two people in a room singing “Strawberry Fields,” forever.

  Frédéric’s favorite of the four Beatles, by the way, is John. That suits him. It is also his favorite Gospel, after all.

  After we finally finished what felt like twenty thousand plates, I took a last walk high into the mountains, finding that narrow path I once navigated in the dark, climbing above the world. The demons weren’t coming to meet me. Just silence. The most silence I had felt in my heart for a very long time.

  I didn’t stop to meditate. I just walked for several hours, and as I moved forward I called up the names of all of those I love. I called up the Sheikha, so lovely in her room, teaching me to sing the names of God. I called up the Baron, hitting me on the head and crying in front of the television set. I called up Mohammed, slowly piecing together those threads so long broken that they seemed beyond repair. I called up Hassan, whom I had not been to see for such a long time now, with his deep, pained brown eyes, trying to let go of a homeland he may never have again. I called up all of the people in the streets who had given me words, language, stories, quiet vowels that have somehow served to heal me in these last difficult months. I called up Rania, trying to bring back angels from the dead, and Dima, wrestling with God in her room each evening. I called up the faces of those I saw in a room last night, praying for peace.

  Then I prayed that God, whoever or whatever he was, would not abandon them.

  Evening fell, and the light descended over the desert hills, slowly covering them with darkness. Beneath me, I watched as Frédéric made his way down the mountain from the opposite path, his body casting a shadow walking over the stones, the prayer beads dangling from his hands. He paused, leaning over, to speak to a bird.

  “Cuckoo,” he said, and then the rest of his words were lost on me.

  And now I am walking back to the monastery. I love this view from the mountain path of the monastery visible between two mountains, the enormous sky extending on every side of it. The world appears divided in two, between land and sky, with the monastery perched just between them. A bridge connects one side of the valley to the other. From here, when someone walks over that bridge, it looks just like he is walking through heaven.

  When I reach the courtyard, Frédéric is already there, staring out over the valley below with that ever-present glass of tea in his hands. He pours me a glass, and I sit down beside him.

  “Frédéric,” I finally ask him, quietly, “I was wondering if we could talk about something.”

  “Tfaddali,” he says, grinning, using one of my favorite Arabic words. It is what someone says when he invites you inside his home, or gives you a place ahead of him in line, or allows you to speak. It says, I am making space for you in my life. Come in.

  I had not expected to speak to Frédéric about serious matters again, not since our last conversation in the church. Still, in these past few days at the monast
ery, I’ve noticed that Frédéric is far more human than I imagined a novice monk might be. He fumbles over his Arabic prayers in the mornings, just as I do, so that half of the time we know that he is praying, but we can’t understand what he is asking God for. When he speaks English, he often says “never” instead of “ever,” mentioning the strangest thing he has never seen in his life, just as he has a sweet habit of adding h to the front of his English words, saying “harms” instead of “arms,” “hair” instead of “air.” There is nothing at all affected about the moments he escapes from conversation to chat beneath the table with a kitten he named Muzika, or the way he speaks with affection about his favorite goat (number 44), or the bees he keeps for honey. I suspect that he feels more at home with animals than humans.

  Maybe Frédéric is a saint. Yet in my eyes he is above all a poet, searching for his life on a mountaintop. I might lack the courage to speak to a saint, but a poet I can manage.

  “Do you remember when you told me that you never thought that I should become a nun, because I don’t believe in resurrection?” I ask him.

  He lifts his eyes in surprise. “I said that?”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  He whistles softly and waves his hands, as though recovering from touching something hot. “Sorry. That’s hard, isn’t it?”

  I find it difficult to believe that he has completely forgotten something that I have been obsessing over for the last month. “I was just wondering—I’ve thought about it so much since you said it. I guess I was hoping that you might explain what you meant.”

  He pulls his string of amber prayer beads from the pocket of his robe, begins moving them from one finger to the next.

  “Frédéric?”

  He continues passing his prayer beads. I have come to the conclusion that this is the monastic form of a stall tactic. “When I came back from Mount Athos, I used to see you walking in the mountains,” he says, carefully choosing his words. “I didn’t know you well, but you looked so serious and sad, like you were living within the mind of suffering. Like you were trying so hard to carry some cross that you had chosen. I felt sorry for you. It looked like your heart was stuck in suffering and not in life.”

  It’s true. He had seen me just after I had lived the Crucifixion, just after I had given my life to God in the desert on my mother’s birthday. “But you told me that you thought that I could never become a nun. I’m not sure what one has to do with the other.”

  He smiles. “I don’t know whether or not you have a calling to be a nun or not, Stéphanie. All I know is that whatever choice you made during the Exercises was one made out of suffering, and I can’t believe in a choice made that way. A monastic choice should be made in the fruit of resurrection, in the belief in life, not death.”

  He is right, of course, but he should try his opinion on the priests and nuns who schooled me, encouraging Lenten fasts and personal guilt. In addition to the normal rations of Catholic guilt, I was a Mexican Catholic, which means we had Passion plays and plenty of statues of Jesus covered with thorns, his bleeding heart exposed. I had always been taught, though perhaps not explicitly, that suffering was at the heart of being Catholic—which was perhaps why I had abandoned my faith so entirely when I left the Exercises. I didn’t want to suffer anymore, not at the moment when I had finally discovered that I might be happy.

  Frédéric seems to be reading my face, somehow taking in my thoughts without my needing to speak them aloud. “On Mount Athos, I was living and praying in the monasteries of the Orthodox Church, and I felt a kind of mysticism that I had never experienced in my life as a Catholic. The Orthodox monks in many ways insist on the Resurrection much more than we do. Their emphasis is on the rising, and not so much on the Crucifixion, which is why Easter is the most important holiday in the Eastern Christian world, why you rarely see a cross inside of an Orthodox Church. Many monks in Athos even wear black, to show that they have already died to this world and are alive in the Resurrection of Christ.”

  I’m confused. “If faith is about the Resurrection, what happens to the Crucifixion then?”

  “The Crucifixion exists, Stéphanie. Resurrection doesn’t say that the Crucifixion didn’t happen. It simply says that it is not the only thing that happened, that life still exists somewhere on the other side of suffering. We run the risk of getting so stuck in the Crucifixion that we forget about life. The Crucifixion is the way toward resurrection, simply part of the journey. The Resurrection appears here, in this moment when things seem dead, when we have reached our human limits, when it feels as though there is no love. Resurrection is not an event in the past but a concrete reality, something we look for every day. It is to be completely poor and to receive God in that space as life.”

  It is true then, what historians say of the frescoes of the Syrian Church, that here we never find an image of the cross without the symbols of resurrection hanging over it, so that death is never without new life, already sprouting at its heart, growing out of it. In the Eastern Church they even call Holy Saturday, the day in which Jesus is dead in the tomb, Sebit al-Noor, the Saturday of Light. Even in that moment, when everything is lost, light is hidden in the midst of it all.

  We look out over the mountains, slowing turning red in the evening, and the single strip of desert road that runs in front of them. “Do you know what I have always thought is strange, Stéphanie?” he asks. “Did you ever notice, when the priest holds up the bread, he says, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’ Isn’t that bizarre? We ask him to say a word, but no one ever tells us what that word is.”

  Maybe each of us has our own word. Like the name we are given at Creation, which tells us who we will become. Like the Quran, where no word ever means the same thing twice.

  In the evening, I find a place in the chapel among the warmth of bodies huddled in every corner, in a room so dark it gives me the sense that we have fled somewhere beneath the earth to seek shelter. It is not easy to sit still, to breathe in this room full of people carrying the conflict. Even after all of these months in Syria, my instinct is to run away. But I stay.

  During the Exercises, when I would meditate, I would often find myself carried away, lifted above myself to an empty space in the air. Now I resist. When I close my eyes and feel the familiar soaring emotion in my heart, I gently root my feet to the earth and settle back into that room. I don’t want to be carried off to another place. I want to stay here, with these people. Praying with them, I no longer feel like a stranger.

  There are dozens of Christians in the chapel for meditation, the air heavy with a weight I only gradually recognize as fear. I quietly sit behind my candle and examine their faces, one by one, praying in the dark. I know many of them by now. In the streets of Damascus, everyone tries to look brave. Like me, they come to the desert to allow themselves to be weak. Beside me a woman is crying. Several young men are hanging their heads in defeat. A young girl is kneeling beneath an altar, lighting candles, with a face so innocent that it cuts me to the heart. The war has never looked quite so stark as it does in this room of human faces with their eyes closed tightly, begging to be spared.

  And in that instant I love them. Paolo had been right—in the moment of suffering, humans take on a transcendent power and beauty. I love this room full of people, just as I love the country that just months before I had been so eager to flee. I don’t know why it has taken the threat of everything vanishing for me to understand. In the Bible, the moment in which Abraham is asked to give up his son is the first time that love is mentioned by name: Take now thy son, thy only son Isaac, whom thou lovest. Love is given a name in the moment of sacrifice, at the moment in which we face the terrifying possibility of loss. Suffering is the moment when love appears.

  The hour finishes, and in the corner Frédéric picks up his guitar to play a song before the Mass. I close my eyes, and as I hear the first notes of “Blackbird” floating through the room, out from his corne
r and into the heart of that thousand-year-old chapel, I look over at him and smile, at this small, unspoken message meant only for me, “All your life/You have only waited for this moment to arise.”

  24.

  THEN THE CONFLICT IS OVER, inexplicably, almost as quickly as it had begun. I left the monastery and traveled to Beirut for two days, crossing the empty border, and I visited the site of the bombing. I stood near the crater in the ground and gave witness to the surrounding buildings with their scarred facades, the gaping holes where there once were windows. I saw with my own eyes the students demonstrating in the streets for democracy, ecstatic in their baseball caps and Western clothing, waving their Lebanese flags in the air. I felt the Cedar Revolution, this rebellion against the Syrian regime, further proof that the government would fall at any moment.

  But then I returned to Syria, and the next morning when I woke up to take my morning stroll through the neighborhood, I glanced up to see a brand-new enormous poster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad looming over me, his fist in the air. “Whenever we are united as a country and a people, then there is nothing to be afraid of,” it read in Arabic script over the background of a Syrian flag. “We’re all with you, Bashar al-Assad.”

  I knew that Syrians were not all with Bashar. I had heard that expressed explicitly many times in the previous weeks. Which is why I found it odd that everyone in the neighborhood continued to promenade back and forth beneath his face, not paying him any notice. That afternoon more posters began surfacing, on car windows, in almost every shop. Teenagers gathered at cafés wearing T-shirts with Syrian flags. Where was this coming from?

  The next day the Syrian president finally addressed the nation in a televised speech, declaring confidently that everything was under control and that Syrians need not fear coup or invasion. Soon after, hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah supporters marched through downtown Beirut, supporting Syria and shocking the so-called international experts who had predicted that a flood of Western-style democracy was headed toward the Middle East, the Cedar Revolution on the verge of triumph. Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, called to the exultant crowd, “I want to tell America, do not interfere in our internal affairs. Tell your ambassador to relax in his embassy, and leave us alone.” Then he yelled, “Death to Israel!” and the crowd shouted, “Death to Israel!” in response.