Today I met a local legend, a Dutch lay preacher who tries to convert the Muslims by preaching on the Corniche and going to their gatherings. He started his peculiar ministry in Tripoli but his house was bombed in 2003 and the government told him to leave the city or they would revoke his passport. So, he and his family moved to Beirut where he has been preaching ever since. Last year I heard about his attempts to convert members of Hezbollah.
So, I asked him, how did it go today? He said he was preaching on the Corniche that God had given Israel to the Jews 2,000 + years ago and two Palestinian Muslims came up to his table and started shouting at him. He’s a very mild mannered man and he said he was simply stating an historical fact. In his view, he explained, God is gathering the Jews to come to Israel so he can turn them into Christians! His audience still disputed this but then the preacher received a cell phone call from a member of the Baptist church that I attend to hurry up and come to the ordination of the pastor, so he explained to his audience that he had to leave early and the two Palestinians kissed him and said good-bye.
For all one hears about the sectarian divides in this part of the world, there is still so much evidence of not just tolerance and humor but sometimes the blurring of boundaries altogether. My colloquial teacher is a Greek Orthodox who was raised a Druze. I asked her what her mother thinks about her conversion to Christianity and she said her mother tells her if that God had wanted her to be a Christian she would have been born one. Her family lives in the mountains outside of Beirut and she visits them often – she has not been cast out for her apostasy. In the two churches I attend I have met a number of families who belie the sectarian divide: in one family the husband was a Muslim who was shot during the Civil War and rescued by a Christian neighbor and subsequently converted; in a number of families, the Christian wives of Muslims raised their children Christian; in another, the Christian husband of a Muslim woman did a paper conversion and attends church with their daughter every Sunday. I don’t suppose this could happen in Saudi Arabia.
One of my friends here is from the South of Lebanon where Hezbollah is so much a feature of the landscape that they have their own museum. She told me that when the Shi’a and Druze of the area are very sick, some will go to a church dedicated to St. Mary and get baptized. No one considers them converts – it’s sort of an extra dose of spiritual power.
The divisions in this country are not sectarian in nature, but political. The French colonial powers left the country a constitution that guarantees division based on sectarian lines. The prime minister must be Maronite, the Finance Minster a Shi’a and the Interior Minister a Sunni. Between these groups plus the Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, and the rest of the spoils of Lebanon are divided up and the hangers-on of all confessions defend their prerogatives. The confessions are essentially the political parties. Now that natural gas has been discovered in the Levantine Basin the Ministry of Energy is a plum assignment that is being squabbled over and holding up national development. This is the constitution that the U.S. devised for Iraq – and look how well that’s working.
The ordination I attended today was of a Baptist pastor who had been preaching and serving communion for 11 years. I asked him how he had managed to do his job without ordination all these years. He said that the Baptists are divided on the topic but that it’s within the sphere of acceptability for a local congregation to call a person to be a pastor without undergoing ordination by other pastors. Why then, I asked, did he bother with this now? The answer, it turns out, is that he has been asked by his fellow Baptists to represent them to the government and to perform official functions and that the government insisted on his ordination for him to be recognized in his new role. You can see how thickly intertwined government and confessions are there.
Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese Catholic (of Catholic, Presbyterian, and Greek Orthodox parentage) who fled Beirut during the civil war. He’s written an important book that reflects his Lebanese heritage called On Identity in English but I think it’s French title says it better: Les Identités Meurtrières (Murderous Identities). His point is that we all have multiple identities as members of faiths, families, nations, occupational and other groupings, and they cross-cut each other’s boundaries. He believes that peace lies in the claiming of our multiple identities and that forcing people to assert one identity over another is itself an act of violence that escalates into others.
I spend my days here in this beloved city hoping its people will continue to assert their multiple identities even with the challenges of the Syrian civil war. This country of two million citizens is dealing with two million Syrian refugees of all political persuasions. Think about that for a minute, and then pray for rain. For on top of everything else, there is a drought here and unseasonably warm weather and the crops are in peril as well. Preaching the gospel to Hezbollah may come to an end and the political parties representing the various religions start blowing up each other’s natural gas pipelines.
goingfortheguttural 