The church basement at the National Evangelical Church and a store displaying Valentine’s Day gifts.
Sunday is my Day of Two Churches, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I get to experience Christianity in a slightly different and surprising way. To begin with, coffee hour happens right at the very beginning before the service begins, as hospitality requires. After all, what kind of host or hostess does not immediately offer the guest coffee?
In the morning I attend a Presbyterian-like church where I am experiencing the role reversal of being part of the congregation that worships in the basement while the main congregation, well-to-do Arabs, worships in the sanctuary. The English-speaking congregation is a mash-up of the English speaking world living in Lebanon – teachers, language students, spouses of Arabs, employees of NGOs, Philippine and African housemaids, plus a few Arabs who happened across the congregation one way or another. We rarely see State Department employees. I understand they are barely allowed out of their compound – no wonder they produce such drivel about the dangers of Lebanon.
In this upside-down world of basement worship we hear the organ upstairs and the congregation singing lustily, in Arabic, the 19th century Methodist hymns we grew up with, “Holy, Holy, Holy”, “Lord, I Want To Be A Christian”, etc. Downstairs we sing new age hymns projected on PowerPoint accompanied by the pastor’s guitar and the piano played by an Armenian named Vartan. Our basement space looks like somewhere in Nebraska with its plain wooden table, folksy banners, and stackable chairs. Upstairs the sanctuary looks like Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church.
The best part of the service is the prayer requests because one gets such a heart-tugging glimpse into life here. The housemaids ask for prayers for their children at home and sometimes that “madam pay me my wages for the past six months”. Today we heard from a woman whose husband had kidnapped their children but decided to return them. We hear prayer requests that belongings being shipped from home be released from customs without exorbitant “fees” and for children to pass their exams so they can go to college. Today we prayed that the newly formed government of Lebanon be guided by a spirit of service to the people and not by greed and corruption – that is to say, we were praying for a miracle.
Last year I witnessed the first sermon preached to this congregation by a woman. The male pastor was afraid that wouldn’t go over with some of the congregation but he had to go away one week and she stepped into the breech and everything was fine. Both pastors are American, the man of Lebanese heritage who came over with his family a few years ago; the woman a teacher at a local seminary.
The church I attend in the afternoon is a small Bible Baptist congregation that worships in Arabic. It is just down the street from where I live. I would never have bothered with it except that my first day here last year, when I was disoriented and jetlagged, a woman helped me find my way to the university. In the weeks that followed I kept running into her and finally agreed to accompany her to church. (Her name is Diana and I will tell you more about her when I later write about cats.) The Baptist congregation is mostly elderly Arab women although there are a few younger women and about three or four men. Sometimes Filipina housemaids join us but only for the service and not the hour-long coffee hour in the basement beforehand. I like this coffee-hour very much as it restful and chatty and I can listen to the colloquial Arabic. The pastor of this congregation is Lebanese but educated in the States. His mother, Elizabeth, who is part of the congregation, comes from a line of Scottish businessmen who lived in the Middle East and married locally. Her cousin Agnes is the aunt of the Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi whom the congregation got to know when she attended AUB and stayed with her aunt. Elizabeth speaks Arabic fluently, of course, but she can neither read nor write it as she was educated in a American school in Beirut that never taught the literary Arabic. Like the other grandmothers in the congregation, her grandchildren are all over the world as that generation sent their children away for their educations and careers during the Civil War.
This week was Valentine’s Day whose celebration looks very American – flowers, chocolates, balloons. It first started appearing here about 25 years ago when war exiles began returning with the custom from the States. And it does seem so Lebanese – sweets and love being very dear to the Lebanese heart. So much so, that my colloquial teacher, a young woman of about 30, sent me down another cultural rabbit hole when she asked me if we in America had the custom of celebrating Valentine’s Day, too.
goingfortheguttural 