Remembering the martyrs.

In March 1996, seven Trappist monks, including their prior, Dom Christian de Cherge, were abducted by Islamic sectarians from Our Lady of Atlas Monastery in Tibherine, Algeria. Brother Anthony, a member of the Trappist Abbey of the Genesee in Piffard, New York, passed on to me updatings of the situation from his order's office in Rome, along with background information about the Tibherine community's decision to remain in Algiers after their previous abduction in 1993, and after recent news had come to them of the assassination of other religious in the diocese of Algeria.

This decision was taken (in the words of Dom Armand Veilleux, the Trappists' procurator general):

...after prayer and dialogue; a decision that was lucid, courageous, serene, and unanimous. Not one of them "desired" martyrdom. [Dom] Christian...said that such a desire would be a sin, since it would be to desire that a "terrorist brother" should sin against the divine commandment "thou shalt not kill." His daily prayer during these past months had been, "Lord, disarm me, and disarm them."

Dom Armand explained that Dom Christian, fluent in Arabic and well-versed in the Qur'an, had made his monastery a place of Islamic and Christian encounter, "simply because everyone felt that they were received there as brothers and sisters and that their difference was respected."

Then on May 23 the French Foreign Ministry announced that a document, signed by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, claimed that the monks had been killed. A week later the remains were found and were buried in Tibherine, at the request of the monks' families.

To honor their assassinated brothers, Trappist abbeys throughout the world held memorial services on Sunday, June 2. Brother Anthony, speaking on behalf of his abbot, Father John Eudes Bamberger, asked me if I would play a role in the Piffard memorial by reciting the Our Father in Arabic after Mass.

Naturally I was honored by the request, yet I arrived at the abbey that Sunday with one unresolved question: How was I to say the Our Father? My experience speaking Arabic was Islamic, not Christian. I had never heard the Our Father in Arabic in a Christian liturgical setting. Arabic, to me, was a language in which one vocalized and chanted the verses of the Qur'an. As a Christian, how was I to vocalize the Our Father when I had heard Arabic only in a Muslim context?

Then, as I sat just before Mass in the abbey's beautiful cave-like chapel pondering this question, Father John Eudes came up to me and put into my hands a document [see, page 31 for full text] which made the question unnecessary. That document was the remarkable "Testament" of Dom Christian, a statement in verse written after the 1993 abduction and left to be opened in the event of his suffering the kind of death which eventually did come to him.

The "Testament" had an effect I would call "uncanny," except that the word implies a spookiness which does not describe the sorrowful yet at the same time profoundly peaceful spirit of concentration that came over me. As I rose after Mass to walk, for the first time in my life, into the abbey's cloistered area, I felt as if I were accompanied by Dom Christian, especially when I stood facing the cross, imagining myself striving, as he must have done, to find a way, despite the threat of violent death, to embody the phrase, "as we forgive those who trespass against us...."

Thus inspired, I found no contradiction in vocalizing the preeminently Christian prayer as if it came from the pages of the Qur'an itself - chanting it as I felt certain Dom Christian had chanted it in his many meetings with Muslim guests at Tibherine. Such chanting in Arabic - as I explained briefly to the assembly before I began - has an elevating effect on the spirit. Intonations that at first seem harsh and perhaps even threatening acquire, with time, prayer, and study, a purity that stretches the heart. Uplifted as I felt by Dom Christian's spirit and by the very sound of the Qur'an, I looked at the cross near the altar. I was not simply standing there with Dom Christian, I was suspended there. And we had a companion, the one addressed in the last words of the prior's "Testment":

And you, too, my last-minute friend, you who know not what you do.

Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank you, and this adieu which is of your planning.

May we be granted to meet each other again, happy thieves, in paradise, should it please

God, the Father of both of us. Amen! In sh' Allah!

Brother Anthony, in his thank-you note to me afterwards, mentioned that the chanting had helped to soften his outlook toward Muslims. "Perhaps that is one of the fruits of this bloodletting," he wrote.

If there were such a fruit, it came, by way of Dom Christian, from the cross itself. Dom Armand reported on June 7 of the ripening of that fruit in Algeria:

The whole Algerian conscience has been shaken by the death of the monks, and perhaps still more by the way they had lived. In an extremely simple way, they had lived to the full the Christian witness of love and brotherhood in a Muslim country, and loved to the end. Many Muslims are deeply shaken and moved by the fact that after this terrible crime we can still speak of forgiveness and fraternity!

It is terrible to stand - or hang - with Dom Christian on Golgotha. Yet Dom Christian teaches us, Christians and Muslims alike, that beyond the terror ties the only true salaam, or peace. And since Christ's love led Dom Christian so far, should we doubt that such a love (provided we are capable of responding to it!) will lead us to the same place?

George Dardess teaches English at Allendale Columbia School in Rochester, New York. His essay, "When a Christian Chants the Qur'an," appeared in the January 13, 1995, issue of Commonweal.