Faith

Tucked away in the rocky hills of southern Lebanon is the town of Qana. It is a place where, while buying a bottle of juice in a tiny store, a conservatively dressed Shia woman and her children may come up and ask where you are from, and then tell you about their uncle in Dearborn and how happy they are to have you visiting Qana. It is a place where you walk out of a store feeling welcomed.

In the modern era Qana is best known for tragedy. Long ago, however, it was better known for a wedding miracle. Carvings in rock on the edge of town indicate that early Christians believed this to be the site where Jesus turned water into wine. The fourth century church historian Eusebius seems to have considered this the place too (there is a competing site in the Galilee region of Israel). The area is beautifully kept, with a pretty path and flowering plants, and on the day I visited it was the epitome of peacefulness.

There was, however, this sign you see in the photo above. It marked the entrance to the path, and it seemed a little...well, overstated. Did sacredness really not begin until sometime in the first century? (It's a sad thought if true.) And does sacredness really require some spectacular act? At least on this day, for me, sacredness began a few hours earlier, when I was interacting with the Shia family while holding that fruit juice, smiling and sharing, connecting through words and a mutual reaching out. I felt a joy and wonder there, and I experienced a kind of love that enlivens the soul and leaves you ready to risk all.

So while I recommend a visit to this site, I don't think I like the sign much. And I wonder if Qana, with its miracles and massacres and kind mothers at the store, might want to consider putting up a line from Wendell Berry's "How To Be a Poet" instead:

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

One of Japan’s greatest novelists is Shusaku Endo (1923-1996).  A Christian in a country where less than one percent of the population is Christian, Endo’s search for identity shaped much of his writing. He felt rejected in both his homeland (because of his faith) and then in France during the three years he studied there (because of his race). He was intimate with confusion and depression. Those who travel, whether spiritually or geographically, may relate to this man.

On his return to Japan in the 1950s, he made a stop in Palestine and discovered a Jesus who, rather than triumphant and ensconced in cathedrals, knew rejection and betrayal.  Here he saw what he had been unable to see in either Japan or France, and the experience transformed him.

In 1966, Endo published Silence, a historical novel many consider his best work. Set in Japan circa 1600 (during one of the worst persecutions of Christians in history), it tells the story of a Portuguese priest journeying from Europe via Macao to Japan, where the Christian faith has been outlawed. Eventually imprisoned—and thus given a unique perspective from which to see the world—the priest observes things, including:

"These guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind."

Near the novel’s end, the weary priest has a new way of looking at the world and theology, for he has seen torture and execution and has withered under the silence of God. He has not lost his faith, however; he has only lost the faith he once had in a comfortable environment, and he now burns with a righteous anger toward a Church that judges the actions of people who live in a context that those who live in a better place simply cannot comprehend:

“What do you understand?  You Superiors in Macao, you in Europe!” He wanted to stand face to face with them in the darkness and speak in his own defence. “You live a carefree life in tranquility and security, in a place where there is no storm and no torture—it is there that you carry on your apostolate. There you are esteemed as great ministers of God.”

Silence isn’t found in any bookstore travel section as far as I know (it’s usually categorized as literature or religion/spirituality), but it addresses themes found in good travel writing: dislocation, surprise, evolution of thought. It teaches us about a place, and it shows us the new eyes with which a traveler sees home.

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My thanks to a security guard in Girón, Colombia for posing for this photo.

In the quote above, the priest offers one definition of sin.  For a definiton by a character in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, click on “There is Only One Sin”.

In the photograph above, a young Vietnamese woman prays in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Saigon, built by the French in the late 1800s. In her face we glimpse something about prayer. And in the lines below, excerpted from a poem entitled "Six Recognitions of the Lord" by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, we also glimpse something of prayer:

I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.