Aziz Matta

In the beginning murder came to be when Cain killed his brother Abel after God had driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. When you place yourself away from the divine care you might be able to destroy your brother whom God shepherds; it is as if you kill God Himself. And Cain killed his brother out of jealousy since God accepted the offering of Abel and did not accept that of Cain, so he became angry with God, that is, he separated himself from God and in turn from his brother. So when he met Abel in the fields, he killed him.

Then came the commandment through Moses: “Thou shall not kill” and as such the life of others is not under your control. That (life of others) would go only to the One who gave it and thus it enters His mercy.

There is arrogance in taking the life of another or in other words, murder comes from arrogance and highhandedness. And highhandedness as such is a type of deification in the sense that God alone is the one who is highhanded and can destroy. Every sin is a self deification and the murderer is the major “destroyer” since he considers the one he is about to kill as not having the right to exist. He (the killer) takes you back to nothingness or he thinks he does that; and afterwards he feels he has returned himself to nothingness and this feeling increases day after day to the point that often the killer despairs of his own repentance.

The cancellation of the other is the feeling that a certain person has to be brought to nothingness by shedding his blood because his existence is intolerable. That is the existence of the other is bothering to the “killer” to the point of stifling. And if you (the killer to be) do not stifle the “enemy”, you will suffocate. The Qur’an describes the inner state of the murderer saying: “…. whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if be had killed all mankind…” Sura 5: 32

Murder takes place primarily in one’s soul. So the aim is to love your enemy since when you keep him existent, both you and he will be glorifying the Lord and Heaven will roll into your heart and his heart. And then you would be able to understand, not in the popular way but with more depth, the meanings in the Qur’an (in Sura 2:191) that ”Oppression is worse than murder”; what God wants you to do is to rid your heart from the seeds of oppression that are in it since that is what spurs your hands to kill. And the aforementioned explanation goes hand in hand with what we find in the Gospel of Matthew 5: 21-22, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. ’But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment”. In the spiritual traditions of the Fathers of the Church, anger is the passion that gives birth to the sin of murder or any form of violence; and as such one of your spiritual goals is to eradicate this passion so it does not turn into sin. And the soul which is free of anger is the quiet (restful) soul; that is the spiritual ascetic school of the hesychasts who work to undo the effect of the passions and appetites in the depth of their being where God alone has full reign.

The load of Murder is quite heavy. A well known journalist of the An-Nahar newspaper once told me about what a sniper of the times of the Lebanese civil war once told him:”I wake up in the middle of every night and I see the ones I killed, their faces and even their clothes, and this makes me very anxious and troubled“. That is in fact the return of that man to his conscience after he had been trained by his military friends to quench that conscience in him. Keep in mind that murder might stay on the conscience of the murderer tens of years or the rest of his life.

Despite all that the murderer remains the sheep that has lost his way in the mountains, and he remains our brother and we are supposed to shepherd his wounded soul so that he can open his heart for the Lord to sow His word in him. And that murderer might be a major one, still tenderness can find a way to his heart and make of him a meek lamb. Repentance is God’s work in the soul, and if one’s soul opens up to it in tears, the Lord will wipe every tear from one’s eyes. Some of our Saints were ultra sinners but the Lord took them in His compassion and tenderness so that nothing remained in them except His invocation and remembrance.

I conclude from this that we have to raise ourselves up on forgiveness; and that brings down on us the mercy of God and His power and puts limits to our waywardness. Such a great conversion can take place through God’s love no matter how deep we have sunk in sin because the human heart is the beloved of God and the human soul is able, when touched by His love, to say with Psalm 33:8 “Taste and see how good is the Lord”. And if we get to the passionate love of God after we have sinned, the Lord will blot out our sin forever. The greatness of the Lord lies in that sin does not find a place in His memory. Is that not His forgiveness?

The above was a discourse on individual murders. What about the killing of communities one the other? What about wars? No doubt, there are countries that hate others; or maybe that was so before World War II after which came peoples who seem for them impossible to fight each other nowadays. So training and taming groups of people not to fight is possible.

There are peoples who have warred due to what seemed to be a religious reason. Yes indeed this happened; and God was “borrowed” for the sake of killing. During the period of Hitler, “God is with us” was written on the habit of the German soldier; and there are peoples who thought that God has commissioned them to kill other peoples and that the killers are God’s militaries. And in that Karl Marx was right when he said that “religion is the opium of the people”. He had witnessed murders in God’s name and the spread of poverty in God’s name. Would one group of people feel sad over another group that kills in God’s name? I have noticed that this rarely happens and as such those that do not feel sorrow in the case I mentioned above, have themselves participated in the killing. How long would it take us to reconcile with and forgive the sin for those who sinned against us?

None of us is God’s agent is shedding blood. And every interpretation or explanation that contains such understandings is from Evil. Cannot the believers in each religion call each other to an agreement or pact of peace that considers killing in God’s name a heresy or even blasphemy?

So, is it not possible to change the ideology of the peoples in such a way that the understanding of the army of a country would be only one of defense in case an attack against it takes place? If you permit me to talk nonsense, I would question saying why shouldn’t the production of weapons be banned altogether? It seems that in times of danger, factories are immediately converted for the production of instruments of death. Why are the peoples afraid? In that, I do not understand how the United States accepts to give permission to its citizens to possess weapons. What would happen if the human being gets angry and agitated?

The citizen is given the weapon of murder; then why is he called to account when he kills? And how is it that they speak of his virtues in such a case? Of course you cannot heal a person of anger and of the possibility that he would destroy another human being unless the grace of God descends on him. The angry person wounds others from his heart. Why then are there those instruments of death? Why is it that we should die apart from God decreeing that?

I understand that what the angels said at the birth of Christ “Gloria in Excelsis and peace on Earth” to mean that obedience to God is what leads to Peace. Is it not the responsibility of the religions and nations of the world to make an effort so that something of that, if not all of it, might be realized? That was the reason behind founding the United Nations. Do we need a political scientific agreement to get to real love or do we seek self purification in order to sow mercifulness among individuals and peoples alike?

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “القتل” – An Nahar – 05.11.2011

When you do not want to confront yourself, that is face the reality of your existence, your tongue becomes a sword with which you kill the others in you since you are unable to eradicate your sins or you probably do not see them so that you will not be frightened by them and thus you remain closed in your own pettiness. When the foreign policy of a country becomes dominated by a high rate of gossiping slandering another country, that is a sign of emptiness in those who are gossiping in the slandering country; and such emptiness is self-inflation. Thus the “other” is the one you bruise or kill since you see yourself as without bruises and wounds and you do not see yourself as the one who is wounded and bruised and that you are about to be destroyed. And you cannot admit your weakness since such a confession is a detection of sin and such detection is the beginning of healing or all of it. And that is the conviction that the “other” is your physician; or that your “health” is a product of his (the “other”) examining you and counseling you.

Gossiping is a “closing in” on one’s self; it is a closing in on emptiness. You cannot tolerate emptiness so you fly away from it and you destroy the “other” not aware that by doing that you destroy yourself. You “destroy yourself” when you feel threatened by discovering your real self when loved by the “other”; and you “love yourself” if you desire to make it better by sharing in the love the “others” have for you. You exist only when you love and when you are loved by those who love the Lord. Perhaps God’s only aim for His creation is this journey of love in Him. Only in that would God be “seen”, as such it (God’s love) is a seeking after the Word (Jesus) who has been since the Beginning.

But if you close on yourself, then it is inevitable not to have inner discourse coming from evil and corruption; as such you get seduced by your passions and I mean here the roots of sin in you. These are the “uncleanness” the nature of which you know, or maybe you do not know but you need to root it out from your heart since it results in harming you even though you have not deliberately desired it. Yet uncleanness has to leave you so that you can dwell in the “other” if that “other” does not stay away from you due to his purity. As such the arrow (of gossiping) does not hit its target but it harms the one who sent it (that is you).

The philosophers of Ethics distinguish between slander and gossip. In the Quran, I only find the word slander; and its meaning is to “invent lies” as it comes in Surah 5: 103 and in Sura 16: 116 “ Do not say about what your lying tongues describe: ‘THIS IS LAWFUL AND THIS IS UNLAWFUL,’ inventing lies against Allah. Those who invent lies against Allah are not successful”.

Lying is a form of fear in the one who lies and a slander of the “other” whom it targets. That is what slander is. But you might say true things about the “other” either because you are a gossiper or because you want to hurt him. For instance you might say “that person steals” and then you mention an episode of that. That is what is called gossip while slander is when you invent lies.

Disclosing the weak points of people does them great harm since this exposes them to be shredded by those who have an interest in that; and such gossip coming from you, might stay with them as long as they live. This is true especially in women, when you make their chastity a matter of libel. People give ear to that quickly without making sure of things. And maybe the gossip might move from one mouth to another and as such might destroy families; you are called to be reticent concerning the sins of others and such silence helps you out of slandering others. Silence is an excellent watch over one’s soul since it allows one to be quiet with the Lord and as such be repentant. But he who gossips does not know what repentance is.

You might be exposed to gossip in social activities. What you hear then is something to be thrown in the “well of your reticence” and you do not give yourself room to reflect on what you heard of the iniquity of others for fear you would plunge into them. The Fathers have warned us not to reflect on our past sins after we have repented so that those sins would not tempt us again. You have to reflect on the virtues and their beauty; perhaps they will draw you closer to them; do not reflect on what is rotten so that you do not think of committing them.

Read this in James 3: 5-13, “Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind,but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.” If the apostle recognizes the difficulty in having a “chaste” tongue and despite that asks of us to have our tongues be “chaste”, that means that it is possible to have that if we seek it from God.

God wants from you only what is pure; if your purity is strong in you, you become a fountain of purity for others. Each one of us wants to be loved. That is why the “other” would be sad when you slander him. He also would be sad if you tell others what he has confided in you. Make it a principle to consider what one tells you as something he does not want to say to someone other than you, or maybe he does not dare to. Consider all what you hear as “confidential” as the Christians say. But if you realize that spreading some information you got would be of benefit to others and would strengthen them in the truth, then go ahead and spread it, keeping in mind not to disclose information that you are entrusted with by someone who does not wish to have it disclosed.

“The conversations in company are in trusteeship” is a rule of conduct in our society. That means that all what you hear when you are with people should remain there and not go out. This is why reticence is better and of more benefit in most cases. Not all what you get to know should be spread around. Most information is in the custody of those to whom it belongs and of those who have been entrusted with it. So abide by that thus guarding your own purity and the integrity of others and their reputation.

Each person has matters that he keeps to himself; and friendship might permit that he would disclose them (to the friend) if he is able to make sure that what he says is not only unharmful but is of benefit. Fortify yourself with reticence for that would give you eloquence in your silence. Reticence is not always in need of your words in order to transmit the good that you store. Humanity is a communion of love, and love needs witnesses whose lives are according to the commandments of the Lord; and they themselves give life to others with their compassion, kindness and serviceability. For through those the Lord has brought about his compassion.

Translated by Riad Moufarrij

Original Text: “النميمة” – An Nahar – 29.10.2011

Syria is united and we want it so. Its fragmentation would be a danger for the entire region, and mainly for Lebanon. The French mandate had divided it into three parts; however it soon regained its unity due to the solidarity among its people.

It is possible to reinforce this unity through peace, which assumes that the blood continues to flow in the Syrians’ veins and arteries. “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God.” (Psalm 51)

Neither power nor hope, to withstand the enemy, is possible for the Arab East without a powerful Syria, coherent in all its social spectra, free from the history of its conflicts and holding only its glories. Its dream was a civil rule and this has become recently the dream of Arabs. We aspire that this dream might continue to exist in the souls as a denial of a rigid heritage and of a distinction between divine and human natures or a distinction between divine judgment, i.e. the salvation of the souls, and the human judgment, according to which human beings ask for divine inspiration in their daily issues on earth. The first [i.e. the worldly life] does not turn into the Hereafter [i.e. the life to come], however the first yearns for the Hereafter and it moves toward it, while it continues to impact the worldly life.

This is mainly the concern of Arabism, since it asks one major question about the legitimacy of carrying the human nature, which itself justifies pluralism and the burden of diversity within the one homeland. Pluralism is not dissipation, and alignment in one form without different political colors annihilates the individuals. It kills freedom. Thus you have to choose between freedom that has necessarily sporadic thoughts and the single-party rule. Only God has the right to think that He is the whole Truth.

I hope that Arabs would reach at the conviction that their diversity enriches them and that God has not delegate anyone to run the world. This is what civil rule means. It is the people’s gathering in a country, where they agree to think together, and I did not say that their minds are separated from God. Every group [or body] can think that God inspires it with whatever God’s will is, but it cannot impose on other people what it assumes to be the ground of community life. To me it does not make sense when a country declares its belief in one religion or another. The state is a legal body, i.e. it has an abstract structure. However a homeland is about people who meet, interact and share their affections and their human depths, and from these depths the state takes its drive to proceed. In the homeland you are my brother and together we build the state. Through the encounter and the exchange of our thoughts and convictions we reach together at a rule which you and I can ratify. Though we must disagree, yet our alliance entails that I would not stretch my hand to kill you and you would not stretch yours to kill me. The state, before anything else, is a place for peace.

No one knows the destination of the Arab Spring. It should contain some seeds of democracy, yet it might not be exempt of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism [in its turn] might not be of equal intensity in all countries, yet we must perceive that the dictatorship of a group may be worse than the dictatorship of a person. Facing such uncertainty, questions concerning freedom arise because of the different political philosophies.

However, my concern is not about the potential progress of every Arab Spring, since political Arabism has different colors or different aspects. What happens in Egypt had never occurred during the days of its kings. I have followed, in my youth, king Fouad’s and king Farouk’s rules, and then Egypt designated the Copt Boutros Ghali Pasha as Prime Minister, while Egypt’s revolution against the British was organized by Muslims and Copts alike. That means that Christians’ alliance with foreigners was not known. I don’t know exactly why the attitude has changed after the June-revolution, so that I can give my opinion. Anba Shenouda, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria, had refused absolutely that any Copt would think of a Coptic particularism on the political level. Could one of the causes of strain be that Copts were outstandingly successful in universities and professions, such as medicine and pharmacy? Scientific progress maybe does not serve one. We all remember that Anba Shenouda had forbidden his community to visit Israel, after establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. And the Coptic theology, similar to Orthodox theology in general, is stringent with regard to Judaism and Jews. Further, it was forbidden for anyone to dispute with Muslims, in case any of them had published a book or an article against Christianity. There is no doubt that Egyptian security bodies are negligent to act upon sectarian calamities. The problem needs a radical solution; since we all want that the beloved Egypt remains a distinctive Arab country. No one from my generation would be influenced by the Arab culture, unless he had been influenced by the Egyptian thought. And whoever knows the spiritual greatness, faith, and serenity of the Egyptian Copts, would be sad for their emigration.

What concerns us in particular is the triad of Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, where there is convergence in characters and traditions between Christians and Muslims. I don’t know the reason of having such privateness in the Arab world. However, we all obviously remember that the Arab rule, from its beginning, complied with Christians. Only the Mamluks’ rule was harsh may be even on non-Christian communities. The culture of kinship continued to prevail among us, in the Ottoman rule, before our struggle and the implementation of the policy of Turkification in the beginning of the 20^th Century. I can say with confidence that mildness was ruling upon the relationships among the different confessions, and our characters would not change easily or hastily. Therefore, I do not see any reason for the fears expressed by some Christians. What has happened in Iraq, which faces a long war, cannot be considered as an example for the danger threatening the Christians. All people there killed each other. In addition to that, our mindset is different than the Iraqi mindset.

Do Christians lack courage and hope? We can stretch our hands to the hands of Muslims as we always did earlier. I understand that some may say that there are new movements, which are unrelenting.

However, throughout all difficulties we live with Christ, who has said that he will always be with us to the end of the age. Fear is the gravest force that drags us out of our place. It always annihilates what is commonly called the minorities, because numbers are everything for them. In addition, I feel that moderate Muslims who love us and wish our stay are more important and powerful than those extremists. And each of us knows a loving friend among them.

The time has come for Muslims to realize that the old charge, which claims that we were cooperating with the foreigner, is not true anymore. Don’t you remember that Charles de Gaulle, who was committed to his Catholic faith, said that France deals with all the Lebanese confessions alike? While the Americans know that a State has no governor who rules forever. And they have never demonstrated that they are friends of Christians. What could we offer to them, while they have strong relationships with Arab countries, where no Christian lives? Besides, the Muslims’ oil is appealing.

In the year 636 Arabs were besieging Damascus. Its Governor, Mansur ibn Sarjun, the grandfather of Saint John of Damascus, realized that he had to open the city gates lest Arabs enter it by force and expose Christians to danger. But when Arabs took over all the State departments, they discovered that Christians were holding all the offices. Thus Muslims maintained Christians in all the departments, because of their knowledge. This is to say that Christians understood that Arabs entered the Levant to become its rulers, and that they should cooperate with them.

Another thing that has to be said is that the Sunnites represent 85% of the Muslims worldwide and that the whole idea about the alliance of minorities is void and useless. This does not mean that we abandon our friendship toward the Shiites. They, first of all, refuse any confrontation with the Sunnites. And to all of them together it has been said: “You were the best nation brought forth to mankind, bidding the right and forbidding the wrong”. We are delighted about the Shiite’s renaissance, and we also like their poets, whether ancient or modern. In theology, we like their open-mindedness and one of their great personages, Imam Musa Al Sadr, has appeared who truly loved us. Thus we responded to their love in our truthfulness. However, we need to realize that we have lived sincerely and with dignity among the Sunnites in the cities, and they do appreciate this matter. I think that we showed courtesy and love to them, which resulted in relating individuals and families together to the present day. We are not factional in our companionship with Muslims, and they are one nation. Our heart is open to all of them, since there is nothing other than love in our hearts, as long as we are devoted to Christ.

Nevertheless, we are, Christians and Muslims, in need of repentance and a continuous purification to embrace the other. And our national unity is an embracement in order not to be affected by dissimulation.

This is a homeland of bestowal founded on hope and constant purification. Muslims have the “wound of Issa [Jesus]”, which is the wound of love, as ̓Ibn ʻArabi called it, and they do not want to recover from it since to it belongs the principality. And we are with them in this love. This is how a homeland might be built.

Translated by Sylvie Avakian-Maamarbashi

Original Text: “الحب الواحد” –An Nahar- 01-10-2011