A few warm words on three points

Saturday, August 27^th 2011

1) First, we wish to thank all our friends for the great solidarity expressed towards our monastery and our country, in those difficult conditions that we can stand only with the help of your cordial prayers, the support of your commitment and the effectiveness of your gifts.

A lot of thanks to each of you, sisters, brothers, families and organizations! Your participation allows us to look towards the future with an increased serenity and, with us, our collaborators’ families and the families in need that we regularly help also feel comforted. We cannot yet restart construction work at the apartments intended for young families in Nebek, but there are still some friends who have not come back from their vacations!

2) Like every year, we celebrated this morning the monastery feast. The Mass was conducted by our Bishop George Kassab in the “Hayek Monastery”, which is now completed! In this occasion, the “weaving monk’s chapel” (Al Hayek) was consecrated. It is a cave, an ancient hermitage, and today the spiritual heart of the place.

The Bishop also granted us, in this holy day, the joy of signing our Community’s rule and declaring it canonically erected as a new monastic reality inside the local Church, with effect in the universal Church. It is truly a grace of the divine goodness! This makes us feel even more committed with and within the Church, and bodes for us a growth at the service of God’s Kingdom, in the Islamic-Christian world.

On this base, we renewed our monastic vows and thus we set off for a new phase in our Community’ life, with our novices and postulants; and this encourages us to offer a testimony of brotherhood in other regions of the Muslim world, which is so dear to the heart of Mary’ son.

3) We are approaching the end of the blessed month of Ramadan and the feast that closes it. Throughout this month, we committed ourselves in prayer and solidarity with the Islamic Ummah and some of us kept the fast, experiencing a great spiritual consolation. We take this opportunity to offer our Muslim friends in the world our most cordial greetings, asking the Lord, the Merciful, to bless them and their families in their commitment to the common good.

The meaning of Ramadan is related primarily to the Night of Destiny. It is the night of the divine initiative in the dialogue with human beings. We ask the Friend of humans - who once sent the Angel Gabriel to the earth for it to be sanctified in his divine revelation - to send today his angels, in order to protect his beloved sons with peace, reconciliation, justice and blessing.

Finally, we renew our urgent request to pray intensely for an end to the bloodshed of the sons of this mother, Syria. We ask that the wise, the pious and lovers take a stand for a peaceful jihad, in order to save the country from tragedy, in its two opposite forms: stagnation in a past that cannot go on anymore, or precipitation towards an unknown future, threatened by the fear of violence and division.
The name of God is Peace. To Him, we ask to enlighten our minds, so that we can choose a non-violent initiative tailored to the current crisis.
We hug you, in a hug of hope, a hope that is rooted in our hearts, because it is rooted in the intention of the Creator, in the gift of the Redeemer and the life of the Spirit.

 the Community of Deir Mar Musa