Seeking peace in a time of violence

In the doubts and struggles of the seven Benedictine monks murdered during the Algerian Civil War, a Dominican Cardinal finds a way of living truthfully and gracefully with some of the most difficult questions of our time.

Today, global powers openly embrace violence as a means of imposing their will. In a prayer service in the Pentagon in March, the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. There are things that God hates, and it’s right for us to share that hatred.” Christians, he said, are defined “not just by love” but by “biblically informed hatred”. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote to his diocese in May: “War has become the object of an idolatrous cult: we no longer sit down at table to avoid conflict, but rather consider war a possible, or even inevitable, outcome.”

The story of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine kidnapped and later murdered in 1996 invites us to be free from the idolatry of war. On Christmas Eve 1993, “the brothers from the mountain”, as the monks called the terrorists, came to visit the monastery. Sayah Attiya, their leader, demanded to see “the pope of the place”. Christian de Chergé, the prior, refused to let him bring weapons into the monastery. “We are preparing to celebrate Christmas,” he told them. “For us it is the birth of the Prince of Peace, and you are coming to us like this, with arms!”

The monks came to see that their monastery should be a “school of peace”. This had to begin with the elimination of violence in their own hearts. Christophe Lebreton, the youngest of the monks, wrote in his journal: “Ever since his meeting with Sayah Attiya, Christian prays, ‘Disarm them!’ And little by little this exigency has penetrated us as well: ‘Disarm me … disarm us.’”
Christophe found religious life difficult. He was the cantor and became impatient with his brethren and the liturgy. He admitted that he was “fed up with the Office” and longed for “pure prayer, stripped of all liturgical vestments (antiphons, responses, hymns, etc.)”. He has my sympathy! Br Luc, the oldest of the monks and the physician to the local ­village, prayed: “Lord, give us the grace to die without hatred in our heart.”

They were threatened by death but Christian insisted that their lives could not be violently taken from them, because they had already been given away. He wrote in his final testament: “If one day (and it could even be today) I should become a victim of the terrorism that seems now to want to involve all the foreigners that live in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure.”

The desire to be purified of violence made the monks of Tibhirine distrustful of the concept of “martyrdom”. Christian said: “Let’s leave it, it does not concern us, it is dangerous.” He especially disliked the idea of martyrdom for the faith, which implied, he believed, a clash of ideas. He preferred to talk of “a martyrdom of love”, inspired by his Muslim friend who had been killed as a collaborator after he had interceded to save his life during Christian’s time serving as a soldier in the Algerian War of independence.
Martyrdom for one’s faith is more than the championing of ideas. Our doctrines are expressive of the mystery of divine love or they are nothing. Martyrdom reaches out beyond differences of belief, while not denying them. The peace that the monks embodied was nourished by seeing, hearing and knowing their Muslim neighbours intimately. Br Luc tended their bodies with a healing touch. For Christian and Christophe, their faces revealed the face of God. Christian wrote that conversion was “founded on the faith that one day the face of God will be all in all, and that it is impera­tive for us from this very moment to seek out this all, this face of God in every person”. For Christophe, God was all face, and when the community gathered in chapter, “we were all gaze as we listened to one another listening to you”.

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, the protagonist says: “Any human face has a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it. The courage and loneliness of it.” Can you really hurt someone if you see with clarity the face that is theirs alone? When I was in Ukraine earlier this year, I saw a video of a Russian soldier being pursued by a drone until he realised he could not escape. Then he shot himself. I shall not forget his face.

The lives of the monks were filled with questions: Should they stay or should they go? Should they give medicine to the “brothers from the mountain” which they needed for the villagers? At what point should they take a decision about the future of the community? Shared questions, as C.S. Lewis told us, are at the basis of friendship and community. In this time of violence, our vocation might be to live with difficult questions, to abide in their uncomfortable space, learning how to live the beginnings of answers, with the grace of God.

Three pillars of the Benedictine life helped the monks to do so – but we can all live each of them in our own way as a door to the Lord’s peace, which the world cannot give. The first is stability. In Benedictine stability, writes Rowan Williams, “we learn to sit still with whatever company arrives, in the confidence that God in Christ sits still with us … The community that freely promises to live together before God is one in which both truthfulness and respect are enshrined. I promise that I will not hide from you – and that I will also at times help you not to hide from me or from yourself.”

We are all invited, in our communities and families, to step into the light and dare to be known. Masks cannot endure with those who are close to us. In God’s first conversation in the Bible, God summons Adam out of the bushes into the light of God’s face and then clothes him and Eve, to take away their shame, just as the father of the prodigal son will clothe him with the best robes. Enduring in such mutual openness is not easy. Christophe only put his roots down at Tibhirine after a second attempt. When Christian was a novice, he was touched to see another monk – clearly Luc – being bowled over by the beauty of a sunset. “At the end, he turned around and said simply: ‘We’ll wait until tomorrow evening before we piss off! [foutre le camp].’ In a flash, I understood what stability was, and many other things about monastic life.”

One of the monks says to their Muslim neighbours: “We are like birds on a branch, birds who don’t know if they will fly away or stay on the branch.” A villager replies: “We are the birds; you are the branch. If you leave, we lose our footing.” That is a blessed stability. This stability is dynamic. We are rooted in the One who summons us to walk with him. Paul saw Christ as the rock who accompanied the Israelites in their exodus (1 Corinthians 10:4). Christophe captured this best: “Constancy, permanence, stability … and then: mobility, the road. Both ‘Abide!’ and ‘Let’s go forward!’” But it is hard to step into the light in a society saturated with accusation and denunciation, which encourages a culture of concealment. How can we dare to reveal our fragility and fallenness?

The second aspect of the monks’ lives which grounded their peace was prayer. Christian told his monks: “Tell me how you pray and I will tell you what you believe.” They wished to be present in this Muslim land priants parmi d’autre priants (“Praying among others who pray”). If Muslims and Christians can see each other as fellow ­worshippers, barriers will fall. Christian remarked: “It is difficult not to welcome the call to prayer, wherever it comes from, as a reminder of the communion that prevails in the heart of the One towards whom we turn with the same abandonment.” The cry from the minaret and the summons of the bell sound together.

The monks’ times of prayer were close to those of their Muslim neighbours. They heard the “shared call for prostration”. Christian believed that worship carried them beyond differences of doctrine. He quotes a Sufi friend: “We do not want to engage with you in a discussion of dogma. We feel called to unity. In dogma or theology, there are many barriers created by men. Here we wish to leave to God the possibility of creating something new between us. But this can only be done in prayer.”

There is not necessarily an opposition between dogma and prayer, any more than between dogma and love. Theological explor­ation is rooted in prayer and opens the door into the mystery of the transcendent love. However, the summons to be priants parmi d’autre priants calls us to communion in the One who is beyond all words. Peter Brown, the great Patristics scholar, was brought back to the practice of his faith by hearing the call to prayer and the singing of the Qu’ran on a visit to Iran. He glimpsed what had been missing from his life: worship.
Cardinal Pizzaballa wrote movingly of Jerusalem as a city which reverberates with the prayers of different faiths: “The prayers of the different religious communities ultimately set the rhythm of the entire city: they are its breath and light … Ignoring this ‘vertical’ dimension of our land, the religious and ­spiritual sensitivity of the communities that belong to it – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – is the deepest reason for the failure of the coexistence agreements that have taken place in recent decades. Future ones will also be doomed to failure if the specific, prophetic character of Jerusalem is not considered. It must be, first and foremost, a house of prayer for all peoples (cf. Isaiah 56:7)”

The final aspect of the Benedictine monastic life we can all live as a way to find peace is ­labora, work. Christophe remarks that Br Luc is “a doctor who prays. May each of us be like that in what he is given to do: in the workshop, in the kitchen, in the garden: ­workers who pray.” Christian recalls the Rule of St Benedict: “We will truly be monks when we live by the work of his hands.”
His hands rather than just ours. Work is a participation in the work of God, the Opus Dei, also the name of the common prayer. Christian writes: “The Word [le Verbe], who is creator and re-creator, has hands when he becomes incarnate … perhaps he incarnates the hands of his Father. One could say that Jesus worked manually for a long time, like his earthly father Joseph in Nazareth. Then he moved to ‘the business’ of his Father in Heaven, and his work is changed, but it remains, it is intended to be manual, because this is how God works. And even more it will still truly be a manual ‘work’ to take the bread ‘in one’s hands … then the cup …’ and finally ‘to stretch out his hands in the hour of his Passion’, not that they may taste rest but that they may abandon themselves to their work of eternity.”

Christian foresaw the challenge of our time: “The vocation of human hands is to remain industrious even in the age of the robot.” Pope Leo argues in Magnifica Humanitas that the development of artificial intelligence may render millions of people without the work that is part of their human dignity. He says: “Work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path towards maturity, development and personal fulfilment.”
So the lives of these monks teach us how we can become “a school of peace”. We learn this at home, in our families, parishes, religious communities and places of work. Otherwise our words will be empty. Stability invites us to abide in the light and to dare to be seen. We trust our brothers and sisters to forgive our sins and cover our shame. How can we discern the difference between a merciful ­covering and forgiving of sin and irresponsible cover-up of sexual abuse? How are we to become priants parmi les autres priants? What might that look like in the multicultural countries of Europe? And what must we do to show that we cherish the dignity of work? We find the seeds of some answers to all of these questions in the way of life of that small, monastic community in the Atlas Mountains.

Adapted from a lecture by Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe OP on 1 July at a conference in Blackfriars, Oxford to mark the 30th anniversary of the martyrdom of the monks of Tibhirine.