IT WAS A SUMMER

For most of you, summer is long gone.  But here in Beirut the new school year is just beginning.  We've gotten our first rain of fall and I turned in the last assignment for my summer classes on Thursday night.

It was a summer.

The last blog I wrote was just a few days before summer intensives began.  That’s when I fell off the comfortable ledge of leisurely writing.  I can’t remember thinking deeply about any ambitions or goals for myself when we moved to Lebanon, but I did tell Larry some time late spring that I had decided—as I was speaking—that I would begin the M.A. in Islamic Studies in the summer.

I had no idea what I was saying.

But when you’re only permitted to work four hours a day.  When there’s no chauffeuring responsibilities because there’s no car and no kids.  When there’s not much to cook in a girls’ dorm room and certainly only a few dustballs to pick up occasionally.  When the days roll lazily from one gorgeous evening to the next. (The air quality may lack a lot for clean lungs, but sure makes striking sunsets.)  Well...

Sundown over Beirut, the docks, and the sea.  Photo by Renata

When I'm looking for something engaging, enriching--that’s when the prospect of some academic adrenalin looks like fun!

So I tackled what I never even considered a few months ago.  And I have learned so much.  

I feel enriched.  I'm inspired.  It’s an unusual experience to immerse yourself in something you never even thought about before.  A new and intriguing world.  It was an eight week cultural journey, a reaffirming spiritual experience, that I shared with 15 others from seven different  countries.  I was the only American, twice the age of most of the class and the only one who didn't already know when Muhammad was born.    

It was intense.   It was engaging.  

The experience wasn’t wasted on Larry either.   The other 30 students involved in summer school—most of them working on their B.A. in theology or M.A. in Islamic Studies—took comfort in the fact that the dean had a personal perspective of their stress!   While Larry was jumping close-range hurdles himself, preparing for classes he’d never taught before, I was catching my breath between book critiques, exams and research reports.   Only once did I throw my books across the room and declare I was going to quit the program.   

Our last Sabbath together before everyone returned to their countries, I made dinner for them and remembered.  Seven professors,  a couple thousand pages of reading and nearly 200 pages of writing later, I realized what a journey I'd been on with four South Sudanese pastors, a TV producer from Korea, an Egyptian office manager, an Iraqi translator, an Armenian Bible teacher and a Lebanese pastor.  We had weathered theology of mission, Islamic history and thought, comparative studies of Islam and Adventist Christianity, approaches to the Muslim mind.  Not only did I gain a tremendous respect for a whole different thought-world, but I realized I had learned as much from my classmates as I had from the professors or the books or the movies.  

Speaking of movies.  The professor charged with providing us with a comprehensive and non-biased history of Islam assigned us a nightly full-length movie.  Most of them were documentaries.  Nearly all of them were created in the wake of 9/11.  Ten or eleven years later...

...the scripts sound dated.

As I've critiqued the message of those early post-9/11 productions, I have been struck with how fast and how thoroughly our world has changed.  Islam has left a footprint of one shape when it is in minority, a contrasting footprint where it comprises a majority, and a thousand different prints wherever it settles.   Islam is not a cohesive whole, but the Islamic world and its claims to our attention are constant and forceful.  

There is so much to learn and so much to understand.  After only 18 hours of class credits, I can't claim to know a whole lot.  But I'm intrigued to wrestle with the tremendous paradoxes I've met and the challenge to my thought, the contrast to my belief system.   In even these early steps, I feel great patience towards those who believe differently than I do.  But I am strengthened by the balance and beauty of what I believe.  I  understand better why there is so much chaos in spiritual things, but my faith is clearer than ever.  I know why I came to live in Beirut.

A view of Beirut and north to Jounieh...washed by the evening sun...on a clear day. Photo by Renata.