“Let me tell you, children, about a young boy who loved God more than anything else — his name was Dominic Savio… One day, Dominic said to his mentor Don Bosco: ‘Father, I wish to become a saint.’
Don Bosco asked: ‘And how will you do that, my son?’
Dominic smiled and replied: ‘By being cheerful, studying hard, and loving God with all my heart.’
[…]
Dominic Savio never grew old, but he grew holy — proving that greatness begins in small acts of goodness. For in the Lasallian spirit, holiness is not found in grand gestures, but in doing ordinary things with extraordinary love.”

Brother Habib, interrupting a random class — Collège Notre Dames des Frères Furn-el-Chebbak, East Beirut, 1991 (Paraphrasing).

Lebanon, East Beirut, 1982, a baby boy is born in the middle of a raging civil war. That year was a turning point in the Lebanese civil war which transformed, after the Israeli invasion of Beirut, the defeat of the PLO¹ and the assassination of president Bachir Gemayel, from a Palestinian-centered war into a confessional and ethnic cleansing war between Lebanese factions asserting their dominance in their respective territories. 

The little boy woke up to a world where the sound of machine guns and cannons was a daily normality. Raised in a catholic family, he went to a catholic school founded in the late 1800s by French missionaries: The Lassalian Brothers (Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes) brought to Lebanon by Elias Howayek, who would later become Patriarch of the Catholic church in the Middle East.

The Brothers, inspiring piety, kindness, and confidence, are often charismatic individuals and good story tellers. Their favorite hobby is to tell the stories of the Saints. The little boy was thrilled whenever an arithmetic class is randomly interrupted by one of the men in the black cassock and the split white collar, for a brief getaway into the lives of Dominic Savio and his educator Don Bosco, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes or Fatima, and many more gems from their rich repertoire of spiritual saintly tales…

Needless to say, the young boy wanted to become a saint. And apart from the young Dominic Savio who passed prematurely, the other saints were predominantly priests. And what better way to get closer to God than by becoming a priest?

The future of the young boy is clear in his head: become a priest, live a life of studying hard and loving his fellow humans as much as loving God, and the path to sainthood is paved. Little did he know that the world had other plans, lurking just below the horizon.

As far as studying hard, it was all relative. In many Lebanese families, parents cared less about their child’s grade than about their rank in the class. In a class of thirty or more, only one child could truly make their parents proud, while the rest were left feeling that their best was never enough. The young boy’s parents were not of that kind. And with his quiet and reserved nature, avoiding the spots was a must. It worked best for him to study hard enough to dodge being publicly shamed, but not hard enough to be publicly praised.

Until one day, in June 1992, the 10 years old boy was to face a surprise. During the end of the year ceremony in which the Brothers distributed the grades and the special honors, he heard his name in the part of the ceremony that he expected the least: a special honor for ranking first in arithmetic was awarded to him. The boy is filled with anxiety; he knows that he must walk to the pedestal in front of the whole class, shake the Brother’s hand and accept his words of praise. Should he show pride at the risk of sounding pretentious? Or should he show humility at the risk of diminishing the Brother’s commendation?

The moment passes and relief comes when the attention of the class shifts to the next special honor with another kid’s name being called. Back in his seat, alone with his prize, he wonders how this came to be. He never studied too hard for arithmetic; at least not more than he studied for the other subjects. It occurred to him at that moment, that he might have a natural instinct for the subject. When the ceremony ended, and the kids were free to move around, he was surprised to receive a few pats on his shoulder from fellow classmates. He had to admit to himself that it was pride he was feeling at that moment. Pride mixed with astonishment: a discovery that marks a new era of the boy’s life.

That incident repeated itself in the years to come. Arithmetic was later called mathematics, and science was split into Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The prizes at the end of the year multiplied, now physics was on the menu too. The boy becomes a reference among his classmates in matters of Sciences. Because he’s less intimidating than the teachers, they preferred to come to him for their delicate questions. The teachers were also noticing him, and showing him less authority, more friendship and more trust.

A new passion for Science was thus born, and with time, it only grew stronger. But what about the Priesthood? And what about Sainthood? Perhaps the path to holiness did not have to pass through the Priesthood after all? He yearned for another way to express his love for God. Then it occurred to him: if God had granted him the gift of Science, perhaps Science was meant to help him find his way to the Divine?

At the age of 16, he embarks on a quest: deeply study the sciences and deeply study the scriptures until he finds the way to “reconcile” the two disciplines. Indeed, it had already occurred to him that few points of discrepancy arise when pondering on the two subjects independently. But those discrepancies must be superficial and only obvious for those who don’t dig deep enough. So deep enough he must dig.

Summer 1998, the school year is over, and the next year doesn’t start until three months later. What a better use of this time other than reading the scriptures. The challenge was to read the Bible, Old and New testaments, from cover to cover. 

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (1512), Sistine Chapel.

Genesis Chapter 1: the first disenchantment.

The Firmament. That dome in the sky that holds the Sun, the Moon and the stars and separates earthly waters from Heavenly waters from which rain falls. There was an account of cosmology and the cycle of water very different from the tales of modern Science books. 

Genesis Chapter 2: a second disillusion.

The story of Adam and Eve clashes not only with the accounts of Darwinian Evolution, but also with the accounts of Chapter 1. If in the first account God created men and women equally “in His image and likeness”; now it seems that Eve is created as an afterthought after God realized Adam is lonely and after the creation of plants and animals as a first attempt to satisfy Adam’s needs.

The deeper he dug, the more difficult it was to wrap his head around the material he was reading. Questions started to build: throughout years of catechism, he never heard the tales he was discovering being told in those words and in that order. Perhaps to reconcile Science and Religion, Scripture needed to be read not as a literal account of events, but as a collection of symbolic and poetic tales that ultimately form the moral story of humanity’s effort to live justly and harmoniously with one another.

But wouldn’t that make God himself a symbolic and poetic metaphor of some ideal that Man aspires to attain? The teenager puts this thought aside and decides to read the rest of the book, searching for ethics and morality instead of a literal truth. Little did he know what lay ahead!

Michelangelo, The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants (1511), Sistine Chapel.

If the story of Abraham being commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac can be dismissed on the account that ultimately God rejected the act, other accounts didn’t end that gracefully. The story of the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the slaughter of the Canaanites, the lament of Job, the plagues of Egypt, and the list goes on… Not to mention the laws permitting slavery and the treatment of women as property and prizes of war. God seems to be portrayed as a powerful and angry being with temperament often contradicting His supposedly loving nature.

Maybe the Old Testament is ultimately a tale of humanity misunderstanding God. The New Testament must then bring to the light the real ethics that God wants to bestow on mankind.

And indeed, the New Testament puts forward a major moral upgrade with a message of love, compassion, forgiveness, and humility. But the book is not devoid of passages of self contradictions and lower moral stands. Slavery was not deeply challenged, and in many parables, the devotion of slaves to their earthly masters is seen as a virtue akin the devotion of man to God². Women are given important roles and portrayed as source of wisdom in some passages, yet in other passages they have a lower role and are instructed not to speak in the temple or against their husbands will³.

It seemed to the young boy that if the New Testament brought an abundance of moral beauty, it still needed to be read with discernment, and its contradictions to be filtered through the conscience of the reader.

The civil war had been over for several years by then. But the trauma of those who lived through it as adults was still alive. 

Photo (cropped): © ICRC / Luc Chessex. Beirut, destroyed cemetery, July 1982. Ref: V-P-LB-N-00015-27A.

A woman from his neighborhood could not stand near windows, on rooftops, or on balconies. She would freeze in place at the smallest burst of a loud noise: her hands would start to shake as she drops whatever she’s holding. During the war, she had lost her fiancé, victim to a sniper from his own camp, mistakenly killing him as he was bringing lunch to his company. Needless to say, the war never ended for her. 

She had a confidant, as many did during that time; a priest she would go to whenever the burdens of life feel too heavy to bear alone. One day, she collapsed at work and was admitted to the hospital in an atmosphere of secrecy around what happened to her. The young boy would later find out that it was due to complications from a hidden pregnancy she had tried to end on her own. It was clear that if the fetus bore her husband’s genes, it would have been more than welcome in her devout christian family. 

Her suffering wasn’t a failure of her character, nor a scandal of one priest’s weakness, and certainly not unique. Her pain was common, not in the details of the events, as every story is different. But there was a repeating pattern emerging from trauma, chronic suffering, and religious and social pressure. Devout people practicing their religion faithfully. Faithfully in what concerns the signs, the gestures, the spoken words, the order in which words are spoken, the timing… the Divine choreography. Yet when it came to their actions and life choices — when fighting a war under the banner of religion — it seemed that everyone, the lukewarm, the devout, and the priest, all picked and chose from the moral table before them, whatever suited their world view, their history, their interests, and their circumstances.

The central question became: to what North the moral compass points? If it points to the scriptures — ambiguities set aside — then why do the compasses held by different people fail to align? Could it be that each compass turns inward, toward its holder, pointing in whatever direction life had steered them? Could it be that we invented the whole thing?

At that moment, it felt that the world had tilted, almost upside down, as if to straighten itself after being held for too long in an awkward bend. In a strange mixture of pain and relief, a deep sense of revelation, and the feeling that a new journey is about to begin, the passage from Genesis 1:26-27 resonated in the teenager’s head, but this time, the text read:

²⁶ Then Man said, “Let us make god in Our image, after Our likeness; and let him have dominion over Our fears and Our hopes, over the heavens of Our imagination, and over all things unseen upon the earth.

²⁷ So Man created god in His own image; in the image of Man He created him; of Love and Fear He created him.

1. PLO: The Palestinian Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, had its headquarters in Beirut prior to the Israeli invasion of 1982. ↩︎
2. Parable of the Wise and Faithful Servant (Matthew 24:45–51; Luke 12:42–48); Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30); Parable of the Master and Servant (Luke 17:7–10); then Romans 6:16–22; 1 Corinthians 7:22; Ephesians 6:5–8; Colossians 3:22–24; Titus 2:9–10; 1 Peter 2:18–21. ↩︎
3. Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 25:1–13); Parable of the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:1–8); then Corinthians 14:34–35; Ephesians 5:22–24; Colossians 3:18; 1 Timothy 2:11–15; 1 Peter 3:1–6. ↩︎

Artwork in this article are created by the author using AI assisted as well as classic editing tools.