Each morning, my Google Photographs app depicts a reminiscence from the archive. As we speak, it was this seize from August 4, 2017: on the left, St. Georges Maronite Cathedral neighboring Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque, nestled within the coronary heart of downtown Beirut. We frequently say that the great thing about Lebanon is within the peaceable coexistence of so many religions, creeds, and sects, and that is one symbol-laden picture.
| St. Georges Maronite Cathedral (left) and Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque, downtown Beirut. |
Three years to the day after this picture was snapped, one of many largest non-nuclear explosions within the historical past of the world detonated within the port of Beirut. Annihilation would not start to explain the aftermath: tons of of lives had been obliterated; hundreds extra, injured; tons of of hundreds, displaced; and huge sections of the town and neighboring areas, utterly leveled. Beirut was gutted, and its soul solid into an abyss of tribulation and mourning that continues to scale deeper and deeper fathoms as the times transpire.
The hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate did not discriminate among the many lives claimed, be it nationality, ethnicity, socioeconomic standing, faith, or gender. I misplaced a buddy and fellow Lebanese expat Krystel El-Adm who, like me, had returned to her motherland, swimming in opposition to the torrential tide of the mind drain, with the hopes of contributing time and expertise to enhancing the infrastructure right here. In truth, that fateful day she was equipping a neighbor along with her laptop computer in order that he would not be deprived by the digital studying tendencies born out of the worldwide pandemic. Yet one more buddy Georgette Aoude was struck on the top and rushed to the hospital by an altruistic taxi driver who to this present day stays unknown. She was plunged right into a coma for greater than a month, however fortunately immediately she is amongst us, alive and wholesome.
We’ve by no means been in additional want of prayers, of benevolent intervention, of neighborhood and collective power. For a land that’s residence to a lot of acknowledged saints and documented miracles, we positive have our share of filthy, rotten criminals who’ve managed to elude the reckoning powers of justice. However I’ve religion that “we will overcome, someday.”
As we speak and each day, please bear in mind Lebanon and its hapless victims, alive and deceased. Pray. Pray. Pray.
