The letter written two years
before his death by the Tibhirine abbey’s prior, killed along with six other
monks in 1996 in Algeria
Algiers, 1
December 1993/Tibhirine, 1 January 1994
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.
To accept that the
sole Master of every life cannot be made extraneous to this brutal conflict. To
pray for me: how could I be found worthy of this offering? To know how to
associate this death with so many other equally violent ones that are left in
the indifference of anonymity. My life does not have a higher price than any
other life.
It is worth no less
and no more than any other life. Whatever the case, it does not have the
innocence of childhood. I have lived enough to consider myself an accomplice of
the evil that seems, alas, to prevail in the world, and also of that evil may
strike me out of nowhere.
I would like, if
the moment comes, to have that flash of lucidity that allows
to solicit the forgiveness of God and the forgiveness of my brethren in
humanity, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart those who
have wounded me. I cannot hope for a death of that kind. It seems to me
important to declare this. Indeed. I do not see how I could be happy at the
fact that a people that I love were indistinctly accused of my murder. For what
they will perhaps call the ‘grace of martyrdom’, to owe that grace to some
Algerian, above all if he says that he acts out of faith to what he believes to
be Islam, would be too high a price to pay.
I well know the
contempt with which the Algerians taken as a whole have come to be dismissed. I
also know the caricature of Islam that a certain kind of Islamism encourages.
It is too easy to
put one’s conscience at rest by identifying this religion with the forms of
fundamentalism of its extremists. Because Algeria and Islam are another
thing, they are a body and a soul. I have proclaimed enough, I believe, in
front of everyone, what I have received from Islam, finding in it so often the
central recurrent theme of the Gospel that was learnt when I was on the lap of
my mother (the whole of my first Church), specifically in Algeria, and, already
then, with all my respect for Muslim believers.
Evidently enough,
my death will seem to vindicate those who have seen me in precipitate fashion
as being a naif or an idealist: ‘tell us now what you think!’
But these people must know that my most piercing curiosity will be finally
resolved.
Thus, God willing,
I will be able to immerge my gaze in that of the Father in order to contemplate
with Him His children of Islam as He sees them, totally illuminated by the
glory of Christ, the fruits of his Passion, invested with the gift of the
Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to establish communion, to re-establish
likeness, playing with differences.
This lost life,
totally mine, totally theirs: I give thanks to God who seems to have wanted it
entirely for that joy, despite everything and against everything.
In these thanks in
which everything is said, by now, about my life, including also you, friends of
yesterday and today, and you, friends of this earth, beside my mother and my
father, my sisters and my brothers, a centuple given according to the promise!
And you too, friend of the last moment, who did not know what you were doing.
Yes, for you as
well, I want to foresee these thanks and this adieu. And that it may be given
to us, blessed thieves, to meet again in Heaven, if God, our shared Father, so
wishes, Amen! Insciallah.
Christian de
Chergé, Prior of
Notre-Dame de l’Atlas
[From
L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO, June 1st 1996]
