Wa Habibi – A Lament

ABOUT MY BLOG 18th September 2016

Wa Habibi  – A Lament for the Earliest Christian churches, those of the Near East

Wa habibi is the title for my book describing a personal encounter with the Early Church in the Near East. It is Arabic and translates as O my Love/My beloved. It is the opening phrase of a Maronite Christian hymn sung on Good Friday which depicts Mary, Mother of the Lord singing this lament at the foot of the Cross.

“O My Love, O My Love
What has befallen you?
Who saw you and grieved for you,
You who are righteous?
My Love, what is the sin of our times and our children?
These wounds have no cure.” (an approximate translation given to me by Canon Hosam Naoum an Arab Palestinian priest now Dean at St George’s Jerusalem).

A version of this hymn can be heard on this you tube recording below:

 

This version is sung by Fairouz  the famous Lebanese Christian singer on Good Friday. Her music is admired and loved by people of all faiths in the Middle East.

While it depicts Mary’s lament, it also felt to me when I first heard it, like a lament not just for the body of Christ on the Cross but for those parts of the Body of Christ today, the ancient Christian Churches of the Middle East, these church congregations founded according to tradition by the apostles and their own disciples as yet again tumultuous events outside their control result in not only persecution but ignorance and abandonment by those who should be their friends. However, as the catastrophic, destructive and brutal events in these ancient and beautiful countries of Syria and the Middle East unfold it felt also like a lament for the whole tragic region, its past history and its people today. In 2003 Christians numbered 1.5 million in Iraq, just over six percent of the population. Today they total less than 300000 and the figure is shrinking by 60000 to 100000 every year since 2011. At that rate in four years’ time Christianity will in effect be extinct in Iraq and the statistical trend is similar in other neighbouring countries.

During the course of my  visits to the Near East on pilgrimages, to work and to learn more about the early church, sadly Wa Habibi became for me too an appropriate title for my book describing my encounter with some of the remnants of the early Church today. To travel in the Near East is to be filled at least in part with a sense of melancholy and helpless sadness, for many peoples and reasons, but not least, for sympathetic observers, for the past history and current perils and dangers of those the earliest churches.

Although the book includes research and encounters from eight journeys to the Near East it is structured round the device of a specific Sabbatical Pilgrimage in 2009. I followed the possible journeys of Saints Bartholomew and Jude from Capernaum, to Jerusalem across the Jordan through the Decapolis via Madaba, Um Rasas, Jerash, Pella and Rihab into Syria at Deraa, Damascus, along the Fertile Crescent, via Aleppo, Cyrrhus and Kurdish northern Syria, along the Euphrates via Rasafa, Raqqa, into the former Mesopotamia at Deir er Zour and Dura Europus (earliest Christian Church cAD230) including also Palmyra, then driving back through Lebanon then onto Armenia, staying in the convent at Holy Etchmiadzin as a guest of the Catholicos then travelling the length of Armenia to most easterly monastery at Tatev near the Iranian border (this is associated with St Jude). I have since that pilgrimage returned on a further three journeys for more research into these ancient sites, the last occasion being this year where I had a wonderful 5 weeks working as a locum priest at St Georges’ Cathedral Jerusalem.

As well as being a journal of my encounters with and research of facets of the early church and recording visits to ancient Christian sites and their surviving archaeology in parts of the Middle East, the book is also an attempt to make more widely known the present plight of the Christians in the Middle East, descendants of the earliest apostolic churches trying to survive against terrible odds today and abandoned as they have been by those who should be their friends and allies in the West.

The photograph at the top is of me at the ancient city of Dura Europus by the River Euphrates on the ancient Syrian/Mesopotamian border looking east and south along the river. The remains of the world’s oldest known church building  were discovered there in the 1920s.

Biographical Details

My name is William SD Burke. Having been a soldier for the first twenty odd years of my life, I was then ordained in my early forties as a priest after training at Ripon College Cuddesdon Oxford. I have served all my time since then as a parish priest, although I am also a Canon emeritus of Peterborough Cathedral. I have been since childhood a passionate amateur archaeologist. While I travelled in the army as part of my work, since being ordained much of my travel has been to the Near East to learn more about the origins of the early church, to visit ancient archaeological sites and to encounter the church in the Middle East today.