Religion / The road from Damascus

The Bread of Angels

A Journey to Love and Faith, by Stephanie Saldana Doubleday, 320 pages, $24.95

"The Bread of Angels" is an elegant and brave memoir about the spiritual journey that transformed Stephanie Saldana's life. The unlikely setting for the tale of this young Texan woman of Mexican and Irish descent - Damascus and the Syrian desert - infuses her story with delightful characters and anecdotes, and powerful historical and religious associations.

Saldana arrived in Damascus in 2004 as a 27-year-old graduate of Harvard Divinity School, on a one-year Fulbright grant to study the place of Jesus in Islam. She planned to improve her Arabic at the University of Damascus and to eventually study the Koran. That her academic questions sprang from a creative, chaotic and deeply personal source made the research all the more meaningful for her. A sensitive soul, she felt she had seen much suffering: Her family had such a strange and cruel history that she was raised to believe they were cursed. Her maternal grandmother was a manic depressive who swallowed a bottle of pills after her husband left her, preferring suicide over the shame of divorce. Later, that same grandfather was shot at his ranch and died a slow, gruesome death. Stephanie's own parents divorced, and an aunt was run over and killed by a school bus.

Coming to the chaotic Middle East was not only a way to try and escape that dark fate, but also the heartbreak she had suffered at the hands of a man back in Cambridge she had loved, who claimed never to have loved her back. Additionally, years of travel, which included a brief stint as a journalist in Beirut, had brought Saldana into close contact with globalization's malcontents and had left her uneasy with the poverty and powerlessness of the developing world. In other words, she was young, idealistic, deeply hurt, a little restless and with the soul of a poet. And what better place to run away from loneliness and despair, to heal one's family, and to put an end to human suffering more generally than in a monastery in the middle of the Syrian desert?

	Damascus, Syria.
	Photo by: AP

It's at Mar Musa, a sixth-century Syriac Catholic monastery recently restored by a partnership between Syria and the European Union, that Saldana's memoir of self-exploration and spiritual transformation truly begins. During the fall semester at the University of Damascus, Saldana was merely a hapless American trying to keep up in Arabic class with her peers, whom she portrays in exquisite, good-humored detail - from the fiery Turkish Muslim feminists, to the off-putting, socially awkward "Jihad Johnnys" from America, who have grown beards and never miss an opportunity to ridicule the evils of U.S. imperialism. But by the beginning of her winter break, when she arrived for a month at Mar Musa, she was ready to pierce through to the depths of her spiritual malaise.

A Catholic by birth and a religious seeker by choice, Saldana wanted to participate in the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits. A collection of prayers and meditations, the exercises are divided thematically into four categories - the Fallen World, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection - each of which also serves as the title of one of the four sections of Saldana's book. Through the exercises, participants are meant to relive the life of Jesus through a month of silence and prayer. The exercises can form an initiation rite into the priesthood, but they can also be employed by the laity, and can provide the time and space to search for God, deepen one's spiritual practice, and make important, life-altering decisions.

For Saldana, it's an opportunity to decide whether to become a nun and spend her life at Mar Musa praying for healing and peace, or to return to the worldly life, where she will get married and have children. Initially, Saldana decides on the former. Then, Frederic, a cute novice French monk recently returned from Greece, appears on the scene. Despite her feelings for him, Saldana consoles herself by thinking that, as nun and monk, the two of them will live and work side-by-side at Mar Musa for the rest of their lives.

Eventually, though, Saldana changes her mind about joining the monastery, but the experience there serves as a turning point that transforms her and enables her to engage both Syrian society and her research on a higher level in the spring. She begins work on her Fulbright project in earnest and begins meeting regularly with a Muslim sheikha, a female sheikh, to study the role of Jesus and Mary in the Koran.

It is that narrative that serves as a natural continuation of Saldana's spiritual journey, and helps her heal. In Islamic prophecy, the pregnant Mary wanders in the desert, frightened and lonely, until she collapses, wishing to die. And yet, with the help of an angel, Mary finds the strength to continue.

"That is the story I have lived," Saldana marvels. "That long, excruciating battle back to life." Similarly, the sheikha explains that in Islam, Jesus was never crucified and therefore not resurrected. Stephanie spends a long while trying to reconcile this new Muslim, human Jesus with the Christian, divine one she had known since childhood.

In the effort to further explore this newfound symbiosis between Christianity and Islam, Saldana begins teaching English to young girls at the sheikha's madrasa. And, most perplexingly, she and Frederic come to share a deep friendship, exploring together the alleyways of Damascus, the suras of the Koran, and the decisions that have shaped the substance of their respective lives. Will Frederic choose to remain in the novitiate at Mar Musa, or will he leave it all for Stephanie?

Hanging the laundry side by side

Saldana's recollections of the simple, lighthearted everyday interactions with the Syrian Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Iraqis and Palestinians who people the streets of the Old City of Damascus make for a nice counterweight to the moments of intense revelation at Mar Musa and at the madrasa.

Her description of her home in Babtuma, in the Old City's Christian quarter, for example, which precedes her journey to Mar Musa, is delightful. Babtuma is home to a staggering number of different churches and sects, and her house, a traditional bayt arabi, is a microcosm of that diversity. She writes that the residence is "less a house than a miniature village," explaining that, "The fact that my neighbors now hang their laundry side-by-side is a minor miracle ... [as] the house managed to contain, in a single building, many of the Christological controversies of early church history."

She continues: "On the rooftop apartment overlooking the city a family of Assyrian Christians lived, members of a Christian sect who survived largely in Syria and Iraq and who still spoke Syriac, a late dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Assyrians, as well as the other Syriac-speaking Christian minorities, were rather proud in those days because they could watch Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' without reading the subtitles. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of witnessing on a daily basis what Jesus might have sounded like if he were gossiping with his family about the neighbors."

Especially charming is Saldana's description of her warm relationship with her eccentric, elderly Armenian neighbor and landlord, a snapshot of a small piece of cosmopolitan Levantine society as it once was - nostalgic remnants from the French mandate that one also can intuit in some of the once-elegant theaters and fading bank facades in certain older neighborhoods of downtown Damascus.

"While I call my guardian [by his given name] 'Juanez' and occasionally 'Grandfather,' the rest of the neighborhood knows him by his Armenian title, 'The Baron.' The Baron carries himself by imagining that he still lives in another era, in his case the early disco era of the 1970s. Every afternoon he changes out of his regular outfit of tight green track shorts and a white undershirt and puts on neatly pressed polyester pants and Italian shirts to take his daily promenade through the neighborhood. If I compliment him on his clothes, he flashes a smile and says, 'Yes, they're beautiful, aren't they? You know, they were imported from Milano."

Saldana not only captures the Baron's anachronistic tastes and cultural affinities, but also the levity and humor that enable him and countless others like him to continue living as if untouched by the tragedies of the modern Middle East. In the case of the Baron, he is mourning the loss of cosmopolitan Beirut as it existed before the Lebanese Civil War. Yet, Stephanie captures this same delicate mix of dignity and nostalgia in her depiction of the Iraqi refugees she meets in Damascus who quietly lament the irrevocable loss of cosmopolitan Baghdad.

Saldana's reflections on her friendship with an American Jewish student make for an interesting sideshow. As she informs the reader with only slight exaggeration, "There are so many [American] Jewish foreigners studying in Damacus that they may as well open their own yeshiva." Most of them lie and say they are Christians, "[j]ust to make life easier, not because they have some sinister, secret agenda. Damascus was once home to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world [...] it makes sense that Jews would be interested in Damascus."

That said, in my own experience as a student of Arabic at the University of Damascus, I found that students tended to take precautionary measures. For example, rarely will students say the words "Israel" or "Israeli" aloud. Speaking with Syrian nationals about any visits to Israel, tuning in to radio stations from the other side of the border, or speaking Hebrew are all ill-advised. The Syrian state guarantees freedom of religion and Jews are free to worship, but that doesn't clear the haze of suspicion that could envelope any foreigner who seems too keen on the topic of the Jewish state.

Yom Kippur in Syria

Despite these taboos, or perhaps because of them, Saldana's friend confides in her, within earshot of passersby in the street, and potentially the secret police, that his home is in Israel. Although his story seems innocuous enough - he works on Israeli-Arab dialogue in Israel and has come to Syria to learn Arabic - it is still enough to put Saldana ill at ease, indeed, to terrify her. He then asks her, also in a disturbingly loud voice, if he can pray in her room on Yom Kippur, since it is more secluded from the curious eyes of the neighbors.

"I know what I should do. I have read stories of Jews in concentration camps risking everything in order to complete their prayers, even when their lives were in danger [...] I also know what part I am supposed to play. I have been rehearsing this moment since childhood, and it has been reinforced a hundred times since then, through 'The Diary of Anne Frank.'" She continues, "Michael is asking to pray in my room, asking me to help his name to be written in the Book of Life. But I still can't do it. Part of me hates him for even asking. [...]. I'm tired of wondering which shopkeeper is watching me for the secret police. I just want something resembling a carefree day. [...] So I refuse to give Michael an answer. Every day I slide out of class as quickly as possible into the street. I know that he must be hurt that his closest friend in Damascus no longer acknowledges his existence. It hurts me, too."

Despite the fact that Saldana's memoir transpires in Syria, it is not a travel guide, nor is it a work of anthropology; its observations about Syrian society are eloquent but seem to only scratch the surface, and rightfully so - they form the background of the journey, not its content. That said, this spiritual memoir is immensely readable and moving. Saldana takes herself seriously, but not so seriously that we don't enjoy following her through her year.

The ending would have been more satisfying if the author had explicated more clearly how she thought her decision would influence the rest of her life. But perhaps in the end she didn't have to choose between marriage and living in a holy place or working for world peace. Saldana currently lives in Jerusalem, where she teaches at the Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences, a partnership of Bard College and Al-Quds University.

Rachel E. Levine was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the University of Damascus in 2008-2009. She will begin a master's program in Arabic linguistics and literature at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall.