L’Osservatore Chicago: Tangible metaphors for the beauty and mystery inherent of all life

(POSTED: 2/8/10) Between news of troop surges in Afghanistan and national fiscal difficulties, The New York Times recently printed a half-page article about a remote cliff-top monastery in Syria.
Their reporter, Robert Worth, described a "motley crew of religious seekers and backpackers from a dozen countries" climbing stone steps to what had been, until 1982, an abandoned Byzantine ruin. They had come for Christian-Muslim dialogue, to build, in Worth's words, "harmony around a religious fault line that has only grown more volatile since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
The visitors were eager to meet the Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, the Jesuit priest who had found the 6th century site and, almost single-handedly, created on it a new house of worship, lovingly restoring the deteriorating church and frescoes.
What struck me, looking at the pictures of the arched gate over the stone steps and the chapel with its ancient Arabic, Greek and Syriac inscriptions was my response to the story of this site.
Why do I get the same feeling looking at the cave-like chapel and the gate on the craggy hillside as I do driving into Milwaukee, suddenly aware of a flurry of steeples piercing the skyline with reminders of life's other dimension?
Or the way our Brooklyn daughter describes Easter at her parish where children in festive hair bows and bow ties come out from behind the altar where they have been sequestered for "catechism," carrying pastel balloons (or not carrying them in the case of those that have escaped into the lovely church dome) bringing up, as she says, "our hearts to God."
All and each, the chapel at Syria's Deir Mar Mousa, the Milwaukee churches, the Brooklyn sanctuary, are tangible metaphors for the beauty and mystery inherent of all life. Father Dall’Oglio, who doesn't claim to know the absolute, says that what is offered at the chapel in Syria is "a road, a path, that we are on together."
Margery Frisbie, a graduate of Mundelein College, has raised lots of kids and written lots of columns. She is the author of several local histories, two graphic histories published in Europe, and An Alley in Chicago, the Life and Legacy of Monsignor John Egan.
Contacts: margeryfrisbie@sbcglobal.net or info@chicagocatholicnews.com
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