“Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in libano”, I was exalted like a Cedar in Lebanon, Holy Wisdom says. It is written above the chapel in Harissa. And it’s true: Lebanon was a great place of learning.  In 17th century Rome they used to say, “érudit comme un Maronite” … as erudite as a Maronite. Your education, culture, and profound spiritual outlook mean that you keep your gaze lofty, looking up to the hills, and to the heavens. A great man keeps his gaze high. Like an Eagle… to see many things, in their correct proportions.

St John Paul II was sad about the narrow view that comes with “the fragmentation of knowledge.” He said that to combat this would be the noble task of the next few generations …

Did you know that Europe’s educational tradition came originally from the Middle East?

As the final days of the Roman empire approached, and even as they faced persecution,  the desert monks of the middle east, saved the accumulated wisdom of the ancient world for future generations. Their culture then spread throughout Europe, with Christianity and monasticism. It was nearly destroyed in the 4th to 7th centuries as monasteries and their libraries were destroyed in the barbarian invasions, only to be revived in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries, in the age of Charlemagne,  as Irish monks brought education back to Europe, along with the Greek, Latin and Syriac manuscripts which they had rescued.

Kahlil Gibran mourned, already in 1916,  the silent death of a people that stretched out its hands to the East and to the West.  And yet … you are still here and very much alive.

A century later, the whole world is sick. You may have no petrol or even some days no bread … but your faith is stronger than ours…  no one has taken that from you.  In France, in England and in the USA, Christian civilisation is in the same difficult place as it was back in the 5th century.

If a child looks out from the shore, he is sad when the sea has gone. Will it ever come back? And yet it is precisely at that moment when the sea is at its lowest ebb, that at last it turns.