by Paula Primm
We hear the story of Bir’am, Abuna’s home village, destroyed in 1953
Our third full day in the Holy Land was a day of contrasts. Our morning was spent in Bir’am, the childhood village of Father Chacour. The village, now in ruins and overgrown with weeds, was a town of over 1,000 Palestinian Christians, with a Maronite Church, a health clinic, three schools, and many traditional stone houses. We all knew the story from reading Father Chacour’s memoir Blood Brothers. The villagers were forced to leave their homes by the Israeli army in 1948, and they and their descendants have been fighting within the courts of Israel to regain their land ever since. Despite a successful court ruling in 1952 authorizing the return of the people to their lands, the army blocked the return authorized by the court, ultimately bombing the village in 1953.
The ruins of the village are entirely located inside a national park, ironically dedicated to the adjacent ruins of an ancient building that was probably first a Roman temple, then a synagogue. Our guide, from a Bir’am family, says it was a Christian Church after that. The descriptive materials make no mention of the final use of the building, but instead describe the village as “a prosperous and a big Village during the first to the seventh centuries CE.” No mention is made at all of the Palestinian Christians who lived there until 1948 and what happened to them. We were stunned by this omission.
On the signage in the park, there is no mention of the Christian village occupied until 1948 and destroyed in 1953.
The light in this darkness is found in the Maronite Church that was once the heart of the village. The people of the area were given permission to rebuild the church, and we were privileged to share a moment of worship there with our guide, Riyadh Gantous, and the parish priest. The priest, accompanied by his little son and nephew, both about Father Chacour’s age when his family left the village, unlocked the door for us, and we all filed in. The priest explained that in the Maronite tradition, services and prayers are in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. He asked the boys to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic and Aramaic. Their sweet, little-boy voices filled the little church and our hearts with hope. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. The heart of this church is still beating, giving hope to the people.
Our lovely picnic lunch under the trees gave us a chance to regroup, and we headed down to some of the holy sites on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Walking on the shore of the Sea of Galilee by the Church of the Primacy of Peter where we know Jesus and the disciples walked and talked was a truly profound moment for all of us. We ended our touring day with a refreshing boat ride on the Sea of Galilee. The water birds were coming to shore to roost in the late afternoon, and the air was cool and fresh and clean. We needed the reminder of the beauty of God’s world!