The Last Testament of Christian de Chergé, O.C.S.O

Karl A. Plank, A.H.C.

J.W. Cannon Professor of Religion

Davidson College

Davidson, North Carolina

Last Words

If you could find the Depot,

the Collecting Point—

what would you deposit, forever?

Mike Martin

Last words testify. Whether uttered in a final breath or supplied through a text to be read post-mortem, such words bequeath a legacy of meaning, a witness to what a life’s experience has led one to deem important. The anticipation of death liberates honesty and infuses words with poignancy and urgency. The day of personal eschatology approaches: there is no time left to pose or linger in the clutter of trivia. Each word bears the freight of the moment’s finality and seeks to voice the essential.

We are no strangers to last words. We have heard them in the phone messages of hijacked passengers on 9/11 and read them in the letters of soldiers at war, letters to be opened if “I do not return.” We find them in the pleas of hostages who await violent executions. These examples remind us that last words often bring with them the pressure of urgent crisis. In receiving these words we struggle not only with their testimony, but with the violent context that brings death near. As hearers of last words, we must seek to understand not only the speaker, but the one whose presence harbingers death.

On May 26, 1996 a French mother opened a sealed letter of last words. The letter, written earlier by one of her sons, bore the instructions that it be read only in the case of his death. That death had come violently a few days before at the hands of a militant Mulim group: they had beheaded her son on May 21, 1996. He did not die alone, but with six of his confrères, all Trappist monks of Our Lady of Atlas monastery at Tibhirine in Algeria. Her son, Christian de Chergé, was the prior of this monastery. His testament poignantly expresses how he wished his life and thus, also, his death to be understood; and moreover, his last words provide a way of seeing his “friend of the final moment,” the one who is the agent of his death. In this writing Christian creates a legacy for peace inspired by his monastic spirituality, his sense of living a life that is “GIVEN,” and he challenges his readers to a remarkable vision of a living relation between Christians and Muslims.

The Testament

The testament of Christian de Chergé is brief, a single sheet written on both sides with a firm and sure script (Olivera 4). It reads as follows:

When an “A-DIEU” takes on a face.

If it should happen one day—and it could be today—

that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf

all the foreigners living in Algeria,

I would like my community, my Church, my family,

to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.

I ask them to accept that the Sole Master of all life

was not a stranger to this brutal departure.

I ask them to pray for me—

for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?

I ask them to be able to link this death with the many other deaths which

were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.

My life has no more value than any other.

Nor any less value.

In any case it has not the innocence of childhood.

I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil

which seems, alas, to prevail in the world,

even in that which would strike me blindly.

I should like, when the time comes, to have the moment of lucidity

which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God

and of my fellow human beings,

and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me

down.

I could not desire such a death.

It seems important to state this.

I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice

if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder.

To owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be,

would be too high a price to pay for what will, perhaps, be called, the “grace of martyrdom,”

especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.

I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on Algerians indiscriminately.

I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism encourages.

It is too easy to salve one’s conscience

By identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists.

For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: they are a body and a soul.

I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I have received from it,

finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel,

learnt at my mother’s knee, my very first Church,

already in Algeria itself, in the respect of believing Muslims.

My death, clearly, will appear to justify

those who hastily judged me naïve, or idealistic:

“Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!”

But these people must realize that my avid curiosity will then be satisfied.

This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—

immerse my gaze in that of the Father,

and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them,

all shining with the glory of Christ,

the fruit of His Passion, and filled with the Gift of the Spirit,

whose secret joy will always be to establish communion

and to refashion the likeness, playfully delighting in the differences.

For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,

I thank God who seems to have willed it entirely

for the sake of that joy in everything and in spite of everything.

In this THANK YOU, which sums up my whole life to this moment,

I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,

and you, my friends of this place,

along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,

the hundredfold granted as was promised!

And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing.

Yes, I also say this THANK YOU and this A-DIEU to you, in whom I see the face of God.

And may we find each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both. Amen. In sha ‘Allah.

Algiers, December 1, 1993 – Tibhirine, January 1, 1994.

The Context and Chronology

Christian’s letter bears the date of a month’s time: December 1, 1993 – January 1, 1994. The composition history of the letter is unclear (no earlier drafts exist). Christian may have written it in stages, adding to it as the month’s events demanded further address; or, he may have initially written it in full, only to rewrite or revise the entire text as the month unfolded. In either instance we see the clear impress of the month’s history, shaping Christian’s letter and giving it a remarkable sense of being on target.

In October 1993, the Groupe Islamique Armé (=GIA) had kidnapped three French consuls, eventually freeing them at month’s end with the message that all foreigners had one month to leave the country. That deadline was reached on December 1, the day Christian begins to write his testament. Assassinations began immediately, coming close to the monastery on December 14 with the beheadings of 12 Croats at Tamesguida, only a few kilometers from Tibhirine. The monks had known the Catholic Croats well. Then, at 7:15 p.m. on December 24, while the monks were preparing for Christmas Eve offices, six armed members of the GIA entered the monastery. They were led by Abou Younes Sayat-Attiya who ten days earlier had been responsible for the deaths of the Croats. Christian had a frank conversation with Sayat-Attiya, reminding him of the monks’commitment to peace and refusing any attempts by the GIA’s leader to draw them into collaboration (seemingly the goal of this particular visit). When told that the monks were preparing for Christmas, Sayat-Attiya said that he was sorry—that he hadn’t known—and gathered his companions. As they departed, he said clearly that they would return. The subsequent days of December, after Christmas, saw both ecclesial and governmental attempts to put into effect plans to protect the monks, the former offering new venues of refuge; the latter, military presence. On December 31, the community met and rejected all such proposals as violating the integrity of their calling and reaffirmed their commitment to remain at Tibhirine as the monks they were, vulnerable witnesses for peace and companions in solidarity with the local Muslim villagers. After this communal declaration, Christian finishes his letter.

A Reading of Christian’s Testament

Christian has structured his text tightly. He uses a frame device to unify the opening and the conclusion: both focus upon the imagery of A-DIEU and face and involve an eschatological perspective. Christian thinks about the present moment from the vantage point of an ultimate end. Then, in five succeeding sections, the text unfolds in stair-step fashion, the last statement of each section leading into the theme of the next.

1. The Eschatological Frame

The testament opens as it ends, with an A-DIEU and a face. Christian begins the text by contemplating the moment “When an A-DIEU takes on a face”; he finishes with an A-DIEU to his “friend of the final moment,” the one in whose countenance he sees the face of God. Christian has taken care to render A-DIEU with a hyphen, setting it off from its usual designation of good-bye and accenting its theological load. The A-DIEU conveys a blessing of parting that seeks a movement towards God. The parting movement toward God is “en-visaged”; “A-Dieu takes on a face.” The image of face has a surplus of meaning in this context: it implies minimally that the movement toward God in death has become imaginable, but even more it marks that movement as concrete and personal, a moment of vis-à-vis. As in the works of Levinas, a Jewish philosopher that greatly influenced Christian, the notion of the face brings into view the ethical urgency of an encounter. It notes that the face of another is an interruptive force that claims me to attend to a reality I can neither define (“totalize”) nor control. To en-visage death is to face the emergence of such a reality and to know it as personal, as something seen on our faces and on the face of the one who may bring death. Christian does not write hypothetically: the A-DIEU could happen some day, but that some day could be today, a day caught in the march of “terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria.” The personal end-time is now.

2. Petitions

The eschatological introduction yields to a section comprised of four petitions to Christian’s community, Church, and family. Here he shapes a vision of how he hopes others will see his death, and thus, also, his life. First, he asks that all remember that his life was GIVEN (capitalized in Christian’s text), that even before the final moment it was dedicated to God and to Algeria. No one could take his life from him as if he were a victim, because he had already given it, dedicated it as a monk. When the Abbot General of the Cistercian Order reminded Christian that the order needed monks and not martyrs, Christian replied: “there is no difference.” The monastic life prepares the monk for death and is itself a form of dying—a dying to the illusion that life is his to control or keep. The monk who has already surrendered the claim of ownership of his life finds in death, especially death that is for the other, no threat or victimization, only a continuity with the dedicated life upon which he has already embarked.

Along with the request for their prayers, Christian asks for others to recognize that he does not die estranged or isolated. He does not die alone, but in the company of “the Sole Master of all life” who was no “stranger to this brutal departure”; and he dies in solidarity with all others who had died violent deaths, but now are forgotten in indifference. As God, through a crucified Christ, identifies with those of brutal departure, so does Christian ask others to associate his death with other victims of violence, to create a link with them that resists the oblivion of their anonymity. For Christian, the fresh memory of the death of the Croats makes this solidarity concrete and personal.

3. Solidarity

The last petition, in its desire for solidarity, opens into the next section’s clarification of what such solidarity demands. Christian neither deprecates nor elevates the value of his life. “My life,” he writes, “has no more value than any other. Nor any less value.” Because of the value of his life, he understands the seriousness of his death but, at the same time, he cannot see his death as potentially more tragic than that of the most anonymous victim. His sense of solidarity—an affirmation of the common value of each life—takes a profound turn when he continues to note that the value of his life cannot be grounded in innocence (so as to separate his death from others). He confesses his complicity in “the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in that which would strike [him] blindly.” Solidarity here means the inseparability of one’s own identity from that of the other, and vice-versa. We are “accomplices” in the identity of the other, even that other who may become our killer. He is not who he is apart from our being who we are. Accordingly, Christian hopes for a “moment of lucidity” at the moment of death wherein, aware of his complicity, he can seek the forgiveness of God, his fellow human beings, and even and especially “the one who would strike [him] down.”

4. Martyrdom

The consideration of his being struck down, leads Christian to reflect on martyrdom, a category from which he wishes to distance his own death. He says, “I could not desire such a death.” This reflects, in part, his conviction that his life is of value, no less so than that of any other life. But more pointedly, he takes note of the effects that would be set in motion if others were to construe his death as martyrdom: that a people he loves would be “accused indiscriminately of [his] murder”—a price too high to be paid for martyrdom’s grace; that an already operative caricature of Islam would be further reinforced; that the notion of martyrdom and the identification of Islam with extremism would provide an escape for the Church and the West from the self-examination of their own complicity in the cycle of violence. Martyrdom changes two people: it marks one as sanctified; the other, as a murderer. For Christian, that itself is a violent act to be repented.

5. Islam

What then is the Islam that is the “soul” of Algeria? As the villagers embodied Islam, it was a gift that revealed to Christian not only the life of devotion, but the essence of sacrificial love that he saw at the center of the Gospel. The point is not abstract for Christian, but embedded in experience and memory. What did he learn on his “mother’s knee, [his] very first Church”? As a child, Christian lived in Algeria while his father, a ranking military officer, was stationed there. Struck by the Muslims at prayer, Christian asks his mother about them. She replies: they must always be respected; they worship the same God. These words made a lasting impression that ever suggested a kinship between Muslims and Christians that Christian could not and did not want to escape. For instance, when he became a monk and made his vow of stability at Tibhirine, he recognized the common-places between his monastic life and the villagers’ practice of Islam: a commitment to regular prayer, times of fasting and penance, the high premium placed on hospitality, and an ethos of submission to the will of God. The villagers saw the same in the monks. They were, in the villagers’ eyes, good Muslims.

Christian’s deepest encounter with the soul of Islam, however, came in 1959, during the time of his own military service. He, too, was stationed in Algeria with duties of social service to the local population. At this time a mutual friendship grew between Christian and Mohamed, a village policeman who worked for the French authorities (a position that put him at risk to violence by the National Liberation Army, as would, of course, his friendship with Christian—all this even though he was strongly for decolonization). One evening the two were walking, when Christian was accosted by a violent group. Mohamed intervened and rescued his friend from danger, only to be assassinated himself on the following day. In this act of “giving” his life, Mohamed dramatized for Christian the implications of his own Gospel: that no greater love exists than in giving one’s life for another. From that point on, Christian’s own calling would be a supreme devotion to the embodiment of that love, lived out particularly in relation to the Islam that had concretely dramatized it for him, and to Algeria where he would make his vow of monastic stability.

In Mohamed and in the life of the villagers at Tibhirine, he had seen the soul of Islam and recognized its Christ-likeness. In death’s eschatological moment, his wish, God willing, was that he would see the children of Islam, indeed, as God sees them: radiant with glory—from Christian’s perspective, a radiance with the glory of Christ whose shining transcends religious and ethnic distinction; and filled with God’s spirit that makes perceptible the kinship of religious others, while delighting in the differences. The differences do exist, but not in such a way as to estrange or obscure the fundamental communion of God’s children as such. This is the Spirit’s “secret joy.”

6. Joy and MERCI

The last word is not only A-DIEU but MERCI. Having spoken of the joy of the Spirit, Christian thanks God for the joy that is his “in everything and in spite of everything.” His joy is for that life revealed amidst the communion and the differences, a joy like the Spirit’s own; a joy in the giving of his life that is itself a gift received, acknowledged with gratitude. In this last section, he returns to the community of family and friends that he had addressed in the beginning—they who have been his “hundredfold blessing” (Mk 10:28-30 // Mt 19:29)—and says MERCI. But the final THANK-YOU he reserves for “the friend of [his] final moment.” It is an astonishing moment in the text: Christian expresses gratitude to the one who will bring about his death and then bestows on him the title of “friend.” He envisions the moment not as tragic, but something deserving of A-DIEU and MERCI. He names the agent not “murderer,” but “friend.” The framing inclusio is powerful: it returns us to the “face.”

Christian says MERCI to the “friend of [the] final moment” because in his face he sees, too, the face of God-–the face that forbids estrangement and now calls Christian to give up his life for the life of others. To envisage God in the face of the other, be it the face of Mohamed whose actions, like a Christ’s, rescued Christian in 1959, or the face of “the friend of the final moment,” is the gift Christian’s giving receives. It is the moment of grace in his life that grows from encounter and compels a deep hospitality to the Muslim other. To deny the face of the Muslim, in Christian’s world obscures a vision of God.

Christian’s final wish is playful and profound. With allusion to the Christian passion narratives, he desires that he and “the friend of [the] final moment” find each other as “happy, good thieves, in Paradise.” Christian’s desire pictures a final reconciliation without condescension or avoidance of human failure. In Christian’s eyes, the two of them come together as “thieves,” like those crucified with Christ, lacking in any innocence, yet forgiven. Christian acknowledges here his own complicity and real solidarity with the other: he, too, is a thief, caught in the responsibility for the violence that engulfs the other and brings about his death. Yet, the vision radiates hope, for forgiven thieves are here happy, finding each other in Paradise.

Christian closes his letter with the Islamic utterance: In sha ‘Allah. No sign of accommodation, the phrase voices Christian’s conviction that the Muslim and the Christian worship one God (the lesson learned at his mother’s knee) and that all is in that God’s hands. He expresses his final word in the language of the one from whom he has received the vision of God’s face, and Christ’s love. He says ”In sha ‘Allah”: “God-willing.” This phrase sounds the ground-tone of the testament and leaves its lasting echo.

The Legacy

We cannot summarize the testament of Christian de Chergé. Like a well-crafted poem, it defies secondary description. To know its meaning, we should turn and read the text over and again in its wholeness and particularity. Still, as testament, Dom Christian’s text offers a legacy that has recognizable and pointed features. As faithful readers, we must take note of them.

First, we cannot separate the meaning of our deaths from the meaning of our lives. A faithful death takes root in a faithful life. As in Christian’s case, the life that is already GIVEN, dedicated as in the monastic life, finds nothing to fear in death. Death approaches not as threat, but with the proffer of a continuity of love.

Second, we are accomplices in the history that binds us one to another. The other, even the other who brings death, cannot be who he or she is apart from our being who we are. Accordingly, we can assume for ourselves neither martyred innocence nor righteous victimization in the circumstances that befall us. Our need for forgiveness should trump any inclination toward vengeance.

Third, as we cannot see ourselves as innocent victims, neither can we assume the other to be our enemy. Even the other who brings death may be the “friend of the final moment.” The other, like Mohamed, may be the one whose sacrificial love presents to us the implications of our own gospel; or, like the “friend of the final moment,” the other may be the one whose hostility calls us to fulfill that gospel. More pointedly, we cannot abstract the other from his or her concrete humanity. We must always see in the other a particular face, at once human like our own, and yet revealing the face of God. When seen through God’s eyes, the other, no less than we do, bears the glory of the divine image. We must not make of the other a murderer.

Fourth, we live eschatologically: the end-time is now. In times of danger—as at all times—we live in anticipation of A-DIEU. Because the life which includes our death moves ‘toward God,’ it compels gratitude. In the giving of our lives, we receive the gift of communion and the glimpse of God. With A-DIEU, the last word must be MERCI.