One of the highlights of our trip has to be the road trip we took with Stacey and Antoun to the holy valley of Qadisha, the spiritual and ancestral home of the Maronites.
I’ve been here before, but never experienced it in this way: once, because I was absolutely terrified in the back of a vehicle that was much too large for the narrow valley roads (post-terror tabbouli was definitely delicious at the Nahr Restaurant though), and another time because I was still in the thick of an atheist rejection of my roots, so I didn’t soak it in that deeply.
I had also never hiked far enough to see any of the holy sites; so, I have Christine to thank for making this a priority for our trip, as we set off as would-be pilgrims to Marina’s cave.
This tiny church was built at the mouth of the cave where Marina spent her final days, after being banished from the monastery where she’d been known as Marinos the monk. He’d been accused of fathering an illegitimate child, and rather than disclosing the biological impossibility of this claim, Marinos admitted to having sinned greatly, without explaining how or why. He cared for the child as his own, nursing it in this cave with the miraculous milk of his breast. When he died, his great sin was finally discovered to be her great faithfulness. Marina is how buried in this cave, behind the altar.
“The monastery’s church, half built into the rock, is decorated with frescos from the 18th – 19th centuries. The eastern apse has a Deisis (a representation of Christ between the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist) with St. Stephanus taking the place of St. John the Baptist. Another small apse shows St. Joseph holding the Child in one hand and a saw in the other. In a second apse is the figure of the prophet Daniel in the lions’ den. On the northern wall a fresco represents the coronation of the Virgin by the Trinity, with nine miter-capped Maronite Patriarchs looking on.” (Lebanon Untravelled)
The hike to Saint Marina’s shrine should take about an hour, but it took us more than that because we kept stopping to admire and document the views. I’m not much of a nature photographer myself, and I don’t think I had the right lens to do the place justice, but I was quite taken by the dappled vistas and the strange ways the light would crest the hills above and crown this particular tree or that particular shrub. I tried to capture these moments but mostly failed.
Stepping into Saint Marina’s church took my breath away. I had purposefully avoided looking up the place online, so I didn’t know what to expect once we got there and pushed the bright blue door open. What we found inside was absolutely stunning.
But it seems like very few people make this journey to visit Marina’s final resting place; Christine tells me that all the photos she’d seen looked like they were taken in the 90s and none of them conveyed a full sense of the space.
Marina’s gender-bending has greatly intrigued modern Christians; this is why she’s an Episcopal saint as well as a Maronite. Marina the Monk presents a fork in the road in what the church thinks it knows about itself and its gender politics; that’s one reason why Christine and I have taken to using the name Marinx in our writings about him, her, them.
The bending of gendered pronouns has rhetorical and theological effects, but I had not realized that this porosity was already embedded in Marina’s Lebanese story; in this space, you’ll see gendered nouns that refer to him or her as a female saint (qiddeesa/قديسة) and a male monastic (raheb/راهب) in a single breath. And that’s a bridge between my two faith traditions that I did not expect to find at the end of this pilgrimage.
This is the monastery that was once home to Marina the Monk.
It’s now run by two nuns for most of the year — three in the summer — who welcome groups of hikers and pilgrims that stay as guests of this sacred space that’s been here since the 14th Century.
The monastery also served as a “”fortress palace”” for successive heads of the Maronite Church (“”Patriarchs””) from the 15th to the 19th centuries, and now contains the preserved and very creepy body of Patriarch Youssef Tyan (I literally gasped). However, travel guidebooks note that his name is also listed among the other patriarchs entombed in the valley, but there’s no indication of who this person might otherwise be. So I’ll stick to local lore: no tomb for my friend Joe.
People say this valley is healing; I’ve even heard a theory about higher ozone in the air. It’s probably just the lack of pollution that opened up our airways, but I’d like to think there’s something extra — something meta, maybe even — behind the fresh air.
Roots are a tricky concept for a generation raised as cosmopolitans.
We were to become infinitely flexible, at home everywhere and nowhere, interoperable (and interchangeable) subjects of the information economy.
But now, we wear our mixed identities like ill-fitted costumes. Or like wallets made for plastic stuffed with wads of devalued paper. We ape a foreign vernacular we are told is our birthright. We stutter and code switch and say our paternoster, while the tape loops backwards and backwards.