On the night of March 26, 1996, seven Trappist monks were abducted from their monastery in Tibhirine, Algeria, by the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). Nearly two months later, the Islamic fundamentalists announced: "We have cut the monks' throats."
How did these men live through those two months? What did they feel, what did they endure at the height of tragedy, after lives devoted to witnessing faith? We cannot know. We can only glimpse something of it through how they lived and what they testified to until that moment.
This book offers us their message through circular letters, homilies, lectures, diary entries. It is the testimony of a community that gradually awakened to the extreme danger of death their presence at Tibhirine entailed, yet reaffirmed day after day their vocation and fidelity. These monks show that love is possible, always—even unto death. Among the most moving passages is the spiritual testament of their prior, Frère Christian, which closes like this: "It is also for you, friend of the final hour, you who did not know what you were doing. Yes, for you too I wish this gratitude, and this God made manifest with you. And may it be given to us to meet again, blessed thieves, in paradise, if it please God our Father, of us both."
It is also for you, friend of the final hour, you who did not know what you were doing. Yes, for you too I wish this gratitude, and this God made manifest with you.
It is also for you, friend of the final hour, you who did not know what you were doing. Yes, for you too I wish this gratitude, and this God made manifest with you.
The monks had come to Algeria long before with a clear calling: to live in union with Christ following the Rule of Saint Benedict and the spirit and constitutions of the Cistercian Order; to live there, close to the desert, sharing the fate of a country where political and social tensions grew steadily fiercer.
This is the story of a community gathered in prayer and daily labor, yet open to welcome the many people they encountered each day. The world around them was almost entirely Muslim, and to pray and work with Algerians, to worship the same God, to seek common ground—these became at Tibhirine a constant aspiration, an inescapable habit. You must read these texts to grasp, with amazement, the spiritual depth and horizons these monks reached, so different from one another yet so united in their desire to live the love Jesus commanded. Despite the heights they attained, this book offers us something concrete that moves and sustains us. Frère Christian writes: "The greater our hope, the more we instinctively understand that it can be fulfilled only by committing ourselves resolutely to a long patience—with ourselves, with others, with God. It must be maintained day by day, to live. Each small gesture speaks for it. A glass of water offered or received, a piece of bread shared, a handshake, speak more clearly than any theology text about what is possible together. We are all marked by a call to something beyond ourselves, but the first logic of that beyond is that we can do better among ourselves, today, together."
This book offers so many points for reflection that we cannot explore them all. We urge our readers warmly to read it.
- Natalia Livi, 1999