Canter Bridge

The sun has set on Amman this Friday afternoon. The air in the outdoor café where my turkish coffee and I wrestle with the crossed time zones that simply won’t go away has turned cool. The Muslim call to prayer from a nearby mosque is just audible over the pleasant hum of conversation.

Riad is the maître’d here. A young Syrian man with passable English that he wisely practices on an early customer, Riad clearly wants me to like Jordan, to like his restaurant, to enjoy the particular item he recommends to me from the menu, adding that ‘old Arab, they eat with their hand, but now this is not good.’

Until two years ago, I knew the name ‘Riad’ only as a place on a map.

Then we happened upon the fact that a well-regarded man my age—Syrian and Lebanese in the way that so many in Beirut and the Beka’a are—was open to a change. Now that Riad is my colleague, just two years my junior, a high-capacity addition to our team who may have raised his voice once in his life, though nobody can recall when that might have been. A biblical scholar like myself, a man whose career path had taken him into the minefield of organizational leadership like myself, Riad and I find another shared interest on almost every encounter.

Today in the airport, fresh from a day and a half of cerebal labours and astonishingly good food with Riad and a number of Lebanese colleagues in gorgeous, tortured Beirut, I discover that he—like me—is enthralled by the stars that gather in the dark skies of the places our professional paths take us. I ordered us both a copy of StarryNight software.

I plan to grow old—that is to say, I hope for the privilege of growing old—in the company of human beings like Riad. They elevate and enrich one beyond the anticipated confines of experience. Their conversation, their insight turn the world under one’s feet. It is impossible to cease learning in the company of such men and women.

Tonight—the sun is completely gone now and fireworks briefly light up Amman’s skyline—cats criss-cross the street as I make my way from my lodging towards a commercial zone where I might find dinner. Children play in the street and return a ‘hi’ to my ‘hello’. Women shawled in Muslim head coverings drive Toyotas through roundabouts with children tucked in car seats. Tall, very young men with short, automatic rifles guard the occasional crossroads and nod at me as I make eye contact. A security guard at the restaurant stops me, looks down in the direction of my laptop case, and asks me—yes, just asks—’Computer?’ before smiling and waving me in.

The truth be told, I love traveling alone on business in the Middle East. I find it a sensuous, deeply human place.

This morning, en route from to the Beirut airport and passing through a Muslim neighborhood, I asked my driver Michel for a word or two of comment. ‘Hezbollah neighborhood’, he replied. ‘Traffic now because Israelis bomb bridge up ahead last summer.’ He says this not with hatred but rather with that mixture of resignation and resentment that is common to the physiognamy of Beirutis who know how fine and how murderous a place their city can be.

Mullahs with beatific vision painted onto their face adorn large posters alongside suited men working hard to look stern. Both poses stalk the hearts and loyalties of voters. Both kinds of men seek to channel anger in self-promoting directions. One cannot know the heart, alas, to discover what kind of altruism might live in there, deeply covered by the tribal instinct that courses through the Lebanese body politic and keeps it from becoming one body.

At the airport, I discover I’ve lost my portfolio—important materials within—just as my flight is called. I have a word with the young lady at the desk of the airport lounge. A flurry of activity ensues. The bathroom-cleaning ladies race about flinging open stall doors as though I’d been in each of them shuffling important papers, announcements go out over multiple PA systems, strangers glance about them on leather couches in search of the offending article.

Finally, a man in a flowing white gown and head covering, an old man from the one of the Gulf states and looking like someone with influence, waves me over and says with deep earnestness, ‘It is downstairs in the electronics section of Duty Free!’. Of course, I had bought a wireless card there an hour before!

He brims with satisfaction upon being able to help. In my mind’s recall of this moment, his eyes twinkle. It might have been so.

I race down and find two relieved clerks happy to turn my porfolio over to me in the nick of time.

It would be naive, romantically vain, and inaccurate to think that there is no one in Amman or Beirut who hates a man like me for his appearance, for his nationality, for his faith. But it would be equally wrong-headed to think that most do.

Shared humanity is a most potent reality, twisted in due course and in tragic manner in the way that all we touch becomes deformed. Yet human decency is so often evoked by what one might dare to name the Paradise of Need.

Riad the Younger is so happy at this moment to discover that I am seeking an internet café in which to tie up some of the day’s urgencies before I retire. ‘Right here’, he jubilates. ‘It’s in the air right here’, gesturing into the atmosphere that covers the air-conditioned dining room inside and the restaurant’s terrace, as though one is only rarely in a lifetime offered such luxury of choice.

He doesn’t know my nationality, only my Western appearance and the relative novelty of this place for me. When asked, he forces his English bodily into a description of that part of Syria of which only the finest imagination could attain a glimpse. ‘There we have real nature’, he says of his home by the sea. ‘Not like here, where men place the nature.’

He struggles to remember the name of the sea of his youth and home in my language, then suddenly bursts forth with a volley of syllables approximating to ‘Med-i-ter-ra-ne-an’ without actually lining up in so orderly a fashion.

I tell him that I have a colleague who is also named Riad and who will take me to that very Syria next year before summer, we are momentarily locked in the shared euphoria of considering a place that only one of us actually knows.

Back in Beirut, a coterie of strong men with sinewy intellects and formidable skills talks to me over lunch about what it means to serve in Jesus’ kingdom in a land where Muslims and Christians have killed, ignored, and glanced away from each other for too long. In each line, I hear shared humanity rather than brute confrontation. I trace in their conversation a paradigmatic decision to listen, understand and—where love is still to large a word—at least to tend to their Muslim neighbors as good neighbors do.

In all of this, a created, undeniable, visceral shared humanity—with its awful medley of delights and agonies—is the raw subtext of Christian service.

One cannot know where it all goes. One hopes only for God’s blessing upon this. Upon them. There are so many Riads.