When I first see the little boy – he looks about eleven – he catches my attention immediately. There is a hint of sadness in his big dark eyes. Though glimpsed only briefly, his image stays with me as I set about arranging jugs of water and apple juice on the table. Nearly forty people have responded to the invitation by our community to today’s commemoration of Charles de Foucauld.
My community, the Little Brothers of Jesus, traces its origins back to this adventurer turned desert monk. Four of us have shared a house in a prefab housing project on the outskirts of Leipzig for the past ten years, and every year we invite friends and members of our parish to our ceremony on the first Sunday of Advent. When we were searching for a theme for our 2014 event, my fellow brother, Gianluca, had a brilliant idea: “Charles de Foucauld spent six years living as a monk in Syria. I have a Syrian colleague who’s lived in Leipzig for years and is a Christian. He could tell us about the situation of Christians in Syria.” We liked the idea and Gabriel and his family were duly invited.
As our little gathering gets under way, we are astonished to see more new faces in the room. Gabriel has interpreted our invitation very freely and brought a number of refugees from Syria and Iraq along with him. Most of them are clearly recent arrivals to our district, where there are still empty apartments in the prefabs from the old communist days. And now, sitting here at our tables, are women and men with jet-black hair and dark eyes, speaking a language I don’t understand. The little boy belongs to this group too; he seems to have come with his father.
After the welcoming address, Gabriel steps up and begins to speak about his home city of Aleppo. We listen intently to his descriptions – delivered with characteristic Middle Eastern flourishes – of the ancient city with its famous citadel, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Leipzig is proud to be celebrating its thousandth anniversary in 2015. But what are a thousand years compared with the age-old cities of the Middle East, the cradle of civilization? Aleppo can look back over seven thousand years of history! And yet the war between cultures and nations is older still. Such a war is raging even now in Aleppo, Gabriel tells us. In the fight against opposition militias, helicopters sent by Syria’s Assad regime are dropping barrel bombs and ripping out whole blocks of houses. Nearly two thousand of these iron barrels packed with explosive and bits of metal have been dropped on Aleppo. And Islamic State terrorists are shelling the Christian district bisected by the front between the deadly enemies.