These words were uttered ten years ago by Professor Iskandar Abou-Chaar, one of the many presenters at Father Paul’s festschrift celebration of his fortieth teaching jubilee. Mr. Abou-Chaar sent it to Father Paul this morning from Beirut, Lebanon, as an attachment to an email in which he wrote:
Dear Father Paul,
You are always in our thoughts, and, most particularly, on the Jubilee of the first lecture you gave at Balamand. I attach the word I delivered at the 40th year Festschrift Banquet in NJ on Oct 23, 2010. I would repeat the same today.
With much love,
Iskandar
Exactly fifty years ago today, Monday, October 26 1970 (yes, even this day of the week), Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi gave his first lecture at Balamand Seminary, marking the beginning of his incredible academic career.
Your Eminence, Reverend fathers, Colleagues and friends,
When I came to attend the first lecture to be given at the newly opened St. John of Damascus School of Theology in the fall of 1970, I had absolutely no idea about what to expect.
I had read a few weeks earlier in Lisan-ul-Hal newspaper an announcement about the opening of the institute. Through a series of unrelated circumstances, I decided to enroll in the opening class of that institute.
When I arrived to attend the first lecture, nothing had prepared me for what I saw. Tele Liban, the official Lebanese television were there with their cameras, officials in a representational capacity were there and entered the lecture room with chairs set for them on the side, the then director of the newly founded institute and Metropolitan of Latakia, his eminence Ignatius Hazim (now his beatitude patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch) led the official representatives into the classroom and sat at their head to the side. The handful of students cowered in the middle of the room, and a young man with a goatee beard, a layman, stood in front of the intent gaze of the cameras, the officials, and the handful of students, center stage, and delivered the first lecture to be given at the newly founded institute. I had been told his name before the lecture, a Nadim Tarazi. We started hearing and taking notes.
When a few weeks later this lecturer entered the classroom clean-shaven, I barely noticed, except that he explained to the surprised students that now that we had become accustomed to seeing him lecture, we no longer needed the goatee beard as accreditation. For myself, my sense of sight had receded into the background since the first encounter. The input to my ears had proven to be more unexpected than the original scene. As with all sensory perception, the greater the impact of one sense, the more the others recede into the background—are drowned out. What followed the initial visual scene, became a series of audio encounters, with the sound of "Nadim" somehow attached to them.
The audio encounters would keep recurring, and seemed to arrange themselves under three major titles:
--The word trilectic would impress itself as one title. The scriptural deity was trilectic, not dialectic. The texts about Him would always require a "third" outside instance before they could be understood. This deity could not function as an ego, or superego, or alter-ego, He could not be made into a convenient bedfellow. He remains outside of our grasp, requiring a stranger for the encounter to take place. He is the judge, the impartial judge of our actions, outside our camp.
--The second recurring title concerned the only-begotten of this deity. He remains the slain lamb, the crucified lamb. He never becomes the Hero who leaves disgrace behind. It is the crucified Jesus who will ever be the judging Lord. His victory is on, never away from, the demeaning cross. He also remains paradoxically outside our camp, by our choice as the book of Revelation tells us. Who of us, after all, wishes to make his encampment and pitch his tent in a broken circle, with an encumbering stranger and a demeaning cross? The stranger knocks, who will open?
The corollary to that was in fact the content of the first lecture we had heard on that first day. The teacher of the Word of God/Gospel and by consequence the student, must die, must have death work in him, so that by consequence the student and thence the hearer may have life work in them, while his (the teacher's and by consequence the student's) life issues from the crucified Lord.
--The third recurring title concerns scripture. It is in the study of the scriptures, by day, preferably by night, that we can encounter the word of the nameless deity, the deity of the stranger, and the deity of the faceless and crucified slain lamb. The scriptures never give way to ethereal, timeless ideas. They are not a prison for the words. They, the scriptures, their syntax and their fabric, are the Word of God which must be studied again and again and again until the pages become yellow with use.
With the sound of the words, there was always a Nadim sound associated, and trying to understand the meaning of the word I made an astonishing discovery. In Arabic it sounded like someone who would spend with you the night till the early morning watch, sharing your cup and sorrows, and sharing with you his cup of consolation. But then you would meet a Swiss person, whether German, French or Italian, and it would mean the same thing in Swiss German, French or Italian, a Roumanian, and it would mean the same thing in Roumanian, an Englishman, a Russian, an Armenian, . . . and the series went on . . . , it meant the same in all those languages. And suddenly you realize, that when this Nadim was not spending the night with you sharing your cup, he was sharing the cup of someone else on the intervening nights, and on other nights filling up his cup of consolation by reading/studying scripture, so he would be able to share it with you and the others when he was sharing your/their cup.
So from the initial visual encounter, through the recurring audio encounters, the recollections finally give way to a prayer of thanks:
Thank you nameless Father, of the faceless and crucified Lamb, thank you for providing us with an earthenware vessel called Nadim, thank you for Abou-Jalal, thank you and Amen.
Mr. Abou-Chaar was a member of the first class of students at the St John of Damascus School of Theology at Balamand. At his graduation in 1974 he pursued further studies in scripture in Germany and Greece and became Father Paul’s colleague at that school as teacher of Old Testament, New Testament, Biblical Hebrew, and Biblical Greek for many years and served for one year as Interim Dean. Abou-Chaar’s breadth of knowledge accounts to a great degree to the information included in Father Paul’s monumental four volume Introduction to the New Testament. Three times he was the guest sole lecturer at the OCABS intensive five-day seminars in the 2000’s.