The spiritual testament of frère Christian de Chergé, the prior of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists in the night between 26 and 27 March 1996 and then killed, proclaimed blessed by Pope Francis together with the other martyrs of Algeria in 2018
When an ad-God is looming
If it happened to me one day – and it could be today – to be a victim of terrorism that now seems to want to involve all foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was “given” to God and to this country. Let them accept that the one Lord of all life could not be a stranger to this brutal departure. Let them pray for me: how to be found worthy of such an offer? That they knew how to associate this death with many others equally violent, left in the indifference of anonymity.
My life has no more value than another. It doesn’t even have less. In any case, he doesn’t have the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know myself an accomplice to the evil which, alas, seems to prevail in the world, and also to that which could strike me blindly. When the time comes, I wish I could have that moment of lucidity that would allow me to ask for God’s forgiveness and that of my brothers in humanity, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart whoever struck me.
I could not wish for such a death. It seems important to me to state this. Indeed, I do not see how I could rejoice in the fact that this people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be paying too high a price for what might be called, perhaps, the “grace of martyrdom”, to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I know with what contempt Algerians as a whole have been surrounded, and I also know what caricatures of Islam a certain Islamism encourages.
It is too easy to put one’s conscience at ease by identifying this religious path with the fundamentalisms of its extremisms.
Algeria and Islam are something else for me, they are a body and a soul. I have proclaimed it enough, it seems to me, on the basis of what I have seen and learned from experience, so often rediscovering that common thread of the Gospel learned on my mother’s knees, my very first Church precisely in Algeria, and, even then, with respect of Muslim believers.
My death, evidently, will seem to justify those who quickly treated me as naive, or as an idealist: “Now tell me what you think!”. But these people must know that my most ardent curiosity will finally be released. Here, I will be able, if God likes, to immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him His children of Islam as He sees them, all illuminated by the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, invested with the gift of Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to establish communion, playing with differences.
Of this lost life, totally mine and totally theirs, I give thanks to God who seems to have wanted it whole for this joy, through and in spite of everything.
In this “thank you” in which everything is said, now of my life, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, friends of here, together with my father and my mother, my sisters and my brothers, and to them, a hundredfold given as promised!
And you too, last minute friend who didn’t know what you were doing. Yes, I want this “thank you” for you too, and this “a-God” in whose face I contemplate you. And may we meet again, blessed thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God, our Father, of both.
Amen! InshAllah.
Brother Christian de Chergé
Algiers, 1 December 1993
Tibihrine, January 1, 1994