Some fifty-five years ago, one of my closest summer friends (for the better part of fifteen years), returned after his freshman year in college to an area along the coast of Maine where both our families vacationed from the end of May until the first week in September, with a new name. For purposes of this posting, I’ll call him John Burke. In point of fact, his real name was very much similar in its very “familiar” surname.
John had changed NOT only his name, he was changed…
John was an adopted son. His parents – wonderful people – weren’t able to have children of their own. John had been adopted through one of the many international agencies of Catholic Charities / Refugee Relief. He had been born in one of the many camps in Palestine during the Second World War.
As I would see him each summer, John began to look less and less like a member of the Burke family. It was NO secret that he had been adopted. Everyone, including John himself, was, and had been told from Day One, that he was from the Middle East. He had a devotional love for his adopted parents, but if you knew John, you could feel the strain of ‘being different’ as the years rolled by, summer after summer. From the time we both started prep school, even from a distance, whether in letters, or phone conversations over the holidays, he would touch on going back to the Middle East, or that he was going to major in International Law, or Islam, or join the Peace Corps for a couple years after college. He could speak and write Hebrew and Arabic fluently; and, he had kept up both growing up enrolled in separate classes while living in New York City. John Burke, to this day, was one of the smartest, and funniest, people I’ve ever been around.
By the aforementioned summer after our freshman years at college, John Burke had become Mohammed Ismail. Legally.
Although, we remained extremely close throughout college, it was now different. He became a devoted Muslim. I remained a devoted Catholic. By our senior year, conversations were rarely level-headed, and seldom ended pleasant.
Less than two weeks before leaving for Vietnam in July, 1967, I received a call from Mrs. Burke telling me that her John Mohammed Ismail Burke had been killed during the Six-Day War somewhere along the Sinai Peninsula border in June.
The impact was devastating on me. In many ways, still is. Especially, given where we ALL are within the world today.
I mention the above as a prelude to what my wife and I are going to be doing over the next couple of months. We’re going back to school, and taking a course on Religion in the Middle East, including Christianity.
As we know, over the period of the last three years, matters in the Middle East have inflamed again. On major scales, one right after another.
Someone said recently, the land of Adam and Eve has become the land of Cain and Abel again. The religious scars and conflicts that pot-mark the modern Middle East are far from inevitable, let alone completely understood by most of us.
One recent example, since August of this past year, where there was once over 1.4 million Christians in Iraq in ’87, since August there are now less than 300,000 left in country. All desperately trying to leave / escape from the onslaught of the Islamic State. Thank God for the Kurds!
Over the past few decades, zealous nationalism has spread across the Middle East. Prime among them being the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the Iraqi elections of 2005; and, the Arab Spring of ’10. With all of this, religion’s rise within the Muslim world has coincided with the explosive rise in migration into each respective country’s major cities, or into the over-flowing refugee camps.
Then, as it also has, and always will be, these horrific circumstances will become economic, and the real tragedy is: DIVERSITY LOSES, along with the lives of millions.
I wish John Mohammed Ismail Burke was going to be in the class with us…
Lobster on the Prairie 