Peace be with you from the land of Gilgamesh, the great king who refused to die and left everything he had after he lost his best friend Ankido for one goal. His goal was to get eternal life because he refused to accept that death belongs to the process of life. If this article is to reflect the situation in the Middle East, then we should forget about the structure or order which is supposed to characterize any article. Let us go beyond the rules of the game and see how a person who belongs to this unusual part of the world tries to lead you in a journey that is a combination of a meditation, a prayer, a cry of pain and a whisper of love. I am this seagull who took the wings of the wind and the rays of the sun to sail away and tell the story of the land which makes love every morning with the sea and with the dawn to give light to the whole world... Here I should keep silent and let the journey begin.

The Middle East has long been one of the most problematic areas in the world. After more than four centuries of Ottoman rule, with the Turks trying to destroy any kind of Arab identity whether social or political or religious, the English and the French came. They divided the area between them and ruled until the end of the 1940s. During that time, the Jews began to emigrate to Palestine trying to establish a state with the help of the British government. The result was three major wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973. The whole Middle East lived in a state of war for more than 45 years. Lebanon especially suffered more than 15 years of civil war. All that happened in the name of religion.

The geographical location of the Middle East is the major reason for the trouble which has been its lot since the dawn of human history. Religion has been the other face of the coin of trouble. The three main monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, started here and then spread to the rest of the world. Because people in the Middle East are spiritual, emotional and passionate people, it is easy to start different kinds of trouble. It is like hay waiting for a spark of fire. Religion has been the most sensitive subject of all.

‘Relationship’, this concept that rules everything that exists, is the key to the door to better understanding of the meaning of justice. As long as we do not try to build our relationships, it will be difficult to talk about establishing justice in the Middle East. We are people who cannot live without intimate relationships. Family relationships are still the fundamental basis of our social structure. Intimate friendships still play an important role in forming our identity and building our self-consciousness. If you meet somebody for the first time, the first question after learning the name of the person is: Who is your father? Knowing something about the family is a first necessary step in knowing anybody. All the relatives and friends of the person are an essential part of his or her identity. Taking care to build relationships is a decisive point in the mentality of the people in the Middle East.

To talk about justice in the area, we should need books and books. The fire of injustice is so old that we do not know any more when and how it started. One thing we know, we will never give up hoping to live in peace and justice. We may still need some time to achieve this goal, but the process has begun and we believe in it.

Our faith as Christians has been always baptized with pain and fire. It has become very precious to us. We learned to develop our own ways to communicate with God. We learned that the fire tests the purity of gold. We learned how to see the hand of God in the midst of the chaos which invaded our life every day. Pain has become our daily bread. We learned that to be Christian can never be taken for granted. It is something we hold like a burning coal in our hearts and minds. To be Christian could be equal to death.

In the Middle East we learned that if theology does not match with our life and does not help people to maintain their relationship with God, then the church loses its legitimacy and role to be the body of Christ. Abstract academic theology is a luxury we cannot afford. People need a theology which encourages them to face reality with courage and to find the correct relationship between the Bible and reality.

Young people in the Middle East challenge Christian theology every minute because they are faced with a reality which demands questions and answers. Many ask: Where is God when bombs destroy our houses and thousands of people are killed through no fault of their own? Why does God allow such cruel acts to happen? Why does not God stop this inhuman war? How can we say that God is love when we have lost everything? Where is this love? People are tired of saying goodbye, they are tired of crying. Sometimes their eyes are dry because there are no tears left. What words can comfort these people? The wounds are open and the veins have no blood left to bleed. How can they forget? Does forgiveness mean to forget, or does it mean something else? Is it humanly possible to forgive without forgetting what happened especially when all parts of the problem have no choice but to live together, in the same space and time? What kind of comedy or tragedy is this, and what kind of world are we living in?

We live in a world which has four dimensions. The first three are the dimensions of space (length, width, and height or depth), and the fourth is the dimension of time. This is the box in which we live. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, who was not in our box, came freely inside it to teach us something very important. He suffered our injustice in our box. He, who came with the message of peace and forgiveness, was killed on the cross of our heat and injustice. His death was not the end. He rose again to complete his message of peace. His secret was one word. It was his power to die and live again. This secret was love. Injustice is the absence of love in our life. The opposite of injustice is not justice but love, because justice is not a bunch of laws we try to fulfil, but forgiveness and love. These thoughts are not intellectual gymnastics, but rather a struggle with life and death at the deepest depth of the human soul.

It is very difficult to talk about love to people who live under the law of the jungle. How can I ask somebody who lost a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a father or mother, a husband or wife, or even their whole family to love?

To insist on the solution that must include love and forgiveness, we, the youth in the evangelical church in Beirut, started ‘The White Hearts Committee’. We visited young people in the schools and talked with them about the possibility of accepting peace, love and forgiveness as a base for a new beginning in Lebanon. It was amazing to see the different opinions, which reflect the great confusion among the young people. We tried everything we could to say that to love and forgive is never too late. We know it is difficult, but we know also that there is no other way to turn a new page. To break the chain of injustice is to accept the option of love and forgiveness even when it seems impossible to do so.

In this article you are reading the words of someone who could be anyone from the Middle East, because the fire here has not spared anybody. In this little part of the big box, Jesus Christ lived and gave a new dimension to our existence. He gave us the fifth dimension in order to set us free from our box. What is this fifth dimension? This new dimension is love. The one who has the fifth dimension can communicate directly with God who is beyond all dimensions. In this part of the world, we learned that injustice takes place when our box is so small that it has no room for somebody else. When all the corners in our box are filled with our ‘I’, then there is no place for love of others. My box becomes my prison, and my life becomes an instrument of pain to others.

Young people in the Middle East suffered most over the long years of wars and trouble. Nothing is stable in our life because in a war nothing has a value. Even life becomes cheap, like a bullet. War destroys all values and all principles. Surviving becomes the only valid principle. People mistrust each other and fear grows deep in their soul. The most valuable thing we lost was dialogue. Because everyone lost respect for the existence of the other, because everyone lost acceptance of the belief of the other, there was nothing left to talk about. Everyone saw what he or she believed as the absolute truth. The natural result is violence and destruction.

Youth in my part of the globe lost the dream. Youth without a dream are like Spring without flowers, land without rain or a spring of water, a day without a sun and a night without a moon. The dream is the power to achieve something good in life and it also provides the motivation to make it better. Whoever has no dream has no future. We have lived our youth under the shadow of fear and injustice. The fear of losing everything, alienation, helplessness, despair, loneliness and the fear of death have been our companions for years. War can never bring freedom because it is a greedy monster which never has enough blood and death. War begins when dialogue stops and then a heavy veil covers the eyes. Everything turns black, and light turns into darkness.

We have been slaves to strange ideas which fit neither in our culture nor in our society nor in our tradition. We have lived under certain ideologies which took our freedom away. We have been either marginalized or used as an instrument of war and violence. We have been surrounded by endless barriers which have separated us from the rest of human civilization. We have lost contact with other human cultures. Our music has been the steps of military boots, and our art has been pictures painted with blood. When we begin war, we lose our humanity. That is what makes it easier to kill and destroy and more difficult to hear the voice of God.

Youth in the church suffered like the rest of society, but we tried to look at the future through the eyes of our faith in Jesus Christ. We tried to rediscover the image of God in us and clean it from the dust of our despair and the dirt of our fear. In the midst of the civil war in Lebanon, under shelling and shooting day and night, we could carry on our youth meetings. We prayed together and shared our faith and our doubts, our hopes and despair. We discussed many important subjects which helped us to get closer to God and to each other. We discussed for months the Christian attitude towards war, weapons and violence. In an atmosphere of death and daily destruction, we decided to express our feelings and thoughts in written form that could reach everybody. The result was the first youth magazine in the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. The magazine was our cry of hope, written by our young people. It included short stories, poems, meditations, articles and different kinds of literature. For many of us this was our first experience of writing, therefore everything was deep, honest and faithful and expressed our own way of looking at different sides of life at that critical period of time. It was difficult for the church to believe that young people in such a horrible situation could do that. The feedback was amazing; everybody received our attempt with great joy and recognition. We believed that life can go on in spite of all evil. Through our faith in the Risen Lord, we could break the chains of injustice.

Our work went on to cover other kinds of activities. We began, for the first time in the Middle East, a Christian theatre. We performed more than six plays in Syria and Lebanon. They all dealt through Christian themes and principles with burning issues concerning our problems as youth and as part of the suffering society. Our work together gave us new perspectives on how to live in a multireligious society. It helped us to see the injustice in our life and start a dialogue as a step towards finding ways to overcome it. Our meetings and work provided us with a valuable opportunity to experience the fifth dimension, confronting the raised Lord as the presence of love among us. Everything we believed in was under an incredible test. This test was the hardest, but the most influential experience in our life. It was a battle against a huge chain of injustice which surrounded our life and threatened our existence. It was an attempt to say that our Lord is a living Lord.

We have to be careful how we define injustice and talk about it. It seems that injustice is the same as inequality, but it is not always so. Equality does not always mean justice. For example, if we take two people one is hungry and the other is not, and we have one loaf of bread. How can we divide it between them and be just? Should we divide it into two equal pieces, or should we give the hungry person a bigger piece? What is justice in this case? Because of this dilemma, we said earlier that the opposite of injustice is not justice but rather love. In the complicated social and religious structure in my part of the world, it is almost impossible to define what justice means. The real problem is not to find a definition of justice, but to find a way to accept each other and then search for ways to live together in love and peace.

Was it just that the one who knew no sin died that we could live through our faith in him? The matter of the cross is not only a matter of justice but also and more importantly a matter of love. God is love: this statement in the first letter of John summarizes everything because it tells us directly and boldly what God is in God’s self. God does not only love, God is love. This truth should dominate our thinking when we talk about breaking the chains of injustice. It is the ultimate truth we can know about God, but to know about God is not enough to be Christian. To know God is to meet God in Jesus Christ, to live with God, to give God the leading role in our life, to experience God’s presence and see God’s hand in the daily little details. To know God is to break our box, to open it for other people to enter and share every aspect in it. To know God is to let God set us free from our box. That would give us the power of the fifth dimension, love, that enables us to break the chains of evil, the chains of injustice.

The church is part of society, and the people in it are human beings with all their weaknesses. Therefore, it can have a part in the chains of injustice. Positions, power and money can be great temptations for the people in the church. It will be always a struggle in the church against these temptations and also other human weaknesses. The church suffers under division that brings a lot of injustice and makes the work in it a complicated process. The message of the church in the Middle East lost some of its credibility because the war in Lebanon, which took a religious mask, drew a great question mark concerning the relation between the message of Jesus Christ and war. All the churches paid a high price for the instable situation in the area. It is very dangerous when the church tries to justify any act of violence, whatever this act may be, because violence violates the heart of the Christian message. When the church takes part directly or indirectly in any action which does not declare very clearly the message of love, dialogue and peace, the church becomes entangled in the chains of injustice. We believe that God always gives us the possibility to avoid the choice of violence to solve our problems. The history of humanity for centuries proved that the choice of violence is helpless and wrong, but we still make the same mistake over and over again. The history of the church proved as well that supporting war means supporting the chains of injustice and strengthening the circle of evil.

Young people have a big role to play in maintaining and protecting the message of dialogue and peace because most of the time they are the victims who suffer most from the consequences of any war. To break the chains of injustice, we have to be in a continuous movement against evil thinking, first in ourselves, and then in society. We have paid an incredible price for the last fifty years. Young people, through the continuous tension in the area, have lost their identity as part of human civilization and also their role in building their future as they want it to be. We have lost the clear vision to plan and participate in developing our countries.

Every generation was a victim of the situation. The people who are fifty years old now did not live one day in their lives in peace. Can anyone imagine their psychology? Can anyone imagine what kind of future they are hoping for? How can we expect a good future if we have a horrible present? The amount of damage is unimaginable because it is difficult to see or know what is left. When we lose the harmony in creation, we have to realize that we have lost our reason to exist in this world, because God is the source of harmony. When we lose the harmony in creation, it means we are losing the relationship with the Creator: therefore we lose the source of our life which can go on only in relationship with God. God created the world out of love and this is God’s image in the world because God is love and can only offer love.

Once more, the theme of love appears to be the centre of our thinking. Once more, we say that now and more than any other time we need to renew our understanding of the fifth dimension which should include everybody, especially the people we do not like or cannot accept. This dimension disappears most of the time from our life. Love should be not only our fifth dimension but also the seventh sense that gives us the skills to enter this fifth dimension and make it active in us and in our space and time and relationships.

Our future is open in the Middle East, it carries many different possibilities. We have always believed in peace as a way to a better future. We trust that God will help us in planting the seeds of peace and understanding in the hearts and souls of the peoples who have been waiting very long for this to happen. We will rise like the Phoenix from the ashes full of hope, faith and love. Our hand will keep knocking at the door of freedom until it is open wide for the birds who have strong wings to fly. We have a lot to do, to catch up on what we have missed. The Middle East needs every help whether from inside or outside to go on grounding the roots of peace and justice. Of course we will face difficulties and problems, but the strong will says the last word.

Nadim Nassar of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon is currently pursuing doctoral studies in systematic theology and modern issues in Germany.