November 2, 2025.
Dear Friends,
We will gather together remotely for our Badaliya and Peace Islands Institute faith sharing on Sunday, November 2, 2025 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm. Please join us on Zoom, or in spirit, as we encourage Inter-faith relations and pray together that the fragile ceasefire in Gaza leads to an end to two years of destruction, displacement, killing, maiming and starvation of Palestinians and finally addresses the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories that is the root cause of so much human suffering. Our hearts continue to be broken by the images of children dying of starvation in Gaza, the Sudan and Afghanistan and the many humanitarian crises in our world. May there be an end to all International complicity to war in the Middle East, an end to war in the Ukraine and the civil war in the Sudan where an earthquake has also caused devastating loss of homes and lives. We wait with hope for a peaceful transition to democracy in Syria as they negotiate with the diverse factions throughout the country after a long civil war. Our prayers are on-going for all the victims of human-created violence and for the many courageous first responders and humanitarian aid workers who seek to help them. May the hearts and minds of those perpetrators of violence be transformed from revenge-seeking to peace-seeking. May we turn our prayers into action as the increase of natural disasters due to human caused climate change all over the world is destroying too many lives, along with the earth we are privileged to share with them.
This weekend the Church sets aside two days of prayer and liturgical celebration called "solemnities": November 1st is called All Saints Day and November 2nd is called All Souls Day. These are memorials to the storied lives of those many exceptional men and women recognized by the Church for their lives of service and as models of spiritual wisdom for generations of believers. Today, November 2nd, is a day of remembrance of those many beloved souls who have passed into eternal life before us. Together these feasts are meant to inspire our hope in the recognition of a vast communion of saints, "a vision of a great multitude, which no one can count, from every nation, race, people and tongue" standing before the throne of Divinity. (Rev. 7:9-14)
In 1962, on the vigil of All Saints Day, October 31st, the scholar and mystic, founder of our Badaliya prayer movement, Louis Massignon, joined that esteemed roster of Saints and beloved souls that included his friend and mentor, the one he called an "older brother", Charles de Foucauld, as well as his namesake, Saint Abraham, the name he chose when he made his final vows as a third order Franciscan in 1932. Identifying himself with the great patriarch of all three Abrahamic faith traditions, (a term Massignon himself coined that envisioned the deep fraternal connections of all believers in Judaism, Christianity and Islam), was a choice coming out of his own experience and spiritual journey. He experienced both the Patriarch Abraham and Saint Francis of Assisi as models of interfaith connection. Even before subsequent research on the famous stigmata of Saint Francis verified its connection between the saint's risky visit to the Muslim Sultan during the fifth Crusade in 1219, Massignon intuited that receiving this Divine gift of the stigmata was a result of the saint's affection and intense prayers for the Sultan. This was a dramatic example of substitutionary prayer, the foundation of the Badaliya prayer movement. To experience the physical wounds of Christ crucifixion in one's own body in the midst of a self-offering prayer for the "other" is a rare example of an extreme sense of identification with Christ that is called a "stigmata ". St. Francis has been called the very first to enter into interfaith dialogue in the world. Contrary to the plaster statues and flowery images found in churches and many Christian homes of our great Christian Saints, these were men and women who were willing to risk challenging the dominant culture and power structures in their time out of their devotion and identification with the Risen Christ. Their stories include their struggles for purpose, direction and love that are the common experiences of all of us.
In the midst of the on-going wars and violence in our world and our struggle for human rights, religious, racial and gender equality for everyone, we can surely name enumerable dedicated men and women, well-known and unknown, who are our modern day saints, even those not officially recognized by the Church. When in May of 1908 the young Louis Massignon had an experience of the Divine that he later called the "Visitation of a Stranger", his spiritual vocation began in the midst of the Islamic world. He was sure that his dramatic "conversion" experience was due to the prayers of both those living at the time, like Brother Charles de Foucauld, and the tenth century Sufi saint known as al-Hallaj. The Muslim love mystic's teachings, life and legend became Massignon's 50 year research project. He travelled the world to Christian, Muslim and Buddhist shrines discovering the expansiveness of the Divine vision of that vast communion of saints "from every nation, race, people and tongue."
On November 1st, All Saints Day, the summary of Christian discipleship is poetically proclaimed by Jesus seated before the crowds on a mountain side. Just as the Divine ten commandments were given to Moses on the mountain of Sinai and the prophet Muhammad received the Divine words that became the holy Qur'an of Islam while praying in a cave on the mountain, Jesus speaks the Divine message from a mountain, that sacred ground of Divine encounter. "Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit", he begins. "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven....Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God." These are far more than just flowery words, for the "pure in spirit" are those fortunate enough to be filled with the power, that we call "grace", to love others unconditionally that only comes to us when we know in the depth of our being that we are loved just as we are and so is everyone else. It is only by acting out of compassionate concern for the well-being of others that we can bring about the peace in our world that we long for. The "reign of God" that begins within us, is the ability to "see the Divine spark of the Divine in others. It is that gift of the Spirit of Divine mercy that inspires us to be peace-makers and true "children of God". We are reminded of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, as he continues to call out from that horrific human instrument of torture, the Cross, "forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing". We are reminded of the Prophet Muhammad who drafted the 7th century Charter of Medina that was the first Islamic document that ensured peaceful co-existence for Muslims and Jews in the city of Medina, a single community for both tribal and religious cultures to live in peace.
Let us turn for a moment to one who once called himself "another man from Galilee," Elias Chacour, retired Archbishop of Galilee from the Melkite Greek Catholic church, founder of the Mar Elias schools in Ibillin, Israel. These are the words of a Palestinian who has courageously educated generations of children from all religious and ethnic backgrounds to be the peace-makers for all those living in this Holy Land. In his book on the Sermon on the Mount, he wrote: "At this moment in human history, we need to turn to the one who gives the world peace. The peace that the Lord gives does not come from this world; it is peace that comes from within... the peace that the Lord gives empowers us to be concerned about the peace of a ceasefire and the peace of a truce between two armies".
The Sermon on the Mount, known as the Beatitudes are the road map that are showing us both who God is and in turn who we are called to become.
Peace to you,
Dorothy
See www.dcbuck.com for all past letters to the Badaliya and Peace Islands