Originally published April 7, 2006

From the fourth century until today, Christians have created things to do together, rituals, in order to experience for themselves the great simplicity of redemption. These rituals are meant to recur, they are the stones of an archway which, once built, is there to use, to go in and out by prayer and so to find pasture. We do not want to be rebuilding a different-shaped arch, however entrancing, but to use what we have, what we are used to, in order to enter into the real business of prayer. So the ceremonies of Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, are there to be used, and this is a physical matter, a use of the body, so that all of ourselves will know. Intellectual apprehension of truth is all very well, and indeed for some it is enough; but for most of us, we live in a half-light, neither awake nor asleep, wanting to understand but not quite able to think it through; we need to be there to act it out, to participate. This is in no way an alternative or lesser kind of theologizing; by both ways we come to the central theme of redemption, the flesh-taking of Christ in which he returns to the Father and takes us unto the dynamic life of the Trinity which is the ultimate procession, and it is by physical processions that we can learn to become part of that reality.

The last days of Holy Week provide a simple way of allowing the body, the flesh, to learn theological truth by doing and being in earthly processions. Palm Sunday’s procession is about how to do the basic human thing — to walk, to take one step, just to be able to do the next step, and to remain with that doing, not seeing a much quicker way to get there by a bus, a train, a ship, a plane, which are quicker than our feet; we are always dashing through in order to be somewhere else, and when we are there then we think we will begin. But the procession is a slow, corporate event, the pace set by the weakest and slowest. Like growing, a procession is something done for its own sake, and in doing it we are becoming what we are not, going by a way we do not understand, for a purpose that is God’s, not ours, in ways that are too simple for our sight. We will never of course be ready on earth for the full “procession” which is the dynamism of the life of love which is the Trinity, since we are broken human beings, with limited sight; but given our consent, God can lead us by the flesh he created, to understand and apprehend the image of God which he placed within us. All that is needed is to give a minute assent, however impatient and grudging, and then just to do it. A procession can be seen as a sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” In the same way that we read through the letter of the Scriptures to the inner truth, so we understand more by walking than we know; it is the work and gift of God.

Meditation upon the processions of Holy Week is rightly undertaken at its commencement. In the early church, for the first three days of Holy Week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the custom was to have only plain readings from Scripture; later, what was read each day were the separate accounts of the Passion. Then as now, these were days of stillness and silence when all were to be prepared, emptied, turned towards the Saviour’s great work. After the signs we gave ourselves during Lent of being ready to become empty by giving things up and therefore more free, now that desire will be put to the test. There is nothing now to be done or thought. It is the end of Lent, the pause before the great mystery of Redemption. In this pause, it is possible to reflect on these three processions, on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter night, as ways into the great procession which is the life of Trinity, and this is not just for ourselves here and now. First we walk with so many others from the past, joined with them by our present actions. We receive life from the hands of the dead to live it out ourselves and pass it on to others, and that is true tradition. We are walking with our friends. And second, we do not do this for ourselves only, but for the whole of creation; insofar as one small portion of humanity which is us assents to the love of God, so the whole of creation becomes part of redeeming work.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena they’re rehearsing for the annual Christmas pageant. There’s been a pageant here done by the children for as long as anyone can remember. The scripts vary from year to year, but the basic storyline never changes. It’s about the birth of Jesus.

REV. DEBBIE GARA (First United Methodist Church, Pasadena, Calif.): Children tell the story that is always in one way or another the story of a baby being born who brings a new kind of hope and a new kind of life and a new kind of love to the places that that has gone away. Everyone gets that.

LAWTON: The Christmas pageant is a tradition that is being played out by congregations across the spectrum this holiday season and it has for generations. The pageants run the gamut, from small Sunday school programs to large-scale Broadway-style productions. There’s usually a choir or some kind of singing. Sometimes the participants are adults, but more often than not the pageant is performed by the children and documented by proud parents who these days are likely to post the video on YouTube or Facebook.

John Witvliet is professor of music and worship at Calvin College in Michigan. He says the Christmas pageant is one way that churches actively connect with their history.

PROFESSOR JOHN WITVLIET (Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich.): It’s participating in something that has gone on over time, a story that’s been told for 2000 years, children who participate in a pageant just like their parents or grandparents did.

LAWTON: Interest in the circumstances of Jesus’ birth goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. The story as described in the Gospels was depicted in icons and other religious art. In medieval times, the Nativity story was enacted on traveling wagons as part of religious dramas about the life of Jesus. Saint Francis of Assisi is credited with popularizing the tradition. In a candlelit Christmas Eve service in 1223, he staged a reenactment of Jesus’ birth, and he included live animals, a tradition many churches continue to this day.

WITVLIET: What historians are a little less clear about is when Christmas became such a child-centered celebration and when kids were involved in these dramatic reenactments in a significant way.

LAWTON: At the heart of the Christmas pageant is a fundamental tenet of Christianity called the Incarnation, the belief that God took on human flesh in the form of Jesus and was born as a baby.

WITVLIET: This is not a story of the high and mighty. It’s a story of the humble origins of Jesus and ultimately of, as Christians understand it, a God who chooses to work through very humble, ordinary means.

LAWTON: Witvliet says it’s a story with universal appeal. Nativity dramas can be found all over the world.

WITVLIET: What’s wonderful is the way that different cultures bring their own insights to bear on telling the Christmas story.

LAWTON: But it can be a challenge for churches to come up with fresh ways to approach the familiar story year after year. This year’s pageant at First United Methodist is from the perspective of animals that might have been there when Jesus was born.

ZOE PEREZ: The animals are all squabbling, and then the wise old donkey just like told them that they had a gift to give to the birth of baby Jesus.

LAWTON: Zoe Perez has been in several pageants. Last year she was a shepherd. This year she and her friend, Maggie Cole, have dual roles. They are birds, and they are also sheep.

MAGGIE COLE: I think it is important to have pageants because they’re fun. They don’t take a lot of practicing, well at least ours don’t, and they always turn out really good.

LAWTON: Director Pam Marx believes embodying the characters helps, in her words, “burn the story” into the children’s brains. The actors agree.

COLE: The kids get to learn more, and the people that are in them get to learn more about like Christmas and God, and the parents can be sure that their kids are getting what they need about—what they need to learn about things like that.

LAWTON: Marx says it’s not always a perfect production but, she adds, it always seems to work.

PAM MARX: Remarkably enough it comes together, and I would say there are times when it’s been a greater miracle than others, but it’s always a miracle to me that somehow, wow, they told the story again.

WITVLIET: I sometimes think it’s in the lines that are forgotten and the bathrobes that the shepherds put on and in the halting rendering of these Christmas songs that are not always sung perfectly in tune that some of the beauty of the Christmas message is depicted and shown.

LAWTON: First United Methodist associate pastor Debbie Gara says children bring a special quality to the pageant.

GARA: There are always the faces that we can’t help but smile and feel warm about when we have all these hard places inside as adults. The children soften us in the telling of the story. The story of the telling of a baby child, of an infant, is something that warms everyone.

LAWTON: But Witvliet cautions that warmth and fuzziness shouldn’t overwhelm the ultimate spiritual message of Christmas.

WITVLIET: There’s always danger in even in a variety of Christmas celebrations and pageants that at the end of the day the kids pick up a message that is ultimately sentimental. So there is a challenge for adults and those who mentor children to point them in a deeper and better direction.

LAWTON: The message is what it’s all about at Evangel Cathedral in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and so they do their pageant up big. The church calls this a Broadway-style production that includes the modern day, the Victorian era, and biblical times. There are live animals such as sheep, donkeys, alpacas, and yes—camels in the sanctuary, too. This year’s twentieth annual pageant has a cast of over 200, including some of the biggest names in Gospel music like gold record artist Marvin Sapp and Grammy-award-winning superstars Yolanda Adams and Donnie McClurkin.

DONNIE MCCLURKIN: Because the story is an age-old story it can, you know, we’ve heard it in so many different forms and different ways, but here the production behind it makes this thing become alive, makes it more than just one-dimensional. You can see, you can feel, you can hear, and it brings you into another place when you are watching it.

LAWTON: Congregation members here see the Christmas pageant as an opportunity to reach out to the community and share their faith, and that’s why these artists wanted to be part of the project.

MARVIN SAPP: At the end of the day we’re strongly letting people know and giving them the message that, you know, the real meaning of Christmas is Christ. We can put an “X” in front of it, we can try to do all that other stuff, but the true meaning of Christmas is Christ.

LAWTON: And from the smallest children’s program to the biggest extravaganza that’s the ultimate story of the Christmas pageant. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: In New York’s mid-Hudson Valley, Aziz Ahsan, his wife, and three kids are looking at some old photos. These family times are becoming increasingly rare now that the two oldest children are in college. Ahsan says he values these moments more than ever.

AZIZ AHSAN: 9/11 for me was an event that made my relationship with my family stronger, because now that every time I look at my family I am thankful that I am alive. I can touch them, I can feel them, and so it has created a stronger bond.

LAWTON: Ahsan, who is Muslim, was at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He went to the post office there to buy a special new Islamic-themed stamp. Just after he left the plane hit, and he was struck by pieces of the crumbling tower. Hours later, Ahsan was able to make his way home covered in debris, with serious eye injuries.

SHAHZAD AHSAN: I remember walking over to him and wanting to hug him, and he said, “No, don’t. Wait. Don’t get all this stuff on you.” But I just hugged him anyway because I just had to.

LAWTON: Ahsan put his debris-covered clothes in a bag. He says he hasn’t opened it again since he showed them to me nine years ago. He keeps the bag in his garage and hopes to donate the clothes to a 9/11 museum. Shahzad was 13 when the attacks occurred. He told me he felt a backlash from people who blamed all Muslims.

SHAHZAD AHSAN (file interview): I couldn’t understand why people would hate Muslims when they were the victims of the attack as well.

LAWTON: Ahsan decided he and his family should reach out to their community and show a different view of Islam. He got involved in local causes, was appointed to the zoning board of appeals, and successfully ran for president of the school board.

AZIZ AHSAN: When people like myself and others who stood up and made Muslim a household name or became part of the news stories on a regular basis, it made it that much easier for people to realize that Muslims are in our community.

LAWTON: He and his family created and now sell a Muslim identity symbol. It can be placed in a window or on a desk and in its large form, a public park.

AZIZ AHSAN: I just want to make people aware that we are proud to be Americans, and we’re proud to be Muslims.

LAWTON: The Ahsans also got involved with interfaith projects. Shahzad and several Muslim friends worked with Jewish teens on a “Salaam-Shalom” video project to create awareness about anti-religious bigotry and bullying.

SHAHZAD AHSAN: When I was younger my father was really big on trying to get me to understand that this is important. Even what seems like small events are important, because you might be the first Muslim friend someone’s ever had.

LAWTON: Shahzad is now studying political science at the University of Chicago and hopes to find positive ways of portraying American Muslims. His father says that’s the lesson they all learned from 9/11.

AZIZ AHSAN: Those opportunities became much more available after 9/11, and for people like me who participated, got involved, reached out, the community reached back, and it’s important for the rest of the Muslim American community to get more involved. Don’t be shy. Don’t be afraid.

LAWTON: In western Pennsylvania, the small town of Shanksville looks much the same as it did ten years ago before passenger resistance brought down hijacked Flight 93. But this town was indelibly altered on that day.

REV. ROBERT WAY (St. John Lutheran Church, Clearfield, Penn.): The spiritual lesson I think that we probably learned, really, was that we are one, that as a people we are one, that Shanksville people are not different than New York people, aren’t different than Washington, D.C. people, that we’re all the same people.

LAWTON: Lutheran pastor Robert Way had arrived in Shanksville just days before 9/11. It was his first church assignment.

WAY (file interview): I honestly do not believe that the people of this area would have welcomed me as openly as they have already had it not been for the flight. I think it has really framed what my ministry has been but also has opened not only myself to them, but their lives to me.

LAWTON: He says the crash continues to have a spiritual impact for him.

WAY: Probably emboldened more in my spirit, just to understand that evil is a part of our world. Evil can touch even those of us who are in rural western Pennsylvania.

LAWTON: Ten years after 9/11, Way has just arrived at a new assignment at St. John Lutheran Church in Clearfield, about 70 miles away. But he remains heavily involved in Shanksville. He’s an ambassador for the Flight 93 National Memorial and volunteers at the park every week, retelling the story of what happened there, both the tragedy and the heroism.

WAY: I believe the site really is a site of social engagement and calling people into that engagement once again. We have often used the term that the people aboard the plane really stepped up to the plate, and now it’s our turn to step up to the plate, and the people of Shanksville have done that.

LAWTON: At the site of Ground Zero in New York, Greek Orthodox parishioners are frustrated that plans to rebuild St. Nicholas Church have been locked in stalemate.

JIM KOKOTAS (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association): They were here before the twin towers, were here before the stock exchange was here, and they deserve the right to be rebuilt. The people need a place to worship.

LAWTON: St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was the only house of worship destroyed on 9/11. When the towers fell, the tiny church never stood a chance.

JOHN PITSIKALIS (St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Paris) (file interview): The debris from the south tower literally pancaked our church. You know, it was an unbelievable amount of debris on it.

LAWTON: Only a few remnants were dug out of the rubble: two torn icons, a charred Bible, and some liturgical items, including a twisted candelabra. Most congregation members began worshiping at another Greek Orthodox church in Brooklyn while the church made plans to rebuild. But all rebuilding at Ground Zero is being overseen by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Greek Orthodox officials and the Port Authority had a preliminary agreement to rebuild the church at a different location nearby, but negotiations broke down. The church accused the Port Authority of reneging, and the Port Authority accused the church of making too many demands. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year, and because of it neither church officials nor the Port Authority are commenting. Meanwhile, Orthodox parishioners are trying to ramp up pressure for a resolution. They say a rebuilt St. Nicholas would provide spiritual support for people of all faiths.

KOKOTAS: This is now a sacred ground, and whatever your denomination is you have to respect the fact that many lives were lost. So the role of the church and that relationship with God and oneself plays an even more important role for the people that are going to be coming here, and St. Nicholas could fill that role for these people.

LAWTON: At Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik says the lingering spiritual impact of 9/11 is profound. He was and still is a chaplain for the New York Fire Department and says he’s been especially inspired by the families of the 343 fire fighters who died on 9/11.

RABBI JOSEPH POTASNIK (Congregation Mount Sinai, Brooklyn Heights, NY): So this is a special reminder of many, many special people who are in our midst and who were in our midst.

LAWTON: Potasnik has experienced 9/11’s aftermath on several fronts: as an FDNY chaplain, executive vice-president of the New York Board of Rabbis, and spiritual leader of a synagogue just across the river from Ground Zero. The twin towers loomed large for his congregation, such as during High Holiday services, when they would walk down to the water for the traditional Tashlikh ritual. Eight years ago, Potasnik told us his people had been deeply scarred.

POTASNIK (file interview): You can’t often heal a scar, but you can cover it, and what we try to do, at least in the spiritual world, is teach people how to cover some of those scars so they can continue to live, and life still has meaning and purpose.

LAWTON: I asked him if some healing has now occurred.

POTASNIK: The healing has taken place because we’re inspired by those who have lost so much and yet love so much and want to live so much. I meet families all the time that have a hole in their hearts, and yet they continue to bring comfort to others. Have we healed? Yes. Healed with a hole. It’s never a complete healing, but at least there is that willingness to write a new chapter of life.

LAWTON: Postasnik has seen some new interreligious tensions, such as the controversy over plans to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero. But he says 9/11 has also opened the door for more interfaith cooperation.

POTASNIK: Those who destroyed those buildings, they wanted to separate us. They don’t want to see Muslims, Jews, and Christians and all the other groupings standing with one another. So the best message that we can convey to those that hate us is, “You will not prevent us from being one family.”

LAWTON: The 9/11 tenth anniversary, he says, is stirring up lots of memories and emotions. This photo was taken when Potasnik visited a makeshift shrine for his fellow fire department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, who died with other first responders on 9/11.

POTASNIK: The day before 9/11 in the year 2001, I was together with Father Mychal Judge. We stood at a rededication of a fire house. He said in life you have to learn to hold on to memory, hold on to the moment, and hold on to one another. That’s what he said the day before he lost his life. Isn’t that what we’re doing on this anniversary? Isn’t this what we are doing every day?

LAWTON: And if we’re not, he says we should be.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

MURRY SIDLIN (speaking to singers): Every note. Get inside of every note. Inside of every note.

BOB FAW, correspondent: In a Washington, DC church an impassioned conductor implores his choir.

SIDLIN: Don’t move, don’t move. Very nice. What you’re doing is very nice, and there’s no room for that. It has to be extraordinary—the sort of thing that you will remember all of your lives.

FAW: Whenever he can Murry Sidlin urges them to do more, because what they are rehearsing, what they are trying to commemorate, is another performance by another choir in horrific circumstances: Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.

SIDLIN (speaking to singers): To us it’s just damn words. They leave the rehearsal and walk over bodies to get back to their barracks. We cannot be indifferent.

FAW: This music, Verdi’s lyrical Mass for the dead, is a full-throated testament to the majesty and judgment of God, profound even in this rehearsal at Washington’s Kennedy Center. But it was perhaps never more powerful or poignant than its performance on June 23, 1944 in the concentration camp, Terezin, just outside Prague. When Jewish prisoners sang the requiem to their Nazi captors, that Catholic Mass, says Terezin survivor Vera Schiff, gave prisoners a way to defy the Nazis.

VERA SCHIFF: The text of the Latin prayers suggests that we all will be judged by the Almighty, and this will include the Germans. That was a promise. That the day will come in which we all will be facing the final judge, and that gave us a great deal of satisfaction and hope.

SIDLIN: It was cathartic, therapeutic, and important for them to remain dignified. They responded to the worst of mankind with the best of mankind. This is our way of fighting back.

FAW: In the cold, filth, and misery of a camp like this, a Romanian-born conductor, Rafael Schaechter, gathered 150 fellow prisoners, and in a dank basement with just one score and a broken piano taught them by rote Verdi’s sublime work. Choir member Edgar Krasa says Schaechter was extraordinary.

EDGAR KRASA: Socially he was a wonderful person, but once he sat behind the piano he was a real tyrant.

SIDLIN: The survivors who sang in this chorus say—said to me that when he started work on the requiem, and this is a quote, “he was like a crazed man on a mission.” He began to say things to them such as, “We can sing to them what we cannot say to them.”

FAW: Through the words in this Catholic liturgy, a Jewish chorus could stand up to the Nazis by letting them know what ultimately matters. Nazi propaganda films were made at Terezin to give the false impression Jews were happy there, well fed and cared for. When officials from the International Red Cross visited, things were spruced up even more. The Nazis asked Rafael Schaechter to perform that requiem for their guests. They probably couldn’t understand the Mass sung in Latin, but Schaechter and his choir understood exactly what they were doing.

SIDLIN: Here I can really make a difference—and not to all mankind. To myself, to my friends, to my colleagues, to my family I can make a difference. I can sing what I can’t say. I can respond in the best possible way to the unspeakable horror in which I find myself.

FAW: Performers could be deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, warned Jewish elders in the camp, if the Nazis understood the lyrics. So Schaechter gave his chorus a choice.

KRASA: He told us about the danger and said if you—whoever is afraid, there is the door, and you can go. Nobody left.

FAW: No one left?

KRASA: No.

FAW: The lyrics of the requiem and their hidden meaning were the source of the prisoners’ defiance. The second and longest movement, for example, tells of the day of wrath—Dies Irae: “The day of wrath, that day will dissolve the world in ashes. How great will be the terror when the judge comes” is how the Latin is translated.

SIDLIN: It’s very simple. God’s in charge of humanity, and if anybody fools around with that they’re going to hear from God.

FAW: Or take the final section—Libera Me.

SIDLIN: “Liberate me eternally from eternal death.” Terazín was eternal death. Through this music they found the mechanism by which they could sing to God with assurance that God’s presence is with them, and so I think they found in this work a spiritual reawakening or a spiritual reassurance.

FAW: The singing of Verdi at Terezin had a profound impact on the prisoners and singers, like survivor Marianka Zadikow-May, speaking recently at a symposium.

MARIANKA ZADIKOW-MAY: We wanted to be liberated and just hope that there is a loving Hashem in heaven who will hear you and liberate you.

FAW: In the wretched camp, says survivor Vera Schiff, Verdi’s requiem was a lifeline.

SCHIFF: It was part of the defiance, to keep up our spirits, to keep us in a frame of mind you want to live, you want to live another day. That was helping over the hunger, over the illnesses and deprivation, and that carries you a long way under the circumstances when we feared for our life day by day.

KRASA: We felt great because otherwise we had no opportunity to show the Nazis that we don’t, we’re not afraid of them.

FAW: Schaechter conducted Verdi’s Requiem 16 times at Terezin. After the final 1944 performance, he and most of the chorus were shipped off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. For the few survivors, remembering brings pain and pride.

SCHIFF: I think it brings back twofold emotions: the emotion of course of sadness, because in my case I’ve lost all my entire family. But simultaneously I think I find that it was a great achievement of what people can do under unimaginable circumstances.

SIDLIN: This was not commemorating death. It was commemorating the beauty and importance of life.

FAW: When the requiem ends in the multimedia concert Murry Sidlin created to commemorate Terezin, the mournful wail of a train whistle sounds, and as the audience watches film of Jewish prisoners being transported to Nazi crematoriums, one solo violin plays an ancient Jewish song which the condemned sang on their way to death—a haunting tribute to Terezin, where in defiance there was affirmation, indeed a kind of triumph.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly this is Bob Faw in Washington.

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: The patients are often teenagers or barely in their twenties, yet several of them hobble in on walkers to physical therapy. These women suffer from fistulas, ruptures in vaginal, sometime even rectal tissue—a humiliating, even crippling consequence in most cases because of obstructed childbirth.

DR. CATHERINE HAMLIN: They’re leaking urine, and some of them are leaking bowel contents as well.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Catherine Hamlin and her late husband, Reginald, came to Ethiopia in the 1960s as Christian missionaries and founded the Hamlin Fistula Hospital a few years later. A memorial to her husband invokes the Gospel of Matthew.

DR. HAMLIN: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, my brothers, you did for me.” In the Bible it says my brothers, isn’t it? We say brothers and sisters.

DE SAM LAZARO: The least of the patients the young obstetricians saw were those with fistula. Amid a lot of suffering, Dr. Hamlin says the fistula patients were especially desperate.

DR. HAMLIN: She’s smelling. She’s poor. She’s got nothing, and she’s an outcast from her whole society, from everything that makes her happy. They lie in bed thinking if I keep really still, the urine will dry up. They curl up in bed. They become stiff. Their knees become contracted, their hips become contracted. They get nerve damage to their feet. The sciatic nerve is pressed on by the long labor, and they’ve got paralysis of the feet. They can’t bring the foot up.

DE SAM LAZARO: Fistulas were common across the world until the early 20th century, when prenatal care and modern systems of delivering health care, like cesarian sections, became available. Today fistulas are almost unheard of in richer countries, but two million women endure them in the developing world.

DR. YETNAYET ASFAW: For me as an Ethiopian, the fact that fistula is happening in the 21st century is not something that we are proud of.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Yetnayet Asfaw works with a nongovernment aid group called Engender Health. She says the big issue is access to care in the vast, impoverished rural areas of this land of 82 million people plus myriad cultural practices.

DR. ASFAW: Eight-four percent live in the rural population, so the majority are rural women, and for rural women the issues are many. Women don’t have access to education. There are also several cultural issues, such as harmful traditional practices. Female genital mutilation is one, early marriage is another.

DE SAM LAZARO: Complications from the practice of cutting external female genitalia and other trauma, like rape, are thought to cause about 20 percent of fistulas. But the vast majority are a complication of obstructed labor, which results both in still birth and permanent injury to the young mother.

DR. HAMLIN: The pelvis of the woman is too small for the baby to come through, or the baby’s in a bad position inside the woman. So my husband used to say it’s either the passage or the passenger. The passage is the pelvis that it’s got to negotiate to get out, and the passenger is the baby, which if it’s not lying in the right position can cause the obstruction.

DE SAM LAZARO: Vaginal and rectal fistulas can be repaired surgically, and Dr. Hamlin, who is 87, still performs many of the procedures, like this woman’s case. We were asked not to use patient names.

DR. HAMLIN: Three days of labor, and then she had a stillborn baby, and then she was left with a vaginal fistula in her bladder. And it was quite—it was a reasonably difficult one.

DE SAM LAZARO: What’s the period of convalescence?

DR. HAMLIN: I think in about 10 or 12 days.

DE SAM LAZARO: She’s better off than most women here. Many have lived with their injuries for years, too late to be repaired even with surgery. Hospital services are free, but transportation is often unaffordable—if they can get a ride.

So how far away has this lady traveled to be here?

DR. HAMLIN: It’s about a four-hour drive.

DE SAM LAZARO: Four-hour drive, which for her would mean a bus ride, maybe?

HAMLIN: She would come in a bus, yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Which sometimes is difficult for them, if they’re…

DR. HAMLIN: Yes, it is difficult, and sometimes the passengers say, “This woman’s smelling. Put her off. She’s got some disease,” and they’ll be thrown off the bus.

DE SAM LAZARO: To offer better access to its services, the Hamlin Hospital created five satellite facilities like this one in the rural countryside. They are funded entirely by donations from governments and private, often church-based donors. Still, only a third of the 10,000 Ethiopian women who develop fistulas every year receive any care for them. That’s why experts say it’s important to shift the focus from repairing fistulas to preventing them. Ethiopia’s minister of health, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus says a holistic approach is needed.

DR. TEDROS GHEBREYESUS (Ethiopian Minister of Health): We need to focus more on community-based interventions and on preventing the fistulas. The most important issues, it’s the education part, which will be very important, and also law enforcement, like age of marriage is very important. Girls’ education is very important, and we’re working on that.

DE SAM LAZARO: His ministry has won praise from public health experts for building a network of rural health centers in recent years, with a major focus on maternal and child health. But there’s still a huge shortage of skilled people to staff them.

Midwife students in class: Anterior, posterior ….

DE SAM LAZARO: A few years ago the Hamlin Hospital began a four-year midwifery program. These freshmen were studying plastic models of the female pelvis, learning how to detect abnormalities in the fetus position. So far two dozen graduates have gone on to staff regional health centers in rural areas—a small, promising start, says Dr. Hamlin.

DR. HAMLIN: We just have to keep the next generation of doctors and nurses inspired to help these women until it’s eradicated from the countryside, and it can be eradicated and it will be eradicated. In England, obstetric fistulas no longer occurred after 1920, so it’s not so very long ago that fistulas were occurring in England and in Europe.

DE SAM LAZARO: But Ethiopia, like so many developing countries, has a long way to go. Most Ethiopian women today still deliver their babies without the presence of a skilled birth attendant.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, his is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

My lens is one of hope, based on six years of research and writing “The Monks of Tibhirine,” the book French director Xavier Beauvois called his “bible” for making his movie about Christian-Muslim friendship. My hope is also based on knowing the back story that goes untold in an otherwise excellent film focusing on the monks’ struggle to be true to their Trappist vows of poverty, charity, and stability when faced with their fear of a brutal death.

Some people today might say that Christian-Muslim love is an oxymoron. Yes, there are Muslims who preach hatred of the Christian West, even though fewer and fewer in the West (outside the US) are practicing or even professing Christians. There are no Muslims I have heard of who preach hatred or even disrespect for Jesus Christ, who is a much revered and sinless prophet in Islam.

There is, however, an active Christian minority that preaches hatred of Islam and regularly insults the Prophet Muhammad. Elements with political agendas on both sides benefit from blackening the other, and the media have been willing accomplices to this downward phobic spiral. “Of Gods and Men” is film that could help right perceptions.

Despite pleas in 1996 from both French and Algerian authorities to leave for a safer place when threatened by Islamic extremists, the monks remained at their remote monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains out of deep sense of commitment to their extended family of villagers who depended on them for moral, medical, and material support. Like their neighbors, the monks trembled with fear at night. They argued among themselves: does the Good Shepherd abandon his flock when the wolves come? Does a mother abandon a sick, infectious child? Does their vow of poverty allow for them to flee to safer ground when their friends cannot?

When seven of the monks were kidnapped, it was not their neighbors who did it. Instead, it was a contract job that employed a group from outside the area to take the monks away from their dangerous situation—to be traded, in effect. But something went wrong along the way. Of one thing I am certain: killing them was not the plan. If that had been the case, they would not have been schlepped around the country for two months nor would negotiations for their release have taken place. Yet for some viewers, I suspect this will be seen as simply another “bad-Muslims-kill–good-Christians” story—exactly what the abbot of the monastery feared when he wrote his last testament, read at the end of the film.

The film works very well dramatically as a struggle between faith and fear. By necessity it leaves out important and broader story components. The tenacious commitment of Abbot Christian de Chergé (played by Lambert Wilson) to serve God in Algeria had been formed in him as a soldier serving in the French army during the Algerian war for independence from 1954 to 1962, when his life was saved by a Muslim friend, an Algerian policeman named Mohammed who faced down local rebels who wanted to shoot Christian one day when they were taking a walk—a time when they would discuss their faith.

That friendship cost the Algerian his life the next day. For Christian, Mohammed’s sacrifice was a gift of love reinforcing his belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ resides in all his children. For the rebels, the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

The film doesn’t have room to tell about the seventy-plus imams who, based on the same logic, were assassinated in the 1990s for denouncing what the terrorists were doing in the name of Islam. The terrorists themselves could show respect for the monks. In a dramatic scene in the film, Saya Attia, head of the terrorist group that intruded upon the monastery on Christmas Eve 1993 with demands for medical help, apologizes to Christian for disturbing their celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Left out are the leader’s final words to Christian when he extends a hand in friendship: “We don’t consider you foreigners…you are religious.”

Nor does the viewer know that the tiny hamlet of Tibhirine was inhabited by families whose homes in the mountains had been bombed by the French during the war for independence. They had fled to the protection of the monastery, a holy place where the Christian “marabouts” (Arabic for religious teachers) sheltered them until they could build their own homes.

I have one regret about the film. It might have ended on a more positive note for Christian-Muslim relations by showing the genuine remorse of much of the Algerian population. Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers received sacks of letters from ordinary Algerians after the monks’ deaths were confirmed. The letters expressed a deep sense of solidarity with the monks as well as a sense of shame that was captured by this one: “No matter what has happened, we truly love you. You are part of us. We have failed in our duty—to protect you, to love you. Forgive us…You must accomplish your divine mission with us. I believe it is God’s plan.”

Universal fraternal love is the essence of Christianity and all true religion. Otherwise, religion degenerates into celestial nationalism. Christian himself frequently said that if religion doesn’t help us to live together, it is worthless.

The idea may seem laughably naïve in a post-9/11 world. Love, however, has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with good will, justice, empathy, and respect for others. Like their Savior, the monks’ lives were not taken. They were gifts of love.

John W. Kiser is the author of “The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria” (St. Martins Press, 2002).

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