A Call to Love: Lebanese Christian Shares Hope Amidst Conflict
Reported by Sophia Lumsdaine
Photographed by Luci Lettau
On Thursday, Oct. 16, the George Fox University (GFU) Center for Peace and Justice hosted a presentation by Elio Constantine, Director of Heart for Lebanon’s Middle East Center.
Weeks before his presentation, Constantine scrambled to catch a flight out of Lebanon with his wife and 13-month-old child. Their flight was one of the last to depart from Beirut to the United States. Constantine and his family are now living in a hurricane-battered North Carolina.
“We’re safe; we made it out,” Constantine said during his presentation. “We have so much to be thankful for.”
During his talk, Constantine provided a brief overview of key historical moments in Lebanon’s modern history and discussed the work of his organization, Heart for Lebanon, a Christian ministry that serves those in need in Lebanon.
Constantine described the various ethnic and religious demographics in Lebanon and explained the animosities between these groups. Major religious and cultural communities in Lebanon include Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Jews, Alawites, and Druze.
According to Constantine, these issues run deep and have been exacerbated by an influx of Palestinian refugees following Israel’s establishment in 1948, Syria’s occupation of Lebanon from 1976 to 2005, Israel’s occupation of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war, and recent surges of refugees arriving from Iraq and Syria.
Out of approximately 6 million people in Lebanon, “about 40% … today [are] Syrian refugees,” Constantine stated. He recalled that as a child, the walls in his Christian neighborhood were painted with anti-Syrian slogans. “I grew up in Lebanon being reminded every day who my enemy was,” he said.
According to Constantine, the solution to such hate and distrust is straightforward: “Jesus made it very clear; he told us to love our enemy.”
Heart for Lebanon was established in 2006 as a direct response to the Hezbollah-Israeli war. The organization began serving displaced families from southern Lebanon who “looked nothing like us, shared nothing with us, except that they needed help,” Constantine said. “It was a wake-up call.”
Constantine acknowledged that loving one’s enemies is much easier said than done. He stated that when contemplating love for their enemy, people face three basic options: they can either ignore the issue, passively pray for their enemies from a safe distance, or “go to the front lines and love [the] enemy.” This third approach is “the only solution to break the cycle of violence and hatred and despair,” he asserted. “There is no other way around it.”
He stated that Heart for Lebanon seeks to accomplish this by building relationships across cultural and religious barriers, meeting the physical needs of those in desperation, and “sharing the love of Christ” on a spiritual level.
In the last month, Heart for Lebanon has increased the number of families it serves by 2,000 due to the escalation of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. These families are part of the “1.2 million displaced from the south of Lebanon,” Constantine said.
“We don't care if they’re Muslim, if they’re atheist, if they like the color orange,” he stated. “We care about them because they are sons and daughters of Christ, and it’s our responsibility as followers of Christ to show the values of Christ to whoever we meet along the way.”