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Triumph of the cross
St. Rafka Maronite Catholics raise cross on feast day
By Nissa LaPoint
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Photo by Nissa LaPoint |
It took a day of steady cutting, bouts of heavy lifting and frequent brow-wiping for a band of Eastern Catholics to build and erect a 12-foot wooden cross all in keeping with ancient Christian tradition.
After a quick “three...two...one” countdown at sunset, a group of men heaved the completed 200-pound Maronite cross upright into a small dirt hole behind their church Sept. 18.
Then singing and ululating in their native Arabic tongue, they praised God.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Lou Ashkar, the key founding lay member of St. Rafka Maronite Church in Lakewood.
Amid the plink of chisels, the creak of wood and the grunts of volunteers that Sunday was a festival for St. Rafka parishioners celebrating the Exaltation of the Holy Cross feast (observed Sept. 14 in the Roman Catholic rite) and their Middle Eastern heritage.
“They are so proud of their tradition,” said Father Bakhos Chidiac, the new pastor at St. Rafka.
The feast day is of great importance for Maronites, members of a Lebanon-based rite of the Eastern Catholic Church in communion with Rome. The Maronite Church expresses its faith through a unique liturgy and linguistic tradition but shares in the belief of the seven sacraments, the primacy of the pope and the dogmatic and moral teachings of the Catholic Church.
As bearers of some of the most ancient practices of the Church, erecting a hand-fabricated cross was a moment of pride and joy for members of the only Maronite Church in Colorado.
“The cross (raising) is great symbolism—and a great idea,” said parishioner Maroun Moussallem.
It’s the first year the small parish honed the triple cross, using tools similar to those in early centuries, in commemoration of St. Helena’s discovery of the True Cross in the fourth century.
Upon finding three excavated crosses in Jerusalem, St. Helena identified the one on which Jesus was crucified when its touch healed a dying woman. The cross became a symbol of veneration and followers of Christ made it a tradition, Father Chidiac said, to “process to the top of hills and celebrate Mass under the foot of the cross.”
A week before the annual festival, parishioner Paul Conkling gathered beams of pine and aspen wood to make the Maronite cross, also referred to as an Antiochene cross.
“It’s designed in a triangular shape to resemble the cedar trees in Lebanon,” Conklin said. The three horizontal bars on the cross symbolize the Trinity, he added.
“We think this will become a tradition,” Conklin said about making the cross.
Tradition was a word repeated by many parishioners at St. Rafka who are seeking to build their new community while preserving their spiritual and ethnic customs.
It was just four years ago that the Maronites found a home for their congregation at 2301 Wadsworth Blvd. St. Rafka Maronite Church was dedicated in 2007 by Bishop Robert J. Shaheen, head of the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon, a Maronite diocese that includes Colorado. For six years prior, the Maronites worshipped as St. Rafka Maronite Mission at All Souls Catholic Church in Englewood.
“For years we were a faithful without a home,” Ashkar said.
But what began as a social group in the ‘60s called the “Cedars Club,” later grew into a tight community dedicated to worshipping in their own traditions, he said.
The Sunday festival was ripe with other ethnic traditions, including an array of Lebanese dishes like kafta, a ground meat, and fattoush, a salad with pita bread, and the sound of Lebanese folk music.
Hand in hand with men and women of all ages, Ramsey Sawaya moved to the music in a dance called debke, an Arabic folk dance.
“The great thing about our church community is that it’s multi-generational,” Sawaya said.
Members of the church describe themselves as a congregation of about 50 families comprised of Middle Eastern immigrants, American-born Lebanese and other Americans who married into a Maronite family.
Some Church sources cite that of the 3.2 million recorded Maronites in the world, 94 percent are of Middle Eastern descent. An estimated 215,000 live in the United States, according to the Maronite Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Maronites trace their spiritual heritage to Antioch, an ancient city in modern day Turkey, where the apostle Paul made his first mission. The Maronite Church later took its name from the hermit-priest St. Maron, who died in 410 A.D.
“St. Patrick is to the Catholic Church in Ireland as St. Maron is to the Maronite Catholic Church,” Father Chidiac explained.
Later, the Muslim invasions of the seventh century forced many Maronites to flee the plains of Syria for the mountains of Lebanon. By 687, the Maronites organized around St. John Maron and thus developed a distinctive church within the Catholic Church, according to St. Rafka Church.
The festival and Exaltation of the Holy Cross for George Attiyeh, who helped organize the event, is a chance to raise awareness about Maronites and their persecution.
“The history and the culture is extremely romantic to me because the Maronites survived for hundreds of years in an area” that is dominated by Islam, Attiyeh said.
To this day, the Maronites operate as an autonomous Church under the pope with their own hierarchy. The Maronite Mass is rightly called the Divine Liturgy. It is recognizably Catholic but celebrated in a combination of English, Syriac—a dialect of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke—and Arabic.
“It has a haunting quality to it,” parishioner Anita Conkling said about the liturgy and music.
After raising the cross, a group of men and women sang an Arabic song about the Mother of God. They gathered around the cross to pose for photographs and admire it.
Rosie Gantos, who has attended the parish for three years, was among them.
“It’s just wonderful to see the craftsmanship of this cross,” she said.
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