Ceto’s Rule
The sermon preached by Fr. Ernie on Sunday, December 11, 2022.
Ceto’s Rule
by Ernest Boyer
This is the 3rd Sunday of Advent, so today we light the 3rd candle of our Advent Wreath, the pink one. Traditionally this is the one known as the Candle of Hope. It’s a beautiful name isn’t it. The Candle of hope. But what is hope?
You know, several years ago I went to an all-day seminar in St. Andrew’s church in Saratoga. The subject of the seminar was a book called the Hidden Power of the Gospels. The seminar was led by the book’s author, a man named Alexander Shia. Alexander comes from an ancient Lebanese family — a Christian Lebanese family. His ancestors had lived for centuries — many centuries — in southern Lebanon just a few miles north of Galilee, the region where Jesus grew lived. In fact, the chances are that those ancestors were among the very first Christians in the world. His family have been Christian for as long as there had even been Christians.
For millennia they had lived in the same village in southern Lebanon. But then in the 1950s they were forced to flee. They left to escape the ongoing violence caused by a border dispute with Israel. The whole village left, not only Alexander’s entire extended family, but most of their neighbors too. They all moved together. They went, of all places, to Birmingham, Alabama. They chose Birmingham because it already had a small Lebanese-American community and a Lebanese Christian Church. At that point, though, in the period following WWII, Birmingham was notorious even in the Jim Crow south for the viciousness of its racism. The local Ku Klux Klan had developed the practice of using bombs and arson to bring terror and death to African-Americans and other minorities — so many bombs in fact that the city came to be called “Bombingham.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950s there were no fewer than forty bombings, and one small area where whites and blacks violated the rules by living together came to be known as “Dynamite Hill.” And yet it was to this city that Alexander Shia’s family chose to move.
It was a city known around the world for its hatred of African-Americans, and yet there’s a funny thing about hate: that is that hatred never just stops with one group. The people who hate African-Americans also hate Jews … and Catholics,… and Gays… and Asians …and immigrants …and Muslims …and, it turns out, Christian Arabs too. Little Alexander quickly learned that there places where it was not safe for him to go. There were many stores that he could not enter, swimming pools and parks where he was not permitted, schools he could not attend, districts he had to avoid. They were all the same places that an African-American child couldn’t enter either.
Birmingham’s small community of Christian Arabs had always been close, of course. They had to be. They had to be in order to be safe. Alexander’s large extended family kept very close also. And at the center of that family, holding it all together … was one woman. That woman was Alexander’s grandmother, who everyone simply called “Ceto,” Ceto is Arabic for grandma, but everyone called her that. Her grandchildren, of course, but also her children, her nieces and nephews, her great-great grandchildren, her cousins, her more distant relations as well as those outside the family. Even the priest called her Ceto. Alexander called her Ceto too.
“Let me tell you about my Ceto.” Alexander said during the seminar at St. Andrews. “Ceto was the pillar that held everything in place. She was the gravity that pulled our large, unruly family together as well as the bridge the linked us all to our heritage. The fact is,” he went on, ‘my earliest memory was of sitting on my Cito’s lap as she chanted the gospels to me in Arabic. The thing is, Ceto herself was illiterate. She couldn’t read a word. But as so many before her, she had learned large sections of the gospels by heart, and in our tradition the common practice was not simply to say the gospels but to chant them. So those were my earliest memories: hearing the gospels chanted to me by my grandmother in what was my first language, Arabic. As a result, I came to love these stories. I loved them because they were inseparable from my Ceto’s voice.”
Then one night when Alexander was still a child, his mother woke him suddenly from his sleep. She was crying. Refusing to answer any questions she dressed him quickly. Then, together with all the rest of the family, they ran to Ceto’s house. As they approached Alexander was horrified to see Ceto’s home engulfed in flames. The fire cut through the darkness, the angry flames slashing high into the moonless night. They all gathered around the house, calling out and wailing, convinced that their Ceto was dead.
As it turned out she had decided to go to church that night. It was not a night she usually went, but on an impulse, that night she did. So, they found her alive and wept with relief. But when they went into the house, they discovered that the fire had obviously been set, clearly by the Ku Klux Klan. Everything in the house — particularly every religious artifact — had been placed in the center of the room and then doused with kerosene. Evidently the fact that they had been Christians from the earliest times meant nothing to these people. As far as the KKK was concerned, they were the wrong kind of Christians. They looked different. They acted different. So they were different. And because they were different, they were hated. The event was devastating. The family hardly knew what to do. And yet, there was one thing that they all knew would never change.
“The thing is,” Alexander said, “In our family there was one rule that was absolute. We all called it ‘Ceto’s rule,’ and as far as I knew, even the 10 commandments came second after Ceto’s rule. Ceto’s rule was this: every Sunday the entire family was to come to her no… matter… what. That was it. She’d say, ‘As long as I’m healthy, everybody is to come to dinner, no exceptions, no breaks. And if I’m not healthy everyone is to come to see me in the hospital.… And if I’m dead, everyone is to come to my grave. Come to me every Sunday. All of you. No exceptions.’”
So, the Sunday after the fire — they all gathered as they always had, but for the first time in young Alexander’s memory, they didn’t gather in Ceto’s house. That house was gone. Instead they went to the only other place large enough, the house of Ceto’s youngest daughter. Even then, with so many in the family, the only place that they could all fit was in the basement. It was unfinished but had cement floor. They carried down the dining room table and set up card tables around it. Then, when that was not enough, they took sawhorses and laid boards across them to make places for the rest. Ceto was at the head of the main table with all her adult children around her. The rest of the family were at the surrounding tables. The children were all crammed along the edges with the older ones watching the younger. As they waited for the food to come everybody talked among themselves. There was so much talk, so much turmoil about the fact that Ceto’s house had been destroyed, so much rage at the fact that the family had been attacked. It was agitated, angry, frustrated talk. And the question everyone was asking was this: “What are we going to do about it?”
Suddenly in the midst of it all, Ceto pushed back her chair and stood. Immediately the room became quieter. A few people who were turned away continued to talk but others tapped them on the shoulders and immediately they turned and, seeing Ceto standing, at once stopped talking too. Within seconds the whole room was totally silent. Ceto looked around and said, “I have just one thing I want to say, just one.” She paused then circled around slowly, taking in each person in turn. “Just one thing to say, she repeated.… It’s this: no… hate.”
Then she waited.…Getting no response she shifted to face her oldest son who was sitting beside her. Locking her eyes onto his, she said, “No hate.” She then stared at him in silence. Her gaze never wavered. At last he looked away. Slowly he nodded. With that, Ceto turned to her oldest daughter and, holding her gaze, said again, “No hate.” She then stood unmoving until her daughter nodded too. Ceto then went one by one to each and every person in that room. Staring hard into their eyes, she repeated again and again “No hate…No hate” and didn’t take her eyes away until one by one they each nodded. From the oldest to the youngest, no one was left out. She even included the infants. She would look at the mother first and say “No hate,” wait for the woman to nod, then glance at the child she was holding and say, “Tell him too: ‘no hate,’” and wait until the mother nodded again.
“As long as I live,” Alexander said, “I will never forget that moment, the moment when Ceto looked at me and said, ‘No hate.’ It changed my life. That was the moment when I realized that all those beautiful stories that grandma Ceto had chanted to me weren’t just stories. They were a way to live my life. It was also the moment when I knew that, with God’s help, I would follow what those stories taught. I would follow them from then on. For as long as I lived. That moment has made all the difference.”
So…what is hope?
Emily Dickinson says that hope is a bird that sings at night. What I take that to mean is that hope is not necessarily expecting a quick fix. Hope is the ability — the grace — to know that there is a deeper truth and be willing not only to proclaim that truth but to sing it, singing it even in the darkness, even in hard times — so that others feel the hope too. And the truth that hope knows is this: that in the end love will win. It will win even when hate seems to prevail, which means that we ourselves need never — must never — give in to hate. Love wins. Because God wins and God is Love. This is the hope we celebrate today, the 3rd Sunday of Advent. Let us each resolve to be that hope. Let us sing in the darkness, giving voice to hope both for ourselves and for all those around us. Amen.
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