Saint Ephrem the Syrian and the Maronite Church

1. Who Saint Ephrem was

Ephrem was born around 306 in Nisibis, today's Nusaybin in Turkey, and served there as a deacon and teacher. When the city passed to Persia in 363, he moved to Edessa, where he died in 373. He wrote in Syriac, the Aramaic of Edessa, and is remembered as its greatest poet. In 1920 Pope Benedict XV declared him a Doctor of the Church.

2. Theology you sing

Ephrem did not write treatises. He wrote madrāshē — teaching hymns set to known melodies — and, according to tradition, trained choirs, including choirs of women, to sing them. For him, poetry, music and faith were not separate things but one. That is why he is called the "Harp of the Spirit".

3. The Maronite Church

The Maronite Church takes its name from Saint Maron, a Syrian monk who died around 410. His followers settled in Mount Lebanon, and the church became one of the pillars of Lebanese history. It belongs to the Syriac tradition, is in communion with Rome, and its patriarch resides in Bkerke. Its liturgy uses Arabic and Syriac: many of the old prayers and hymns are still sung in the language Ephrem wrote in.

4. The Qadisha valley

Qadisha means "holy" in Syriac. For centuries this deep valley in northern Lebanon sheltered hermits, monasteries and the Maronite patriarchs. Above it, near Bsharri, grows Arz er-Rab, the Forest of the Cedars of God. Together they have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1998.

5. An echo in Gibran

Kahlil Gibran was born in Bsharri in 1883, at the edge of this valley, and is buried there. Reading him, many Lebanese hear the same sensibility Ephrem left behind centuries earlier: art, music and the spiritual as one body, not three separate things.

Related: Garshuni and the Qozhaya press · The Phoenicians and Lebanese identity · The Syriac inside Lebanese Arabic.