Eat, Pray, Levant: An All-Girls Retreat to Lebanon

When I received an invitation to join a Catholic Retreat last November, I had just paid my credit card bill in full, nearly maxed out from the previous month’s purchase of 2 round tickets to the Philippines.

It wasn’t the best time to plan another trip 2 weeks before my long-awaited return home, but something inside me said, “Yalla! What have you got to lose?”

A couple thousand dirhams, yes, but an experience of a lifetime.

The toughest person to convince was, of course, my husband.

Imagine my poor habiby’s reaction when I told him about my excitement to leave him.

“Just for four days,” I said.

As if that made the situation any better.

Just 2 months of marriage and the wife was already talking about ‘taking a break’ from the outside world.

It’s complicated enough to explain a retreat to a Sunday Catholic.

Moreso to my Muslim husband.

“Remember when we watched that horror movie ‘The Nun’?” I said, already making a silent Act of Contrition for what had got to be a sin. “Those nuns in the abbey making a vow of silence after sundown? A retreat is sort of like that.”

Of course it’s not.

But watching ‘The Nun’ was probably my husband’s closest brush with Catholicism, so I had to go with what I got.

He still did not understand why I had to live ‘like a nun’ for four days and in Lebanon of all places, but as with my other religious activities, he gave me absolute freedom to practice my Faith.

From there, it didn’t take much to convince my Christian boss to take 4 of my 30-day leave credits.

By early December, I was already on full visa application mode.

For those of you who haven’t read my blog series on Egypt yet, I get my kick out of applying for visas.

Nothing like investing so much time and money and leaving it all in the hands of a visa officer.

And nothing like the high you get when you finally get that stamp in your passport.

Yup, I’m a total visa addict.

The experience became even more fun with fellow meticulous planner Lara, who shared my bordering-on- neurotic way of preparing for a trip.

Together, we arrived at the Lebanese Consulate even before the visa officer arrived on duty in mid-December.

When the visa officer raised her eyebrow at my apparent “lack” of a hotel booking, I kindly reminded her that I was traveling for business, not tourism, and nowhere on their website’s list of visa requirements for business purposes (which I memorized by heart) mentioned a hotel booking in addition to an invitation letter.

Needless to say, she wasn’t too eager to accept my visa application — and Lara’s too, who was supposed to come after me, but when the visa officer saw me mouthing incoherent Tagalog at Lara, she put our visa applications together in 1 file and told us to come back on the 23rd of December.

Which I did and got my early Christmas present to myself: my first visa stamp on my newly issued 10-year passport.

3 weeks later, I boarded an early morning Middle East Airlines flight and arrived at Beirut at 6:00 a.m.

Together, we were an all-girl group of 9: Lara, Carol, Gen, Maida, Gwen and Mary Carmen.

Karina flew in from Doha and met us at the airport.

And Iva met us much later at the retreat house already.

Clockwise: Lara, Me, Gen, Mary Carmen, Karina, Maida, Berna, Carol and Gwen

We were Filipino, Cuban, Mexican and Croatian expats spread across the Gulf with one goal: to spend 3 whole days in continuous prayer.

While Catholic retreats are often held in the parishes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, I don’t think they have Closed Retreats here.

A Closed Retreat is just that.

Closed off from the rest of the world to focus all your attention on God.

And silence is golden.

Unlike the annual class retreats I attended in my Jesuit high school, where we had to form groups and share sob stories just because everyone else was doing it.

Because we arrived at the crack of dawn, we still had the full day to ourselves before retiring to the retreat house in the late evening.

First stop was breakfast in Beirut at the surprisingly delightful Zaatar w Zeit.

I didn’t expect much from a place with the name of my least favorite Middle Eastern food (closely followed by molokhiya).

But it was a cozy spot to eat Halloumi Manakeesh and sip hot cappuccino in the cold January morning.

Zaatar w Zeit’s Halloumi Manakeesh

And their White Coffee — which Gen thought was just plain hot water so she actually waited for the server to come with powdered coffee

And Beirut was really cold!

Not snow-cold (apparently, we arrived a day late after a snow storm) but still too cold for somebody who’s lived the first 20 years of her life in the tropics and then the desert.

The Christmas trees were still up nearly a month after Christmas, as it was a Lebanese tradition to leave the Christmas trees until after Candlemas (early February).

We exchanged stories with Berna, our local guide for the day, over a breakfast dessert of kunafa in the pan.

And then we were off to our second stop: the Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon.

It was a short drive from Beirut to Harissa, full of twists and turns up the mountain road.

The Shrine is home to a towering image of Our Lady, overlooking her beloved Lebanon.

If you climb 40 steps or so, you come face-to-face with her (which our group did while reciting the rosary) and also see the whole of Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea stretching from all sides.

The view was absolutely magnificent to behold.

While waiting for Berna to hear Arabic mass, us non-Arabic speaking pilgrims became tourists in the souvenir shop.

I only had a couple hundred bucks on me for the next 4 days, and Lebanon isn’t exactly cheap, so it took me a while to decide which souvenirs I should get.

But so did the rest of the Filipino ladies, which was a relief to me but probably a nuisance to the foreigners.

When I finally went outside with my bag of souvenirs, I saw a lady in abaya who just arrived.

A Muslim lady visiting a Shrine of Our Lady?

Only in Lebanon!

Our third stop (and barely even 11 in the morning) was the Cathedral of St. Paul, also in Harissa.

The interior walls were covered in beautiful religious icons from top to bottom.

While I’m more familiar with Western religious art, being able to touch the distinctly Eastern mosaics was a dizzying experience for me.

It was there that I learned that the Maronite tradition remains in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, even though I had initially mistaken the Cathedral for an Orthodox Church.

After taking a lot of solo and group shots, we trooped back to our van and made our way to Byblos.

Berna said it is the oldest inhabited city in the world, but she’s a Byblos native.

And I heard the exact same thing said about Alexandria by its local Egyptians, so I’m not really sure which is really the oldest inhabited city.

But they’re both very old, and in fact, the first thing we saw in Byblos were Roman ruins.

Fallen pillars of some long-forgotten ancient Roman structure, literally just lying there in the middle of busy Byblos.

We toured the city on foot, making our way down to the cobblestone souq streets, past the ruins of the Roman citadel.

And on to the marina, where the rough waves of the Mediterranean sprayed salt on our sleepless faces.

The uphill walk back to the main street from the souq was especially tiring, so we stopped inside the Eglise Saint Jean Marc.

And then off to an authentic Lebanese lunch at Ksar, where we sampled almost everything on the menu.

The Top 2 contenders were the kebab and kofta platters, but the garlic and herb potatoes, hot flat breads and even the tabbouleh (with all its parsley garnish) were just as good.

The serving portions were outstanding, the food quality excellent, staff hospitality superb — I highly recommend Ksar if you’re ever in the Byblos neighborhood.

And so glad I hadn’t spoiled my appetite with the street snacks lining the Old Souq!

By the time I was done, I was ready to roll… up my bed, that is.

But it was still close to a 30-minute drive from downtown Byblos to Gharzouz.

The final destination of the day — and our home for the next 3 days — was Al Tilal Conference Center.

On the way, we saw snowcapped mountains and were half-expecting to see snow along our path too.

As the late afternoon wore on, the air became increasingly chilly, so we didn’t linger too long to enjoy the sunset mountain view.

We did, however, enjoy plenty of that and more (fresh air, organic garden-grown food, long peaceful hours of prayer and meditation, etc.) over the next 3 days.

Now please excuse me if I don’t actually detail my precise spiritual activities over the next few days.

Suffice it to say that I was praying harder than I ever prayed in the last 3 years, and it did my soul a tremendous amount of good.

At the end of 3 days, our bags were packed, and we still had a few more hours to kill before our flight back to Dubai.

We were dropped off between the Independence Square and Mohamad Al Amin Mosque.

And continued on foot to St. Georges Maronite Cathedral, past the shisha cafes and into the middle of the iconic Nijmeh Square.

By then, we only had a few minutes left ‘til we had to get back into the van to catch our flight.

While we all wanted to extend our trip to see more of Lebanon, none us did — some had babies, some had husbands and all had work waiting for us back home.

So by 9:00 p.m., we took our flight back to Dubai and I reported for work the following day.

The chances of my husband letting me go again next year slightly increased when I brought him pesto sauce and apple jam from the organic garden of Al Tilal Conference Center.

Fingers crossed, things will all go smoothly, so I can attend the annual Closed Retreat for ladies in Lebanon next year and the years after that.