On February 14, , the day Rafik Hariri was assassinated, I was sent to confession for the first time. I was ten years old and in the fifth grade at a Catholic school run by Lazarists above the bay of Jounieh.
Our headmaster had called an emergency assembly in the basketball court. A car bomb had exploded outside the Hotel St. George, he announced. The former prime minister was dead, along with twenty civilians. Hundreds more had been injured. Glee is not an appropriate reaction to news of an atrocity. Even as a child, I knew that. But all it took was one of us to crack and let a giggle float free for the rest of us to lose composure.
Soon, we had erupted into open, flagrant laughter. In Lebanon, politics proceeds not by election, but by emergency, and we had learned that when political events of this magnitude occurred, recess was our reward.
That afternoon, we were pulled aside and scolded. This was a moment for reflection and mourning, the headmaster admonished us, and our response had been insensitive and unchristian. We would have to face the moral consequences of our actions.
He marched me and my friends from the gym to the chapel, where I entered the dark booth, knelt, and unburdened myself. Young, doctrinaire, deathly serious, physically imposing, Father Jean-Mansour was precisely the last person I should have been honest with. I had found the assassination, the bomb, the prospect of seeing the crater in the downtown streets β I had found it all exciting. Father Jean-Mansour, who had been kneeling inside the other end of the booth, stood up, looked straight down at me, and delivered judgment.
