I ran to that altar with four other men to knock everything off it and destroy what the Catholics call the Eucharist.

And when my hand got within 12 in of it, a light came out of that small white disc that stopped every one of us called.

If a piece of bread lights up from the inside when five men come to destroy it, what does that mean about what is actually inside it? My name is Ramy Khalil and I am 26 years old from Brussels, Belgium.

Though I have been living in Perth, Australia for the past 18 months and I want to be clear before I say anything else that I am not telling you this story to make myself into something interesting or to build a following or to impress anyone with the distance I have traveled.

I am telling you this story because it is true and because the true version has a detail in it that I spent 14 months trying to explain away and could not.

And the detail is this.

I rushed toward a Catholic altar with the specific intention of destroying what was on it.

And something on that altar lit up from the inside when my hand got close.

And I have not been the same person since that night.

I grew up in the mbeake neighborhood of Brussels, which if you follow European news, you have heard described in ways that are sometime accurate and sometimes not.

But which if you grew up there you know as simply home a neighborhood with a specific smell in the mornings.

Diesel from the buses and bread from the Moroccan bakery on the rol and coffee from the cafe on the corner where older men sat outside on plastic chairs regardless of the temperature and argued about football and politics in a mix of Daria and French that required both languages to fully understand.

My family had been in Molen Beake for 22 years by the time I was born.

My father Hamid had come from Morocco when he was 21.

My mother Nadia had followed 3 years later after their marriage was arranged through the families and they had built a life in that neighborhood with the specific determination of people who understand that the life you build is the only one available to you and that determination is not optional.

My father worked for the Brussels Public Transit Authority for 24 years.

He drove buses on the number 56 line and the number 83 line and he knew every stop on both routes by heart the way some men know scripture.

He was a man of few words and complete consistency.

He prayed five times a day without exception.

And he fasted every Ramadan without complaint.

And he gave to the mosque collection every Friday with a generosity that my mother sometimes quietly questioned given our household budget and that my father never once reconsidered.

He was not a complicated man.

He believed that Islam was the foundation under everything that mattered and that living honestly inside that foundation was the whole of what was required of a person.

My mother Nadia was the complicated one.

Not in a difficult way.

In the way that intelligent women who have been given fewer options than they deserved become complicated, turning inward and building a rich interior life because the exterior options are limited.

She read constantly French novels and Arabic poetry and biographies of scientists and philosophers and the occasional mystery novel that she hid under the couch cushion when she thought my father might find them and ask why she was reading about murders.

She was funny in a quiet
dry way that you only caught if you were paying attention.

She made the best misman in the neighborhood and she knew it and she accepted the compliments on it with a modesty that I understood even as a child was entirely performed.

She prayed with my father and she fasted and she wore hijab on the street and she believed in Islam the way she believed in gravity as something demonstrated by reality rather than something requiring defense.

I had one older sister named Yasmin who had married at 23 and moved to Leage with her husband.

A quiet engineer who was genuinely kind to her and who my father approved of and who Yasmin seemed content with in the specific way that contentment and joy are sometimes confused for each other.

And then there was me, the youngest, the one who had my mother’s interior life and my father’s stubbornness and my own particular version of the anger that seems to grow in specific neighborhoods.

When the gap between what a society promises its children and what it actually delivers is large enough and persistent enough that the children stop believing the promise was ever genuine.

I was smart in school and I knew it and the knowing made the gaps more visible and the visibility made the anger more specific.

I could see exactly where I was being sorted and why and the seeing did not make me accept the sorting.

It made me look for the story that explained it and the people who had already found that story and organized themselves around it.

I found them when I was 17 at a football club that was not really a football club that used the football as the legitimate face of something else happening in the back rooms after the matches.

The man at the center of it was named Bilal.

He was 30 when I was 17 which made him an adult in a way that carried authority.

He was from Mullen originally but had spent time in Paris and came back with a certainty of conviction that I found deeply reassuring because at 17 what you want most is someone who has already figured out the things that are making you angry.

He was intelligent and calm and he spoke about the Muslim community in Europe with a clarity that felt like the first honest description of my experience I had ever heard from someone in a position of authority.

He said France and Belgium had imported labor and then spent 40 years trying to import only the labor while leaving the human beings who provided it in a permanent state of provisional belonging.

He said the institutions of these countries, the governments, the schools, the media, and particularly the churches were all coordinated parts of the system that maintained that provisional belonging.

He said the church specifically was the historical institution of European cultural dominance and that every Catholic church in our neighborhoods was a monument to a project that had been running against us for centuries.

I believed him.

At 17, I believed him the way you believe a doctor who gives you the name of the disease you have been feeling the symptoms of for years.

The naming felt like power.

The framework felt like clarity.

The group felt like belonging.

I spent 3 years inside that framework.

From 17 to 20, I participated in what Bilal called awareness actions, which was his careful name for showing up in groups to make our presence felt in ways that the law could not directly address.

We stood outside churches during services.

We disrupted Christian community events by arriving in numbers and making the space feel occupied.

We were never officially violent.

Bilal was careful about the line.

He understood that crossing it brought consequences he was not prepared to manage.

But we were very skilled at operating right up against the line and making people feel everything that was on the other side of it without technically being on that side.

The night at Sanjil was Bilal’s most ambitious action.

Sanjil was a Catholic church in the commune of Sanjil about 20 minutes from Molyic by tram.

It was a larger church than the ones we usually targeted.

A 19th century stone building with a tall nave and the stained glass windows and an altar at the front that was elevated on three steps and held what the Catholics called the tabernacle.

A gold colored box that contained what they called the Eucharist, the consecrated hosts that they believed were the body of Jesus Christ.

Bilal had been watching this church for weeks.

He said a priest there had been publicly vocal about what Bilal characterized as anti-Muslim rhetoric in a civic debate about a proposed mosque construction permit.

He said the priest’s vocal opposition made him a representative of exactly the institutional church opposition we were supposed to be resisting.

He said we were going to go into that church on a Saturday night when it was empty and we were going to go to the altar and we were going to take the tabernacle and empty it and scatter what was inside and photograph it and post it and the message would be understood by everyone who needed to understand it.

I want to be precise about what I felt the night we planned this.

I did not feel reluctance.

I felt the specific righteousness that the framework had been building in me for three years.

Bilal had taught us to see the Eucharist not as a sacred object but as a symbol of Christian supremacy, a ritual that claimed to make the divine physically present in a church in our neighborhood as a territorial statement.

Destroying it was in the framework not an act of desecration.

It was an act of resistance against a symbol of occupation.

I had the framework so deeply inside me by that point that I could not see the person behind the symbol.

I could not see the 70-year-old woman who came to that church on Saturday mornings and knelt before that tabernacle and found in it the only reliable comfort she had encountered in a difficult life.

I had reduced everything to symbol and system and remove the people from the picture entirely.

That is what frameworks do when they are working correctly inside you.

They make the people disappear.

There were five of us, Bilal, me and three other men from the group whose names I will not use here because this is my story to tell and not theirs.

We entered through a vestibule side door that Bilal had scouted the previous week.

A door whose lock had a weakness he had identified and prepared for.

The church was dark except for the sanctuary lamp.

at same small red flame that burns near the Catholic altar at all hours to mark the presence of what they believe is inside the tabernacle.

The flame was about 30 ft from where we entered.

In the darkness, the red lamp was the most visible thing in the building.

We moved up the center aisle in the dark.

My eyes adjusted and the shapes of the pews and the statues and the windows became visible as darker shapes against the general dark.

The altar was elevated on its three steps with the tabernacle at the center, a box about 18 in tall with a small door in the front.

Bilal reached the steps first.

He gestured for the rest of us to spread across the width of the altar.

We moved into position.

I was closest to the tabernacle about 4 ft away.

Bilal nodded.

I stepped forward.

I reached out my right hand toward the tabernacle door.

My hand was 12 in from it.

And then the light came, not from the sanctuary lamp, not from anywhere I could identify, from inside the tabernacle itself.

Through the small door and through the seams around it, came a white light that was not the white of electricity or candle.

It was warm and directional, and it expanded as I watched it the way light expands when a door opens, filling more of the space in front of it with every second.

It lit my hand from underneath.

It lit the altar stone.

It moved up the wall behind the tabernacle and across the ceiling of the apps.

It was completely silent.

It had no source I could name.

And it had a quality that I do not know how to describe accurately except to say that it felt aware, not aware of the room, aware of me, aware of exactly where I was standing and what I had come to do.

And here I was underneath the three years of framework and the righteousness I was wearing like a second skin.

My hand is stopped.

Not because I decided to stop it.

My hand stopped with the way a hand is stopped when it touches something that is not the temperature it expected.

I looked at the light.

The light looked back.

That is the most accurate sentence I have.

And I understand it does not make scientific sense and I am telling you it anyway because it is what happened.

Behind me I heard one of the other men make a sound that was not a word.

A short involuntary sound.

the sound a person makes when something surprises the air out of them.

Bilal said nothing.

I could feel him behind me standing still.

All five of us were completely still.

The light from the tabernacle filled the apps of that church with a warmth and a presence that made the word still feel wrong because it still implies nothing is happening and everything was happening in that moment.

Just none of it in a way that motion could capture.

I stood with my hand 12 inches from the tabernacle door for what felt like a long time.

Then I took my hand back.

I stepped back one step, then another.

I turned around and walked down the center aisle toward the door we had come in through.

And I did not look back and I did not run.

And the light was behind me the whole length of the aisle.

And I felt it on the back of my neck.

The way you feel sunlight on your skin, warm and despecific and impossible to pretend is not there.

Nobody talked about it on the walk home.

We split up the way we always did after an action, breaking into smaller groups and moving separately.

I walked alone.

The tram station was four blocks from the church.

And I stood on the platform and waited for the number 81 with my hands in my jacket pockets and the lights still somewhere in my chest as a quality rather than a sensation.

The same way a song stays in your body after the music has stopped, not the sound of it.

the presence of it.

I got home at 11:30.

My parents were asleep.

I went to my room and sat on my bed in the dark and tried to do what I had always done when something happened that did not fit the framework.

I tried to find the rational explanation.

I tried to be systematic about it the way Bal had taught me to be systematic about everything that the Christians presented as evidence for their claims.

He had a standard response to any report of Christian miracles which was that Christians manufactured supernatural experiences because their religion required supernatural experience to survive in an age of scientific skepticism.

He said every claimed miracle was either staging misperception or the motivated interpretation of ordinary events by people who needed things to be more than they were.

I applied this to what I had seen.

Maybe the sanctuary lamp had been positioned in a way that reflected off the gold surface of the tabernacle and created an amplified glow.

Maybe the darkness of the church after our eyes had adjusted to it made ordinary low-level light look extraordinary by contrast.

Maybe the stress of what we were doing had put my nervous system into a state where I was misreading sensory information.

I went through every option.

I sat on my bed until 1:00 in the morning, applying every tool the framework had given me to the experience I had just had.

None of the tools fit.

The light had not come from the sanctuary lamp.

The sanctuary lamp was red and small and behind me when I was standing at the altar.

The light from the tabernacle was white and warm and came directly toward me from in front.

The darkness adjustment argument did not hold because the light had been bright enough to illuminate my hand clearly from underneath.

The way a flashlight held below an object illuminates it from below.

The stress argument did not hold because all five of us had stopped.

Bilal had stopped.

The three other men had stopped.

You cannot explain a shared involuntary halt of five people through individual stress response.

Stress responses are individual.

stops are individual.

Five men stopping simultaneously in the dark of a church in front of a light that none of them had been told to expect is not an individual stress response.

It is a shared encounter with something real.

I did not sleep until after 3 in the morning.

I woke at 7:00 with the quality of the light still in my chest and the rational explanation still not found.

Bilal called me the next afternoon.

His voice was the voice he used when he was managing something controlled and slightly elevated in the way the control sounds when it is covering something underneath it.

He said some of you got spooked last night.

It is understandable.

Church atmospheres are designed to create psychological effects.

The lighting, the architecture, the silence, it is all intentional.

What you experienced was the environment doing exactly what it was designed to do.

I said all five of us stopped at the same time.

He said fear is contagious.

When one person hesitates and the group reads it and responds, I said it was light.

Bilal light came out of the tabernacle.

He was quiet for 2 seconds.

Then he said, “Light comes from the sanctuary lamp.

The lamp reflects off the gold surfaces.

In a dark church, your perception is altered.

” I said, “The light was white.

The lamp is red.

” He was quiet for 3 seconds this time.

Then he said, “Rammy, we will plan it better next time.

Better scouting, better timing.

” I said, “I am not going back.

” He said, “You are emotional right now.

Take a few days.

” I said, “I am not emotional.

I am telling you what I saw and I am telling you I am not going back.

” He said, “This is not a decision you make alone.

” I said, “I just did.

I ended the call.

I sat in my room after the call for an hour.

Then I got up and went to the library.

Not to read about Christianity specifically.

I went because the library was quiet and I needed to think somewhere that was not my room.

And the thinking I needed to do was large enough to require a large quiet space.

I sat at a table near the window with the winter light coming through the glass and I thought carefully about what I had actually believed for 3 years and whether I had believed it because it was true or because it was given to me by someone who seemed certain and I had needed
certainty at 17.

The true things in the framework were true.

The experiences of being sorted and excluded and looked at a certain way on public transit had been real.

The institutional disadvantages that the children of immigrants in Brussels faced had been real.

The specific tired injustice of a society that welcomed your labor and declined your belonging had been real.

These were not inventions.

They were observations.

But the framework I had been given to understand these observations had added things to them that were not observations.

It had added an enemy with a face.

It had added churches as outposts of that enemy.

It had added the moral imperative to resist those outposts through actions that I now sitting at a library table in the winter light understood to be the reduction of individual human beings to symbols and the treatment of those symbols as legitimate targets and the removal of any obligation to consider
the actual people on the other side of the symbol.

That was not truth.

That was the framework using real pain to serve its own logic.

I sat in the library for 2 hours.

Then I went home and ate dinner with my parents and said nothing about any of it.

After dinner, I asked my mother who had always been the reader in the family, whether we had anything at home about Christianity.

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