Saint George and Me

Several years ago, shortly before my twenty-ninth birthday, I discovered that I owed my existence to St-George.

I had always assumed that one’s life story ought to begin at the moment of one’s birth; but now I belonged to that smaller group of people who can start their story even farther back: the moment of their parents’ first meeting.

The potential of my subsequent existence began when my mother, a young woman of twenty-two or so, accepted a lift from a young man driving a red Fiat convertible.

She knew him only as a friend of a friend and had noticed him because of the little red car. She also remembered her friend mention that this young man was in his third year in Electrical Engineering at the American University of Beirute, the same university she attended. All this information could not have gone unnoticed; there was a part in my mother’s mind conditioned by Arabic culture to keep stock of all the merits that made a young man a good “choice” for marriage. And this part of her mind, consciously or not, must have gone instantly into operation. So far, she liked his lanky dark looks and his exuberant personality; his choice of career promised a decent living, and his choice of a vehicle seemed to please her even more. Only one thing remained unknown; his religion.

While they drove down some dusty road in Beirute, she noticed a small laminated portrait of St-George glued onto the dashboard. This answered her final question; her mother would be happy to hear that her youngest and ninth daughter had found a good Christian engineer. After all, this was still Lebanon in the late sixties, and a marriage between a Christian and a Muslim was a rare incident to be avoided, by both sides, as much as possible. Little did my mother know that the young man was, in fact, a Muslim. His Christian friend who had sold him the Fiat had put the portrait of St-George there. By the time she found out about the portrait’s original owner, it was too late.

Two years later my brother was born, and a few years after that my parents moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

My mother was nearly twenty-nine years old when she had me, and my little sister followed five years further down the road. With five-year intervals between each offspring, our lives lined themselves up neatly unto the temporal line like increments on a ruler.

Without any one realizing it, St-George made a re-appearance. Among the few religious objects that my mother had brought with her to Saudi Arabia was a small, laminated, oval-shaped portrait of Saint-George. It hung on the wall beside the mirror of her dresser, and dangling about it was one of her mother’s rosaries, made of lavender plastic with a tiny crucified Jesus carved onto the cross. The third object was always in the farthest corner of the dresser, often hidden behind perfume-bottles still in their boxes, clusters of spiky hair-curlers, piles of make-up compacts and a pair or two of broken sun-glasses.

This object was a small wooden shrine containing a metal relief of the Virgin Mary and child Jesus. It was shaped like a shallow house with a tiny ornate tin cross on its pointed roof. It had a small fence made of delicate tin lace-work behind which Mary and baby-Jesus were mounted onto the wooden back-wall. Between the relief of the two figures and the tin lace-work sprouted a tin seashell protecting a small red light bulb, which when lit threw a warm fuscia light onto the holy pair.

A good portion of my childhood was spent with a magnifying glass in one hand and one of these three objects in the other. By the time I was nine years old, I had memorized every inch of their respective surfaces. But St-George’s portrait grew less, instead of more, comforting. I became more and more hesitant whenever, out of habit, my hand reached out to unhook the oval picture. If I happened to be near my mother’s dresser, my eyes uneasily darted over the wall where the portrait hung and then away again.

Occasionally, I would surmount my uneasiness and study the picture thoroughly. The saint was a young man, a knight in silver armor, mounted on a pearl-white horse. His spear, as thin as a needle, pierced the belly of the sea-foam-blue dragon coiled around the horse’s legs. The knight looked down at his dragon as he killed it, and the expression on his young calm face was not one of violence, but of compassion. The dragon in its turn was forever looking up at the saint, its expression as fathomless as that of the occasional salamander that was caught slithering around in our bathtub every now and then.

There were times when my mother caught me studying St-George’s portrait, and she would instantly begin telling the story of how St-George killed the dragon.
“There was a terrible dragon terrorizing the nearby villages, and every week a young girl would get kidnapped by the dragon. The people of the villages were very upset to lose so many of their daughters so they asked God for help and He sent them a knight to fight this greedy dragon.”

Some times this story took on a darker tone: “The people of the villages were very superstitious and believed that, by giving the dragon one of their young virgin girls as a bribe each month, the dragon would leave them in peace. Saint George believed in God and His power to help him defeat the dragon once and for all so that no more young girls would have to die because of an old superstition. You see how he killed the dragon?” my mother would point to the portrait as she picked up a basket of dry laundry. “God helped him, of course.”

There was no sign of God in the portrait, no halloed old man watching from behind a bolder in the background. I asked God for help to find a dragon many times, or at least a horse, but no help came. At least, not in the way I was told it came in stories in the Bible and the Quor'an.

I longed to meet a dragon, to look upon his otherworldly face and let his knowledge of a world without God pierce me. I drew dragons instead; dragons, damsels, horses and houses in the woods. St-George was too foreign to me by being a grown man, so I drew the liberated village-girls instead. These girls very rarely returned to their villages, but set off towards solitary houses in the woods where they rode their own horses and met with talking dragons behind St-George’s back. In the woods they remained; their yellow hair left untied and their white nightgowns now sporting pink polka dots.

Many years later, the year I turned twenty-nine, a brilliant girl from Calgary named Renée came to live with me for a few months. We set each other ablaze with talk, and during such late-night or late morning talks she mentioned Joseph Campbell’s “dragon analogy”.

According to Campbell, anyone searching for meaning in his or her life can be likened to a hero fighting a dragon. The dragon in this case is a symbol for whatever prevents a person from achieving his or her highest potential, or, as Campbell puts it, “following your bliss”. The hero begins his journey by climbing the sharp scales on the dragon’s back starting from the tail up. Each scale represents some obstacle such as social conditioning generating fear, emotional and creative repression, gender roles, etc. As the hero gets over a scale, he climbs higher towards the dragon’s head. The last scale is the steepest and sharpest, and it is where most people give up the fight. This scale is the obstacle of Social Duty. It isn’t only the hero’s family, but society at large which applies pressure to make the hero conform to its rules of conduct. The hero is pressured to give up any personal goals for the sake of fulfilling public ones such as a "good" marriage, raising a family and pursuing a financially rewarding career. If the hero resists such pressures, perseveres in his struggle to find his bliss and then follow it, then he will have vanquished the dragon. He will leap off of the dragon’s snapping head and onto new uncharted territories; he will finally enter Life in its truest form. Those who fail to pass the last scale will be hypnotized by the dragon; pinned down by its admonishing gaze, shamed into stagnation and nostalgia.

Most people will find Campbell's analogy a bit harsh, but I don't find that he wrote it as a judgement but rather a clue. When I first read Campbell's work, I felt a great connection to his ideas. I saw in print what I had intuitively known all my life: stories, especially fairy-tales and myths, came from somewhere very real and very necessary to us. Our lives seen through their lense revealed the inner patterns that spelled our own private mythologies. Every person is the heroe of his or her story, he or she writes it as they go along.