The monastery of St. John Douma lies in the district of Batroun at an altitude of eight hundred meters, thirty-five kilometers from Batroun and eighty-five kilometers from Beirut, among four Orthodox villages in an otherwise Maronite canton - Kfour al-'Arbeh, Douma, Kfarhilda, and Bayt Shelala - which contain many ancient and modem churches. The monastery lies on a mountainous promontory overlooking the Nahr al-Jawz valley, comparable to the sacred valley of the Qadisha for the many old monasteries and churches strung along its course.
The brick and ocher of St. John Douma contrast with the green of the surrounding olive-groves, highlighting the natural environment of cliffs, rocky slopes, and forests. It has a massive aspect in which ancient and modern buildings are interspersed. Hermit grottoes are dug into the forested cliff overlooking the monastery.
A new community of nuns has been established at the monastery of St. John, and a community of monks has restored the rustic old house that now bears the name of St. Silwan the Athonite.
The community at Douma the Holy Trinity Family maintains a close relationship with the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex Great Britain and the monastery of St. John the Baptist at Kareas in Athens. It also belongs to the fraternity of St. Silwan in Europe, and relations have been established with the monastery of St. Silwan near Chartres in France.
The life of prayer at the monastery is adapted to the changing seasonal requirements of agricultural work. Prayers are made according to a personal program for each monk or nun. In addition, the prayers of the horologion are divided according to the day of the week, and the different liturgies are celebrated according to the liturgical calendar. Young people and families from the region come regularly for advice and the strengthening of their spiritual life.
Working life at St. John Douma is undertaken in an atmosphere of calm and silence for six hours a day. The nuns work indoors in service occupations and workshops, while the monks work in the olive-groves and vineyards. During spring and summer, the nuns help in harvesting the vegetables, fruits, and roses that constitute the monastery's main revenue. St. John Douma specializes in the preparation of provisions sold in the monastic shop. The vineyards provide sweet wine for the liturgy. A sewing workshop provides black habits for monks and nuns; other workshops provide knitwear for children, woolen chaplets and crosses, and adhesive icons.
The superiors of the community often participate in conferences and colloquia organized by (he monasteries and fraternities of Essex and Chartres. Translations have been made of the biographies and works of several fathers of Orthodox monasticism. Since 1990, an encyclopaedic work, the compilation of an Orthodox synaxary in Arabic, has been undertaken with the aim of publicizing the local Arab roots of Antiochian Orthodoxy. The fifth volume has just appeared. Newly introduced into the liturgical year are Antiochian saints who have played a role in the West, newly canonized saints in the Serbian and Russian churches, and saints common to the Orthodox, Maronite, and Syriac Orthodox churches. The study of ancient manuscripts in the monasteries and libraries of the region has allowed local saints and martyrs to be discovered and added to the liturgical calendar with the approval of the Metropolitan.
HISTORY
The date of the monastery's foundation is unknown because archives go back no earlier than the nineteenth century. But architecture and archaeology attest to its great age. Remains in the basement and the massive stones forming the church's outer wall and the walls of the corridor leading from the courtyard to the kitchen appear to be of Roman origin. A Roman temple possibly occupied the site before it became a Christian place of worship and monastic life.
The oldest manuscripts of the monastery date from the Crusader period. A Jacobite evangelary with exegeses of John Acephalos (MS12), and a book of the prophets read during liturgical celebrations (MS10) are dated 1242. Paragraphs of these manuscripts are written in Syriac, indicating the presence of a bilingual community using both Syriac and Arabic. Probably of similar date are homiletic manuscripts in Syriac, which include the sermons of Church Fathers and the Jacobite author Jacob of Sarug (MSS 14, 15).
St. John Douma is also mentioned in a letter written to the leaders of Mount Lebanon by Jibrayil Ibn al-Qila'i. He described it as a Maronite monastery, where the third synod of the Maronite Church was held in 1440 in the time of patriarch John, from the village of Jaj in the district of Jbeil, before his flight to Qannubin.
The monastery was inhabited by Orthodox monks during the Ottoman period. A colophon, marked in a typicon (MS34) of the monastery of St. Elias Shwayya, records that it was copied at St. John Douma in 7103 of the era of Adam, corresponding to 1595. The copyist was a deacon from Beirut known as Ibn al-Hourani, son of Tadros, and the informs us that the superior of St. John Douma at the time was Isaiah (Sha'ya).
An euchologion (MS4) records that land was granted in waqf to the monastery in 1770. A Triodion (MS6) of 1785 records that the monastic superior Eftimos undertook all necessary measures in order to regularize monastic life at St. John Douma: the purchase of liturgical objects and vestments, the copying and redaction of manuscripts, and especially the purchase of lands and mills for exploitation. Four monks and several others assisted Eftimos in his task, which was undertaken while loannikos the Cypriot was Bishop of Beirut. Several of these monks had come from the monastery of St. Elias Shwayya in the Metn. They belonged to the Ma'alouf family, which migrated at that time from the villages of the Metn to Douma, became closely tied to the life of the monastery, and contributed several superiors. During this period, the northern monasteries of St. John Douma, Kaftoun, Hamatoura, and Sayyidat al-Nuriyyeh depended on the bishopric of Beirut and were often placed under a single superior.
When the bishopric of Mount Lebanon was established in 1901, the four monasteries were transferred to its jurisdiction. A school was founded at St. John Douma by the superior Basilios al-'Amm in 1911. It was built above the church and the ancient constructions to the east of the interior courtyard. It received sixty to one hundred boarding pupils from all communities who were taught Arabic, French, English, science, and literature. The school continued to function, though irregularly, until 1950.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the superior Gerasimos Fawaz was visited by the Russian consul Lichen; together, they planned to build the serviceable road joining the village of Douma to the predominantly Orthodox district of al-Kura, which runs for its greater part through lands belonging to the monastery.
