On a crisp Christmas Eve in 1966, we are gathered for a Mass to be celebrated in a borrowed Armenian church in Mashhad, one of the most conservative cities in Iran and perhaps all of the Islamic world, a place where pilgrims flock to pray at a revered sacred shrine, and seminaries turn out droves of Muslim clerics.
We’re a gathering of 30 or so: Peace Corps volunteers, including me, serving in towns or cities in northeastern Iran, an American Fulbright scholar from the University of Mashhad, a sprinkling of diplomats and foreign service officers.
Two Catholic priests, garbed in white cassocks, one an American Jesuit, the other from France, are about to concelebrate the Mass in remembrance of the First Christmas. Off to the side in a dimly lit corner of the austere, dark-paneled church, the black-robed Armenian pastor is hunched over a bench. Leaning forward as he awaits the start of the Mass, he watches attentively while earnestly fingering his worry beads
Shortly after the Mass begins, two French nuns who labor selflessly in the local leprosarium come forward. They begin singing a serenely tender version of a venerable French Christmas carol:
“Il est ne’, le Divin Enfant
Jouez hautbois, ressonez musette
Il est ne’, le Divin Enfant
Chantons tous son avenement.
He is born, the divine child.
Play the oboe, resound the bagpipes.
Let us sing of his coming.
One of the celebrants, the Jesuit, is the Rev. Edward Gannon, S.J., He’s a former professor of mine, a mentor and friend from the University of Scranton, from which I had graduated six weeks before. He recently arrived in Mashhad to see me, having traveled all the way from Belgium where he was conducting research for a book at the University of Louvain.
When during the Mass it comes time for ritual prayers for the sick and the dead, I remember three fellow Peace Corps trainees at the University of Texas, one fatally shot and the other two seriously wounded in the notorious, all but unimaginably horrific mass shooting from a sniper on the campus in Austin, which I witnessed five months before in 1966.
I also remember an evening close to Christmas at my grandmother’s house when I was 4 years old or so. I’m cradled in a rocking chair being gently pushed by my aunt Mary. From the radio comes a song that, although I’m not much more than a toddler, I find very moving and still do: “O, Holy Night the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth.”
That song was about peace. But just then my thoughts turn to the antithesis of peace: that unprecedented mass murder in Austin.
August 1, 1966: I’m hiding, huddled against a building on the campus of the University of Texas, hearing the steady thumping of gunfire coming from the gray stone tower that dominates all below it.
Someone else hiding nearby has a transistor radio from which I learn that an unidentified sniper is shooting from the observation deck on the 28th floor of the tower. Hiding with me is a woman named Barbara. Like me she’s a Peace Corps trainee here in Austin for the summer to prepare for a two-year English-teaching assignment in Iran. We both agree that we’re scared.
At last, the shooting stops, 96 minutes after it started. The radio tells us that two brave police officers encountered the gunman in his towering lair and shot him dead. His name was Charles Whitman, and he was identified as a UT grad student, an ex-Marine sharpshooter and a former Eagle Scout.
In all, Whitman killed 17 people that day and wounded 31. Returning to our dormitory, we learn that our colleague and dear friend from California, Tom Ashton, was among the dead and that two others from our training group were severely wounded.
In front of the dorm, some of us trainees are weeping. Others are praying.
Toward the end of the Mass, I remember Tom during the ritual prayers for the sick and the dead. Soon the priests dismiss us with “Ite missa est. (“The Mass is Ended.”) Go in Peace.”
When we left the church, it was snowing. Just a light dusting. Nothing like the “snow on snow, snow on snow” of English poet Christina Rossetti’s Christmas poem “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
All these events occurred during the reign of the Shah of Iran, the king who ruled from 1941 to 1979 when he was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution by the Islamic Republic regime that harshly grips the country to this day with oppression, intolerance and a fanatical, fundamentalist, distorted version of Islam that particularly targets women, who are prey to the regime’s “morality police”
What then might be in store for the rulers of Iran? Perhaps a final reckoning, a call for repentance, a solemn requiem. And for the people of Iran, we might wish for swift deliverance from oppression, desolation and despair, possibly through regime change.
Both before and since the 1979 revolution, many Iranians, an estimated 3,200, have found their way into Connecticut, some of them exiles, others conventional emigres, still others native-born. They include Yale professors, doctors, teachers, businesspersons and other hard-working individuals.
One prominent exile named Farah Diba, the regally elegant widow of the Shah and the last empress of Iran, lived in exile in Greenwich for 14 years.
Anthony R. Cannella is a journalist who retired from teaching journalism at Central Connecticut State University and worked at several newspapers