“Wanna mess with the monks? Mess with ME first. Wanna rumble, now?”

A friend sent me this:

During the political crisis was that the Bedouins went into the secret mountain passes with their AKs to guard against anyone getting through to the Monastery, and also took over the checkpoints abandoned by the police, reverting to their 6th century role of guarding the Monastery as though the intervening centuries never occurred, and without even having been asked to do so by the monastic community, who were very moved when the Bedouins came and told them what they had done. There were some incidents in the nearby village, but things stayed under control, glory be to God. The nuns were called in from their hermitages, and that’s about all I know, except that I think things are pretty much back to normal now, if there is a normal.