Dennis Covington’s Revelation: A Writer’s Search for Faith in Syria and Beyond

Scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed a month or so ago, I saw that Dennis Covington, a college professor of mine from years back, had shared a picture he’d taken. The photo showed two Syrian refugees, boys less than ten years old, trying to smile or at least imitating a smile. I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. You couldn’t deny their faces. They were a vivid reminder of the 21st Century’s worst humanitarian crisis. In a short caption, Dennis wrote that one of their fathers was missing and the other was alive, though he had lost his legs because of a bomb. They were both from Aleppo. “When I asked the boys what Aleppo had been like,” Dennis wrote, “they said there had been heads in the streets.”

As I write this, President Donald Trump has signed an executive orders that bans all Syrian refugees from entering the United States for 120 days. A federal judge has blocked the order for now. By the time you read this, though, who knows. Things are changing so fast and nothing is certain. That the United States as a whole has any compassion left definitely isn’t certain.

Dennis wasn’t just a professor of mine. He was my writing mentor. Everything good that I write is because of him. In the early 2000’s, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dennis had published four books, one of which, Salvation on Sand Mountain, a journalism-memoir hybrid about a snake handling church in Appalachian Alabama, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He was very much a Christian, though he was never rigid or judgemental. I took several writing workshops with him and the crux of his message was always that our work needed to be honest. And in that, he led by example.

I remember once sitting in his office for an evaluation in an advanced fiction writing workshop. He told me that if I wanted to get into journalism, the best thing to do was to cover a war, as he had done in El Salvador in the early 1980’s. Newspapers were always looking for people to put themselves in harm’s way for a story. The war in Afghanistan had just started and we were on the verge of going to war in Iraq, and so I gave his advice some thought. But I finally decided that I wasn’t the right kind of crazy for that kind of work.

Dennis’s 2016 book, Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World, is a story he clearly desperately needed to tell. His premise is a relatively simple one, though it’s complex in its details. As he writes in the prologue, he “began to reimagine faith as an action rather than a set of beliefs.” As such, even the non-religious are profiled as people of faith.

Revelation is bookended by the story of Kayla Mueller, an aid worker who was kidnapped by ISIS in late 2013. She was tortured, raped, forced into marriage, and ultimately killed when her makeshift prison was bombed. Mueller, a Christian, worked for several aid organizations in various places throughout the world before heading to Turkey to work with the great mass of Syrian refugees who were flooding over the border. When she finally crossed into Syria, she wasn’t on a humanitarian mission per se. She was simply accompanying her boyfriend Omar, a contractor for Doctors Without Borders. It was on this first trip across the border when she was kidnapped. In the book, Dennis describes how it only took one meeting with Omar to plant the seeds of distrust. Claiming to be Mueller’s husband, Omar tells Dennis that he escaped ISIS prisons twice. He doesn’t seem too upset that his wife has been abducted, and quickly transitions to talking about his budding career as a documentary filmmaker. Like so many other things in the book, Omar’s story is left at a loose-end. But that’s okay. There’s nothing tidy about Dennis’s books, thankfully.

After a brief prologue, Dennis gets into the story of his short sojourn into Juarez, Mexico in 2012. Juarez is a hub of drug cartels and a place of unimaginable violence. He leaves his farmhouse in Texas and joins his friend Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, among other nonfiction works, for a trip across the Mexican border. Bowden tells Dennis that the “only happy people in Juarez” are in the local asylum for the mentally ill. When Dennis and his group arrive, the residents and their pastor are out in the street, burning a paper-mâché effigy of Judas. He spends about a week living in the Juarez asylum where he reads about and hears stories of the terrible violence inflicted on the residents by the drug cartels and a corrupt government and even sees a man beating a woman in broad daylight. He’s incredibly moved when he hears an inmate, he calls him “Angel,” sing a hymn in Spanish that was a favorite of both Dennis and his late father. He comes to a realization. “I was the privileged. They were the deprived.” There’s tremendous guilt in that statement.

At one point in the book, Dennis questions everything he’s doing: “Was I merely an aging narcissist who was willing to take risks in order to get just one more story?” But we all know the answer to that. Beyond the narcissism that lives inside anyone insane enough to make writing their life’s work, the answer is, finally, “no.” Dennis is doing what he can. He reports on a kind of suffering that is hard to grasp for people living in comfort in the West. He’s a writer, and an emotionally involving one at that. Writers have a function, a job to do. Aid workers and governments have their jobs. Writers write. I remember during one of our fiction workshops in 2001, Dennis said that maybe we needed a cheer to end classes with and someone suggested, “If you write, then you’re a writer.” Dennis kind of smiled and shook his head. “I mean, yeah,” he said, “but if a student passes by and hears that…” He had a point, though the primary thing that Dennis impressed on us was that exact sentiment. If you write, you’re a writer. No matter what, and above everything else, writers write.

We need to know these stories, and someone has to tell them.

The Syrian narrative takes up most of the book. And why not? It’s here where Dennis plunges, dagger-like, into the heart of human suffering. His first trip to the Turkish-Syrian border comes in 2012, after he delivers an academic paper in Cyprus. From there he goes to Antioch and crosses the border with a translator. He does all this at his own expense, without the financial support of a newspaper or magazine, though he probably got a small advance from his publisher when he decided to write a book about these experiences. (It’s possible, in fact, that the idea behind the book had been around for quite a while. Dennis was never prolific, but the gap between his last book, published in 2004, and the 2016 release of Revelation is the longest amount of time between books since his first novel was published in 1991.) All this is to say that Dennis doesn’t cross the border as a journalist, but as a man driven.

He eventually makes it to Aleppo. He smells rotting flesh, gets fired on. Sees world’s largest covered market in complete ruins, reduced to rubble and ash. A bomb goes off somewhere in the distance and he feels like something inside his head has broken.

On the Turkish-Syrian border, he visits several hospitals, hangs out with children who are missing limbs, whose faces are badly scarred, who are deformed because of bombs, bullets and IEDs, children who insist on keeping their innocence, despite the horrors they’ve seen and the family members who are still missing.

The bomb blast in Aleppo leads to a terrible head injury, something that Dennis ignores until it almost kills him. But he gets brain surgery in time to save his life. And after he gets back to his old farmhouse in Lubbock, Texas, the depression he’s struggled with throughout his life comes back hard. He tells his therapist that he’s “uninterested in living.” His therapist tells him to pack a bag and prepare to go to the hospital if things get too rough, which they do, and Dennis ends up spending several weeks in a mental hospital where the patients don’t do much except make crafts and get ignored by the hospital staff. Dennis went through a lot to get this story to us.

As much as this book is about faith as an action, it’s about Dennis himself, specifically how he’s been drawn to and repelled by both violence and religion all his life. Though he lives in West Texas now, he grew up in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement. In Revelation, Dennis writes that one of the few times he saw his father cry was when he was in elementary school and news of the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was announced on the radio. His father was a segregationist but the brutal and inhuman hatred that drove four white supremacists to commit an act that killed four African American girls was too much for him. And so he broke down.

Being more or less from Birmingham myself (I only lived there for ten years during high school and college, but my family on both sides are from Alabama), I was particularly affected by a scene where Dennis writes of his going to a cafeteria-style diner after attending a church service on the 50th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. A white redneck type accuses a group of black folks of cutting in line and more or less orders them to the back. Dennis writes with sorrow, “Birmingham was still Birmingham.” And indeed, this is the hard reality of life in the South. I haven’t lived near Birmingham for over ten years, but I remember with a cold shudder just how devastating and real the racism still was. It had been pushed just below the surface, but it was there. What an awful thing, to be constantly reminded that people still consider you less than human, even in the 21st Century. Despite the descriptions of various horrors described in the book, this was the scene that made me cry. I couldn’t help myself. It was all too familiar. It reminded me of the brutality inside myself.

When Dennis was my teacher in the early 2000’s, he was very religious, even in his way a fundamentalist. But he was never a biblical literalist, which was something that separated him from the majority of the Southern Baptists that I knew. His innate compassion and curiosity meant that he was interested in everyone’s story, no matter their background, and even especially people whose backgrounds were different than his. He was never very comfortable in academia and enjoyed talking informally about literature, about God, about everything.

He’d long since quit drinking, but he loved to join his students at various bars after class. He was open to everyone, to everyone’s varied experiences, as long as you weren’t a complete monster. And so it’s not surprising that several of the heroes in his book about faith are atheists, or at least non-believers. What Dennis calls faith, we non-believers might call an unconscious drive to do good. Metaphysical or not, faith, as Dennis reasons, is something that imbues a person with the idea that, despite all evidence seemingly pointing toward the contrary, life has meaning. A particularly fine illustration of this concept comes toward the end of Revelation’s prologue, where Charles Bowden says to Dennis, “I cannot fathom people who think life is meaningless. The fucking dog at my feet knows better than that.” The quote isn’t elaborated on. It doesn’t need to be. It’s something that good people simply recognize as true, no proof needed. Dennis goes on, writing, “I knew then I’d stepped into the presence of something beyond belief. The conviction that life has meaning, I thought, must be the place where faith begins.”

Whatever your feelings on the meaning of faith, the most important thing about Revelation is that it illustrates in vivid detail the stories of real people affected by terrible violence. Statistics inevitably lead to abstraction, which is morally dangerous ground. Even so, the death toll in the Syrian war has been staggering. The Syrian Center for Policy Research reported in February that at least 470,000 people have so far been killed. Ten percent of the country’s population. And while it’s true that other estimates, including the UN’s, are lower, the amount of death and suffering in that country since the civil war began in 2011 is incomprehensible.

As I write this, a federal judge has already blocked Trump’s latest attempt at a “watered-down” version of an executive order which halts all refugee immigration to the United States for a minimum of 120 days. By the time you read this, who knows. Things are playing out at such a breakneck speed that no one knows how things are ultimately going to turn out. We can’t become the people that Trump wants us to be. We won’t.