What Remains Beyond Monuments: A Different Kind of Travelogue

I met Jacob Shahid Masih years before I understood why I kept returning to him. We worked together briefly during a medical elective in a rather unassuming place in Northern Pakistan that quietly reshaped how I thought about faith, care, and belonging. I have written about that time before.

He was a nurse by training. Looking back, that almost feels incidental. What stayed with me was the way he moved through the ward. He never seemed in a hurry. He simply seemed present. With patients. With suffering. With silence.

He sang. Sometimes devotional songs in Punjabi. Sometimes playful ones in Urdu. Sometimes simply because the moment could hold them.

I never knew where one tradition ended and another began. I never thought to ask.

Jacob seemed equally at home in Catholic churches, Sufi shrines, hospital wards, and in the company of people whose beliefs differed from his own.

He never appeared preoccupied with defending an identity. When conversations drifted towards religion, he would usually smile before saying very little.

What mattered to him was doing the work well. Becoming a little better than yesterday. Taking care. Staying grateful. Leaving room for child-like imagination.

Being around him left a residue I have struggled to describe ever since.

Even now, when I think of Jacob, I hear his singing before I remember his face.

Years passed. Life moved on, as it does. Yet every now and then, Jacob would return to me for reasons I couldn't quite explain.

A few months ago, I wandered through the Mesquita-Catedral in Córdoba, Spain. I found myself lingering far longer than I had expected, moving slowly through its arches and columns, trying to absorb not only its beauty but the centuries of history it had witnessed.

Only a few days ago, I found myself beneath the Berliner Dom in Germany. A very different place. A very different history. Yet I found myself lingering in much the same way.

Both buildings are extraordinary. They inspire awe almost instinctively. Yet the longer I spent within them, the harder it became to separate religion from history, history from politics, and politics from power.

These were never simply places of worship. They were repositories of conquest and coexistence, reform and resistance, memory and forgetting. They bore witness to humanity at its most creative and, at times, its most destructive.

I found myself looking beyond the architecture. Beyond the domes, stained glass, soaring ceilings, and craftsmanship.

Instead, I wondered about the countless ordinary people who had prayed there, celebrated there, mourned there, sought refuge there, or simply sat quietly with themselves over the centuries.

As I walked, more questions emerged.

Where was the language of tenderness?

Of nurture?

Of what I could only describe as the divine feminine?

I wasn't sure whether it was absent or whether I simply wasn't seeing it. Perhaps I was asking the wrong places the wrong questions.

Around the same time, those questions found an unexpected echo in a film.

In Wake Up Dead Man, the detective Benoit Blanc finds himself in conversation with a young priest, Father Jed Duplenticy, inside a church every bit as grand as those I had recently wandered through in Córdoba and Berlin. A place that almost demands reverence before anyone has spoken.

Blanc is angry. Deeply so. And understandably. His anger isn't directed at faith. It is directed at what people sometimes do in its name. He speaks about misogyny, homophobia, abuse, silence, and the protection that institutions can offer those who abuse power.

It is anger born not of cynicism, but of love with nowhere left to go.

The priest responds very differently. He doesn't argue theology. He doesn't defend the Church. He talks about stories. About meeting people where they are. About connection before certainty.

At first, I found it almost naïve. Then I wasn't so sure.

The conversation never really resolves. Nor should it. Blanc's anger remains justified. The priest's vulnerability feels genuine. Neither wins.

Then the scene changes. Light filters through the stained glass as the priest's voice begins to falter. He stops speaking as someone representing an institution and starts speaking simply as a person.

He says he has felt like a priest for the first time. That line stayed with me.

It doesn't erase what came before. It doesn't make Blanc any less right. But it quietly asks a different question.

What if vocation has less to do with defending institutions than with caring for the person standing in front of you?

The argument remains. And perhaps it should. Films, like books, can illuminate. They can expose. They can even inspire. But eventually the screen goes dark. We still have to decide how we want to live.

For that, I found myself returning to Jacob. He would probably have smiled at the entire conversation and then quietly gone back to work. What the detective named with anger, Jacob had long recognized without becoming hardened. What the priest discovered through tears, Jacob seemed to carry every day without needing to articulate it. He never separated faith from care. They were simply woven into one another.

Jacob had never needed a monument. The missionary hospital’s medical-surgical ward was enough.

Looking back, I think that is why I kept returning to Jacob. The deepest lessons have rarely come from the buildings. They have come from people.

Perhaps that is what remains. Not certainty. Not monuments. People.

And the quiet ways they change us.

from Rambling of an Itinerant

Additional Reading about Jacob.

Acknowledgment: Originally published in the Express Tribune: Beyond Monuments.