Mary, Mary, Why Ya Buggin?

When I was studying art and architecture in Florence, Italy a couple years ago, one of my classes was about women in medieval/renaissance art and religion.  We read about icons of the Virgin Mary, appearances by her, and the miracles attributed to her in Tuscany.  Despite learning a lot, it all seemed academic and far-away.  I mean, when people are malnourished and suffering from plague, the ordinary can seem miraculous.  However, despite my belief that these sorts of miraculous appearances stopped with modern medicine or the printing press, the Virgin Mary (or Miryam al-Adhra in Arabic) is apparently still maintaining a busy schedule these days.  In the last month, she's appeared in no fewer than five churches in Cairo alone.  Concentrated mainly in the poorer Coptic neighborhoods in Imbaba, Shobra, and Helwan, she has taken the form of a water stain, a crying icon, and at the church nearest to my house, a blue orb of light floating outside the sanctuary.


After hearing about this from an atheist ex-Muslim Coptic Art Historian (wow, that's a long title), we got in the proper mindset and trekked up north to see the Virgin Mother and get ourselves saved.


We passed by police barricades and about a hundred riot police with shotguns to enter.  Apparently, a few nights before, after word of Mary's appearance had spread, a mob showed up, shouting insults at the Copts inside.  This is particularly odd as Mary is the only woman to have her own chapter in the Qur'an and Muslims also believe in the virgin birth.  Maybe a little respect is in order for the Theotokos?  Thankfully, the often negligent government took some precautions to protect the church tonight.


In any case, with my whiteness and my friend's lack of hijab, we got in with no problem.  Once inside, as the priest chanted mass, people excitedly showed us cell phone videos they had taken of the previous night's appearance. One has to wonder how the various cults of medieval Christianity would have developed differently if videos were being taken of stigmata, bread becoming flesh, and Mary being everywhere.  

From the video, Mary appeared on the roof where all those streamers end.

The videos I saw definitely showed something.  It seemed to be a blue, glowing orb floating between the central and right cross on top of the church.  At risk of falling back into my usual pattern of blasphemy and disrespect, it reminded me most of Ghostbusters.


DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS, ST. MARK.

STICKERS!

After looking at pictures children had drawn of the previous appearances, we sat outside for a while, waiting with the rest of the crowd for Mary to appear again.  After waiting for an hour in the cold, the Virgin Mary Laser Light Show did not begin as expected, and we headed back home.

Tales from up the Nile

I spent the last few days traveling up the Nile to monasteries and towns near Assyut, El-Minya, and Samaloot.  Instead of writing the play-by-play, which would pretty well resemble my previous post (not much sleeping, lots of prayers, bad fool) I'll instead share a few sights I saw and people I met.

Brother Too Tall
After a tumultuous and freezing entrance (which I'll mention later) at the monastery of Our Lady of the Mountain at Dirunka outside Assyut, the monks were quite welcoming to me, as if, having passed the test of entrance (despite being neither Egyptian nor a Copt), I was now a part of the family.  After chatting with a monk that looked like Arab George Harrison for a long time, he suggested I talk with Br. Hedra AKA Brother Too Tall, because he used to live in America and could give me a different perspective.  I'm usually wary of when an English speaker is presented to me, because they almost always present a very different and rarely accurate portrait of the true state of affairs.  Nevertheless, I sat down for tea (YAY SUGAR) with him.

Now in his 30s, Brother Too Tall had chased the American dream with a passion for much of his life.  He immigrated to the U.S. when he was 16, settling in Reston, VA.  He got misty-eyed with nostalgia talking about the public library there and a quintissentially American Pleasantville existence.  After studying programming in college he got the job he wanted and was settling down.  "I thought I would never leave the U.S. again.  Everything I had ever wanted was there."  After a decade in the states, he felt the call to come home to Egypt and become a monk.  I asked him why he came back, what made him decide to change his life so radically.  "I just knew."

After a few more cups full of glorious sweet tea, I asked him how long he'd been in the monastery.  "Well," he started, "I became a monk in 2003.  And it's....What year is it now?"

The Girl with the Green Eyes
En route from Deir Mukharraq to Gebel at-Teir near Samaloot, I had to go from the town center, cross the Nile, and then hitch to the monastery on the mountain.  I walked through the busy market center of Samaloot, a run-down Nile valley town that time seemed to have forgotten.  More goods were transported by donkey cart than by truck.  As I walked through the busy vegetable market, where old women sat amidst piles of their produce, I saw a woman ahead.  She wore a yellow-starred black hijab, but curiously, a big cross hung down on her chest.  Apparently, Copts in Upper Egypt often wear the hijab.  With her flowing dress and green eyes, she seemed like she was plucked from medieval France.

Realizing that I was staring, I walked on, making my way to the pick-up truck that would take me to the river crossing.  As I waited in the back of the truck, sure enough, the green-eyed Coptic woman, along with her sister and her mother got in two.  Many of Samaloot's Copts live across the river, near the monastery.  They were going home with their vegetables.  The green-eyed one's mother had a permanent frown and the kind of wrinkled face that appears in National Geographic.  They each had small purple crosses tattooed on their wrists, and they joked loudly with the rotund Muslim woman who was riding with us.

As the small boat docked on the other side of the river, she came over to me.  Had she noticed me looking at her?  Finally, she said, "Excuse me, I need my vegetables."  Oh, I was in her way.  Right.

The Catholic
The Council of Chalcedon that began the schism between the Coptic Church and Western Christianity remains fresh in Copts' minds.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, they're not too fond of Catholics, and make many thinly-veiled references questioning whether Catholics are even Christians at all.  Since I can't very well claim to be Orthodox or Coptic, I have to go the honest-but-still-quite-dishonest route to say that yes, I am a Catholic.  Even still, this usually doesn't go very well.

At the monastery of Dirunka, where I arrived at 5:45am after an overnight train ride, I sat shivering at the gate for two hours of questioning.  It was really cold that morning.  After explaining that I'm Catholic, Brother George Harrison asked, 
"Are you Coptic?"
"No."
"Are you Egyptian?"
"No."

He was puzzled and quite skeptical.  "I'm sorry, we don't have room for you here."  This was a lie.  They had lots of rooms.

With my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I then asked, "Perhaps, is there room in your manger?" (So I don't know the word in Arabic for manger, but I said stable, and I think it got my point across)

After advancing from the gate to the entrance to the main complex, I went to the visitors office, where I had to register as a guest.  After repeating my name a dozen times, I looked down to see that I had been put in their guest book as "Edward Yohanna al-Katholiki."  They had made up a middle name, and given me "The Catholic" as a surname.  Nice.

The Coptic Soft Pretzel and Nuns with Orange Soda
After mass, Copts gather outside the church, chatting with the various priests and brothers, munching on the communion bread.  Though I didn't take communion, I didn't feel any such prohibition for the after-church bread.  It was like a giant soft pretzel.  Score one for Eastern Christianity. Though you can make the theological argument that the eucharist should be unleavened since Jesus was celebrating passover at the last supper, you never win arguments with a soft pretzel is on the other side.  Delicious soft pretzel.

The picture I didn't take this weekend was also at Dirunka, and also involved food.  After the day-time visitors had left and their work was finished, the nuns were gathered in the little square by the commissary, chatting, laughing, and downing bottles of Mirinda.  It made me really happy.

Egyptian Shumba

A week into the Egypt leg of my Watson adventure, I feel stupid for not coming sooner. As beautiful as Jordan is as a country, Amman just doesn't compare to Cairo by any measure.

After a few days bumming around Cairo as a tourist, devouring bowls of koshari, taking 'oud lessons, and exploring the souqs and alleys of my neighborhood, I made my first monastery visit.

To get permission to do this, I went to the Coptic Cathedral, where they promptly rejected me, sending me to the monastery offices at another church. In classic Egyptian bureaucratic fashion, the priest at this church said I needed to get a letter from the cathedral before he could issue a permission. Oy vey.

I used the only weapon at my disposal - looking pathetic and sad, and a Coptic guy drove me to the cathedral and vouched for me to some Abba, who was very skeptical of the intentions of a Catholic, a LATIN Catholic. (sidenote: isn't it funny how you can often tell prejudices from grammar and pronunciation? Eye-rakki, eye-talian, using Jew as an adjective, and pronouncing a hard o in Cath-o-lic. Anyways...) After some begging and ring-kissing (yeah, that happened), I got the letter allowing me to visit Deir Anba Bishoi and stay for a few days with the monks.

Arriving in Wadi Natrun the next day, the monk at the gate told me that while I could visit the monastery, due to the fast for advent, visitors were only allowed to stay in the papal palace at the monastery.

"Does your letter of introduction say that you can stay there?" the monk asked.

"Sure," I replied, having not read the letter (Arabic hand-written by old people is really hard to read).

Well, upon further examination, I wasn't allowed anywhere near the papal anything. Nice try. I went into the old church and got my first taste of Coptic prayers. In a hall thick with incense, the monks chanted, playing tambourines and cymbals as pilgrims came in to touch and pray before the relics of St. Bishoi.

On my way out, I stopped briefly at the Well of Martyrs, where the Bedouins who massacred the monks in the Middle Ages washed their swords.

With no clear idea of where I would sleep that night, I decided to try Deir al-Baramous, another of the Wadi Natrun monasteries that thanks to a lovely old Coptic abuna in St. Louis, I have a letter of introduction to.

After some intense questioning by a couple of monks, they decided that an Americani Katholiki could stay there for a few days.

Now I'm just going to come right out and say it: monastic life sucks. I like reading about monasteries and their histories, the works that get produced in them and even ecclesiastical politics. But I usually do those sorts of nerdy things within a normal schedule of eating and sleeping. That wasn't to be found.

The first evenings prayers were interesting enough, trying to follow along in Arabic and Greek to understand what was happening in Coptic kept me going despite my stomach growls. After reading most of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (I have a post coming on St. Moses the Black, who had a great sense of humor), I went to sleep hungry. I had missed the one meal of the day.

I didn't get much sleep on the mostly wooden bed and pillow that seemed especially ascetic. That wouldn't matter much as I was awoken at 3am for the next set of prayers. Expecting another hour-long episode of chanting. I was dismayed to find that I was still standing in a smokey church four hours later. They had kicked us pilgrims out before communion. So I couldn't even get some bread for my trouble.

My fellow pilgrims read the Bible and saints' lives in our room. Now I don't believe in God under normal circumstances, and I especially don't believe in Him having not eaten in about 36 hours or slept more than three. I took a nap.

I woke up at noon when a pilgrim asked me if I wanted to eat. Okay, God and I are back on good terms. The meal was bread and fool, mashed fava beans. My friend Andrew once remarked that even good fool tastes a little bit like vomit. This was really bad fool. Nevertheless, I demolished a plate of it. There was a saucer of molasses that I just started taking licks of, Bear Dinner-style.

Back to normal, I spent the afternoon reading more about the Desert Fathers, including St. Macarius, who founded al-Baramous, and St. Moses the Black, who is buried there. I alternated between thinking, "these are some alright dudes" and "wow, that's kinda messed up." Asceticism isn't my cup of tea. I think today these behaviors are termed anorexia and self-harm. Or at least being really emo for God. But I digress.

More prayers and less sleep, and it was finally the next day. I declined the invitation of my novice host (who was a great guy and wore a baby-blue dishdash) to stay another few days, and I headed back to Cairo, a city where I can buy a baked sweet potato on the street at midnight for 50 cents. In other words, home.

[A note on the name Deir al-Baramous: Deir means monastery, so that's self-explanatory. Despite being better known for Moses the Black, Baramous takes its Coptic name Pi-Romios from two Roman brothers, sons of the emperor who came to the desert to meet Macarius and then proceeded to fast themselves to death. Smart.]

Location:Cairo, Egypt

Cold Jordan

With my time in Amman drawing to a close, I recorded a couple songs. One of them, "Cold Jordan," is a traditional that I first heard covered by the Grateful Dead. Maybe it's my tribute to my home of the past four months. It's a little bit Jesus-y, but there's a long line of good songs with Jesus in them, notably Kris Kristofferson's "Jesus was a Capricorn," the traditional and Nirvana's cover of "Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam," and Kanye's "Jesus Walks," which is just a great song.

Anyway, "Cold Jordan" is a good song about the river and the apocalypse. I also did Jolie Holland's "December, 1999," which is just how I feel right now. She's my favorite singer, and I believe every one of her songs, which I think is pretty rare.

These songs are availale at www.drop.io/tedssongs

Catch you on the Cairo side.

In it to Bedouin it

After finishing up my volunteering and visits with Iraqis, I headed out to the desert for Thanksgiving and Eid al-Adha with Katkuta and Nawaf, a Bedouin guy I know.  He lives in Wadi Musa near Petra, and I had stayed in his cave a few months ago.  After he picked us up at the bus station, we drove down to a wadi, seasonal creek valley, near the Bedouin village.  Nawaf, his uncle, and his nephews were working on a dam to provide water for sheep in the mountains.

The Approach

Along the way, we had to scale a 25 ft. cliff face with a rope hanging down from it.  I wasn't sure of my own rope-climbing abilities, but I saw Nawaf's uncle, who is 70, doing it in sandals and a dishdash, while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.  He even adjusted his kuffiyeh halfway up.  Apparently, the secret to aging well is tea and cigarettes.


At the top, the Bedouin boys (including Awidh, a Saudi paratrooper who is Nawaf's nephew) broke rocks to make the approach to the dam easier.  Then, they broke more rocks because they're boys, and throwing big rocks off a cliff is fun.  I made a fire for tea, while Nawaf's uncle boasted about the gun he has up on the cliff.  Another hour of rock-breaking, and we were heading down, by which I mean climbing down.  Nawaf had to go back home to get some supplies, so Katkuta and I started walking to Wadi Araba, a desert on the Israel/Jordan border.  Nawaf told us not to get into a car with strangers, and he'd pick us up later on the road.

Hiking out of the wadi along a possibly ancient aqueduct

After an hour or so, a white Lincoln with Kingdom of Saudi Arabia plates pulls up.  It's the nephews and they tell us to get in.  After a short drive, we got to the edge of a valley.  In front of us was Wadi Araba with the lights of Southern Israel in the distance.  As we sat on the ground looking out, the Bedouins cranked Dr. Dre and Akon from the car stereo.  It was a little bit surreal, but quite a sight.


Soon, Nawaf pulled up in his pickup truck and we descended into the desert below, going off-road for a while before ending up at his tent.  While Nawaf and Katkuta cooked thanksgiving dinner (meatball curry with potatoes), Awidh and I went out to get firewood.

By moonlight, we gathered brush. Très romantique!  However, when we had filled the back and were ready to go, the truck was stuck in the sand.  After a half-hour of gunning the engine and then digging out, we gathered some brush and put it under the tires.  The truck finally got out.  Exhausted and relieved, we came back to camp.

Thanksgiving Dinner, 2009

After gorging on the meatballs (after fasting all day, save tea and water), the predictable thanksgiving food coma set in.  After the requisite arak and campfire, I fell asleep.  It wasn't after 8:30pm.

Camp at dawn.

The next morning, I awoke at dawn.  Awidh was already up making tea, and we watched the dawn.  Très romantique!

Sunrise in Wadi Araba

After lounging around camp for a while, we went into town for Eid.  I'd been to Nawaf's house before and met his six (or seven?) kids, ranging from 3 months to ten years.  Most of the day was spent serving as a jungle gym for Abdul Salam (his four-year-old) and Ola (his three-year-old).  Neighbors and relatives came and went all day, bringing gifts and candies for the kids.  It was a wonderful mixture of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

The day after Thanksgiving was Eid al-Adha, the Festival of the Sacrifice in Islam.  It commemorates Abraham's offering of Isaac and subsequent sacrifice of a ram.  I thought about this during Eid quite a lot, and I can't help wondering a bit about Abraham.  I mean, three major religions revere this guy.  However, I'm of the belief that when God is telling you to kill your child, it ain't God talkin'.  I know the story is supposed to show Abraham's devotion to YHWH and that whole deal, but what parent would even think about doing that?  That's insane.

That aside, Muslims generally celebrate by sacrificing a sheep, goat, or even a camel for the holiday.  They keep a small amount of meat for themselves, and give the rest to poor families, migrant workers without families, and others in need.  But as many of us are wont to do, I just skipped straight to the meat.  In fact, there was a traumatic event in between.

Never bond with an animal you know is going to be killed shortly.

The brothers and cousins go to work.

It is finished, mostly.

Several years ago, I gave up eating mammals for ethical reasons.  I empathize with sheep, cows, and pigs.  I don't really empathize with chickens or fish.  Anyway, I suspended my dietary restrictions because Iraqis and Arabs have lamb at pretty much every meal.  This was really hard to watch.  Pain and panic filled the sheep's eyes as it bled out, struggling.  It spasmed for several minutes afterward.  I'm glad I saw it to understand where meat comes from.

I could write a bit more about the other events in the desert - a foot race down a sand dune, a few fires, and a lot of shai, but I'll leave it at the sacrifice.

Eid sayyid