Why Sinai? Why not?

All the Saints, more than one every day.  Day by day they are remembered.  What a crowd  and just from one tradition.

Whoever painted these Saints on their Saints days managed to write the name of each one in teeny writing above their head.  You need a magnifying glass to decipher the words but if you screw up your eyes you can just see the halo and the name.  The monks are saintly and I believe that their lives as renunciates are fitting them to become Saints when they die. So, when they leave their bodies accompanied by their two angels, the guardian one and the receiving angel warding off any demons, their journey to heaven is their perfection.  Then, the belief is that after years in heaven, at the second coming, back they will wing to those bones faithfully preserved and prayed over in the ossiary and their new life on earth will be a new heaven on earth.  That is what I understand.  In the meantime, I am left thinking about their lives which faithfully follow the calendar of Saints, faithfully celebrate the great feasts of the Church, lighting candles, venerating the icons and saying the psalms, all of them each week so they know them by heart (and in Greek!).  Us, we just spend a week in the Monastery observing a quieter way of life, reading and studying and meditating and then we come home, home to our lives as householders.  They remain.  We are struck by the discipline and devotion of these monks and the way they as a community have steadily prayed and venerated and chanted and fasted and feasted, have polished the lamps and lit them, have minded the manuscripts and given hospitality to passing pilgrims.  We are struck by the fact that they hold the door open to heaven by these actions so that when we visit we get a glimpse of why they do it, we get a glimpse of why there is always a need for special people living dedicated lives as an act of love.  We are also left thinking that this tradition needs supporting, it needs to be recognised so that there will always be monks at Mount Sinai.  Many people visit the Monastery as an historical site which of course it is and perhaps they might not see what is actually happening day by day behind  the historical building and the site of the burning bush but there is an invitation always open to pilgrim types to take time out of their normal lives and go there to join the continuous cycle of prayer.  You will get a welcome straight from the heart of everyone at the Monastery, they are so pleased that you want to come and warm your heart at this place.  I can recommend the journey and recommend Wind, Sand and Stars expertise in getting you there and keeping you safe and well while you are there.  I am going back next spring on a proper retreat and if you want to come with me, get in touch with me or Wind, Sand and Stars

Modern Day Pilgrims

it's not so difficult to climb Mount Sinai if you have help

That was where we were heading right up to the top

Hadi helped us up there

Abdul and friend

It was our second day there when we nearly all went up to the summit of Mount Sinai.  There were some intrepid walkers who did the whole thing on foot and some who took a camel's help to get to the halfway station.  You have to be quite intrepid to get on the camel.  Some of the camels are old hands and aren't that pleased to have another day clambering up the rocky path with an old Granny on the top. The camel who got me was an old boy called Abdul and he definitely wasn't pleased to be on this trip.  It is quite difficult to get mounted both for the camel and the Granny.  The camel has to be sat down and the Granny has to get her leg right over the top of the camel who, even lying down is quite a large lump of camel.  My Bedouin helper called a friend and somehow hauled me over the top so I was sitting astride Abdul and then Abdul got up, back legs first which meant that I was dangerously close to his head and then once the back legs were up, they were followed by the front ones.  Off we went, up and up the rocky path criss crossing the mountain so that if you looked above you you could see the line of camels on the horizon ahead with your friends on top.  Abdul wasn't up for speeding unless he suddenly thought he could do an overtake on a precipice!  My Bedouin helper was an extra brought in as there were so many of us and he was a bit fed up with Abdul too, he kept having a little sneaky slap of  him and shouting Hari Hari which must mean Get a move on Abdul.  The camel riders were up to the half way station in about an hour and a half and the walkers who could be seen below took about two and half hours.  We stopped for tea and photos in a tea stop.  Nice hot sweet Bedouin tea which slipped down easily.  Then onward and upward and it really was upward.  Upward of 750 steps and some steep and some less so.  We passed many places where Moses had been and probably Elijah too and we were certainly following in the footsteps of monks and hermits and pilgrims as well as intrepid climbing tourists.  Some people climb the mountain in the early early hours to catch the dawn at the top but we were daytime climbers and reached the top by about midday.  There is a chapel which was closed, a relatively newly built one and a mosque also closed but there is a square space where there is nothing but views and that is where you get a glimpse of the eternal mountain which has seen the prophets, saints and others come and go.  Here we were quiet.  Then we took our way back down with a friendly Bedouin who took we Grannies by the arm and kindly chatted as we scrabbled a bit down the high and lower rocky steps.  Some of us needed the help as our older legs were unused to the up and down-ness of Holy Mountain climbing with high altitude as well as high holiness.  Father Justin had told us about the Ladder of Divine Ascent and then Father Nilus had told us about how the souls of the monks and maybe everybody else when their souls leave their bodies, meet two angels, the first one is a guardian angel and the second one is the receiving angel.  We had angels, first Hadi and Josh from Wind, Sand and Stars.  We had the Bedouin who linked arms with us and the Bedouin who gave us lunch and sweet tea.  We had had the stories of Moses and Elijah to inspire us when we flagged and each other to laugh with when faced with new challenges. Those were our modern day angels!

Abdul the unwilling.  And by the way, there are about 6 layers of clothing under that coat, it isn't all me!

 

Death on the Nile and Father Nilus

Father Nilus lights the lamps in this Church

Ossiary

ladder of divine ascent

Father Nilus who I wrote about yesterday is a Greek Orthodox Monk in the community of St Catherine's Monastery.  He comes from Crediton, a small town in Devon and has been at St Catherine's for about 25 years.  We met him when Father Justin was called to Cairo for printing business and asked Father Nilus to look after us.  Father Nilus was just a bit nervous of talking to a group of 25 people, he said he wasn't used to it and didn't think he would be much good at it.  However, we all loved him and loved his truthful and thoughtful responses to our questions which were his own but his own with a total faith in his Orthodox faith.  He looks after the Church and the Chapels of St Catherine of which there are a few and his first early morning job is to light the lamps in the Church.  One of his other tasks is to keep the lamps lit in the Ossiary or cemetery and to pray for the souls belonging to the bones of all the monks who have died here.  There are 6 graves outside and when a monk dies, the bones of the first one amongst the 6 to have been buried are dug up and placed in the ossiary; skulls in one place and the rest of the bones in another.  It would be rather eerie if Father Nilus didn't say prayers for them each day.  The reason they are here is because the belief of Orthodoxy is that on death, the soul leaves the body for heaven, meeting demons or negative forces on the way to heaven which it has to combat.  The soul then resides in heaven until the second coming when it returns to reclaim its old bones and to be resurrected.  Now this isn't so far away from the belief of the Egyptian Pharaohs and their people as we discovered today when we visited the pyramids and then the museum of Ancient Egypt.  This is all about what happens when you die.  A Pharaoh, upon becoming Pharaoh, would immediately set in motion arrangements for his death and for his post death.  That is why the tombs of the Pharaohs were filled with everything they might need on their way to heaven and also why their bodies were preserved for their return.  They, like the monks leave their bodies until they return and on the way upward, they meet the demons or past tendencies from their lives.

When you think that this was thousands of years ago, thousands of years before Christianity, it is rather surprising to find parallels.  There are over 20 million people in Cairo and despite the heaving crowds and lack of space for housing, there is still a prevailing culture of care for the souls of the dead who are given a huge amount of space in this overcrowded city on the banks of the Nile.  Apart from care for the dead for whom there are many cemeteries in this teeming city, we were amazed to think of how the 20 million living people are all fed every day.  

  

  

An introduction to Father Justin

Father Justin scans a manuscript with palimpsest

Why I particularly like this photograph is that is shows a lot of things.  It shows a monk from the Greek Orthodox tradition with beard and black robes and hat, a habit which goes back centuries.  It shows a manuscript in his hands being scanned with rays (I think infra-red) to show the palimpsest text hidden under the top writing.  It shows that these ancient texts are being made available to scholars over the world to see online, to examine and translate.  It shows ancient knowledge written say in the 4th to 10th centuries being made available today.  It perhaps shows that true knowledge doesn't change even if the means of transmitting it do.  And in that monk with his ancient garb and his daily practice of prayer and devotion to these manuscripts and icons, there is a highly educated, 21st century mind.  All of this says to me that God is a details God and must be eager to be known if he pulls all these strands together in a protected place.  This monk is Father Justin, a softly spoken American on one level, a highly disciplined monk whose love for the tradition of worship shines from him.  That is who Father Justin is.  Today from the perspective of an anonymous hotel room in Cairo which is supposed to be luxurious with hot water, large soft towels, telly and kettles and mini bar, the world we left yesterday seems so sweet and refined and full of light and  I am already missing it.  Meditating here, upright on the soft bed is much much more difficult, I keep nodding off!  In our monastery guesthouse we meditated twice a day in a space in the café with a heater in the middle.  There were the occasional mobile phones going off, the sound of the coffee machine in the background, cats who came to join us but it had a genuineness to it, it had a clarity about it and I didn't nod off there.  That tells the story which Father Justin embodies, the story of the importance of the old and gold remaining where it should be in its holy antique setting where Moses and Elijah and many Saints have loved it even if we can click on Google and find the same thing on our modern tablets. In the photograph underneath this Father Nilus, a monk from Devon is in the middle.  The next post will be about him and why he was such an important part of our time at St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of the holy mountain, Mount Sinai.

Father Nilus in the middle of this picture talking about the Jesus Prayer

Back to front blog from the Holy mountain.

God looks down on the unfolding creation he has set in motion

We are back down from the Holy Mountain, back from a week in an extraordinarily preserved centre of continuous devotion.  All 25 pilgrims are safely down and facing the oddness of modernity.  Grandpa and I are in an hotel a few minutes from Cairo airport and our bedroom couldn't be more different from our last bedroom in the guesthouse of St Catherine's Monastery which we had come to love.  We are in a tidy could-be-anywhere hotel room with a tv and a mini bar.  We have just tipped the last of the vodka we took with us (in case of emergencies!) into some fizzy orange juice and unpacked our sandy socks and contemplated the immaculate bathroom.  We could be from another age, but with computers on, mobile phones giving us access to family and friends and life back home we are in what is called normality or is it? That is the question.  As it wasn't possible to write anything on the Sinai blog while we were there, I have decided to do it back to front, recollecting the days away in that holy place from the point of modern-day Egypt with airports, multi-cultural restaurants, swimming pools and hotels jostling with Pyramids and Ancient Coptic Churches, mosques and museums.  It is still fresh enough in my mind to feel the sweetness of ancient tradition, to recall the beauty of the icons, to hear the daily liturgy, still the same as it was in the 4th Century, to recollect the faces of the old and younger monks alight with devotion, to remember the kindness of the Bedouin who helped us all, young and old to climb right to the top of Mount Sinai and then lent us their arms as we tottered back down again.  As the days in that place dissolve into memories, I will try to bring them back to all of us, to introduce those who couldn't be there to Father Justin, to Father Nilus from Devon, to take you into the Church which glows with lamps lit for every service, to try to conjure up the sound of the old monks intoning the daily service and to show some of the icons and to try and tell you why they are still so powerful.  And I will try to bring them to Fay at Wind, Sand and Stars who has watched our progress via messages from Josh, our kind young companion and leader, and to Mary who couldn't come with us this time and to my beloved beloved family who were just a bit worried about sending Grandpa off with me to such a faraway place.  They shouldn't have worried because look who was looking after us!

The BFG (or nearly) is coming up Mount Sinai too

Our BFG doesn't have such big ears! but you can see this one is at home in the sandy desert.

If you could take some person from fiction or film with you to Mount Sinai for friendship counsel and wisdom, especially if it was somewhere you didn't know, wouldn't you be pleased if he reminded you of the BFG?  Our companion for the trip reminded me of the BFG the moment I saw him!  A long thin figure with a friendly rather fine boned face, I noticed immediately that his legs went on further than most people and that his head was a good bit higher than mine.  As well as this, he had a nice quiet retiring quality and the only thing I didn't see was a bottle of frobscottle sticking out of his coat pocket.  The great thing is that he has been to Mount Sinai before and spent time studying many of the great spiritual traditions.  When most young men have a gap year which involves mates, wild sports and kicking their heels like young horses, he spent a year in India with Bede Griffiths, (click to read about him) a monk of whom it is said  that there was no guile and who was the last to see the guile that may have been in any other.  I think the same could be said of the BFG as well as our BFG natured guide.  Tomorrow I may tell you his real name!

getting ready to retreat!

St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of the  mountain

Moses removes his sandals at the burning bush

For half term some people will be  going to ski in the Alps, and others will go walking in other mountains but Grandpa and I who are too old to ski are going to Mount Sinai in Egypt to visit the ancient fortified monastery of St Catherine at the foot of the very mountain itself.  In order to get ready to go we have equipped ourselves with everything the modern pilgrim should have; mobile phones to use as cameras, kindles  to read from, i pads to record our daily happenings, lightweight bottles for water in lightweight rucksacks, walking boots and walking poles.  This is not what Moses had when he brought the entire people of Israel out of Egypt via the red sea to the foot of the mountain.  But somehow the record of their Exodus from Egypt is recorded, the tussle with Pharaoh who kept changing his mind, the moaning of the people who felt they had left every comfort behind, the pillars of cloud and pillars of fire which led them through the wilderness, clouds of quail which carpeted the ground for food for them, manna, a round bread which fell every day but the Sabbath to keep them fed and a God who wrote down their laws because he understood they needed them.    Before Moses led the Israelites to Sinai, he had found himself at odds with Pharaoh for standing up for the Israelites, he found his own identity and killed one of the Egyptian overseers who had been beating the man.  He had fled and left Pharoah's court and was in the desert lands near Sinai minding his father-in-law's flocks when he encountered God in the burning bush.  This bush is said to be right there in the Monastery which was built by Emperor Justinian in the 5th Century to protect the Chapel of the Burning Bush.  As well as the burning bush and the magnificent library and the icons which are part of the treasure of the Monastery, the bones of St Catherine, martyred for her faith in the third century and whose body was said to have been transported to Sinai where it was found by the monks are there to protect and bless the pilgrims and the Monastery is named for her.  As well as our walking boots and high tech equipment, we will definitely be hoping for her blessing on our journey and our time there.  I am struck by our good fortune in being able to dip in to this holy place, kept holy by continuous faithful service from the Greek Orthodox Monks who live there. 

First hermits at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Desert Fathers seeking God in seclusion although it looks pretty busy to me.