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.