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St Catherine's Monastery must be protected, help it if you can.
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| Inside the Monastery |
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| Father Nilus from Crediton who lights the lamps |
Having been to St Catherine's Monastery so recently, listened to the Monks reciting and intoning the whole of the Book of Psalms each week, keeping faith with the monastic life and the daily rituals of worship, hearing about the attack there brings the violence which we mostly think is far away from our much more peaceful lives, very near. I find I can bring the faces of the Monks to mind, I can still feel the clear mountain air and see the almond blossom against the blue sky in the Monastery garden. I feel the purity of the place and the beauty of the treasures, both ancient icons and marvellous manuscripts.
I remember how we sat enjoying the hospitality provided by the Bedouin who service the Monastery and the visitors who come there. The Monastery is just a building, but it is a building with layers of fortification, brick walls and heavy iron doors protecting it from outside but it has an inner protection provided by devotion to God. After all, before there was a Christian Monastery, there were the children of Israel and Moses on the plain just at the bottom of Mount Sinai, and before them, there was the Mountain, often called the Mountain of God. The Monastery is the place where in the old scriptures, Moses encountered God in the Burning Bush. That burning bush is still there, the devotion is still there, God is still there.
Bring the Monastery to your own mind and share the importance of it with as many people as possible so that we can also lend our conscious prayers to it, to the people it serves and to all people who suffer violence, both victims and perpetrators.
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| Father Justin, protector of the ancient library |
