Transcending the everyday alongside the everyday!

All the Saints on their Saints Days, what a lot there have been making their way from Monk to Sainthood over the years

Bedouin hospitality

 Father Laurence with Father Justin

There are levels and levels and layers and layers of creatures under our feet deep in the earth, some scuttling on the surface or sliding or jumping alongside people just like you and me. There are so many sorts of people too and nowhere is this more obvious than when you are somewhere new, an unfamiliar place where the sense of who you are is challenged and you wonder how everyone else fits in.  At this beautiful Monastery cradled in the mountains of South Sinai, the backdrop of barren rocks soaring upwards is home to small and large ants, scorpions, a few snakes, swallows and doves and small sparrows flitting from tree to tree. There are lots and lots of cats pursuing their feline life occasionally noticing the humans, there are dogs who don’t seem to have owners but are friendly enough and find shady spaces to lie around. There are the desert Bedouin, fine boned and enchanting children dressed in a mix of ethnic and Western clothes, their teenagers too trying for a quiff of hair, triumphant if they have a mobile phone as well as a quiff. The younger ones try their luck on the tourists asking for a dollar, a euro, a pound, a caramello. We are the alien species needing to be advised on what and when and what not and when not to give in. We get smarter about this and say no no no because we have a bag of things, pens and puzzles, crayons and notebooks, stickers, t-shirts and Arsenal socks for them but we pass them on through our guide who knows who really needs them. There are those who serve the Monastery, the cooks and cleaners, carpenters from Greece and the man running the coffee shop and the Monastery shop selling icons and postcards, silver rings of St Catherine and books. There are tourist wearing t shirts and orthodox pilgrims wearing their own brand of black garb and headgear.

A Romanian Nun with a beautiful hat!

There are monks with different functions in the Monastery, Father Daniel who supervises the locals who work there and then eats crisps after matins in the coffee shop behind the bar, Father Nilus looking after the Church tirelessly lighting and extinguishing the candles and lamps. There is the monk involved in conservation and one in construction and of course, Father Justin looking after the treasured manuscripts and scrolls and with his quiet Bedouin helper (the first to go to university from the village) is photographing manuscript after manuscript to load onto the hoped for safety of the internet. All the monks have chosen this life under direction and monastic discipline away from the pulls of the world (except for crisps perhaps), they give up the possibility of family life or career but offer whatever skill they have to the glory of the Monastery and God. The next level of being is seen when they go into the daily services where they all have different functions. Here, there is only one celebrating, only one being Priest. His part is mostly been taken by Father Justin. From the Church itself he is seen through the screen doors in the interior of the space where the altar is, he moves around it knowing all the times he has to speak or move towards us.  We know  we can’t go there but where he represents us all. His hands lift with books, icons are kissed, he bows and prays and turns to us and comes through with incense which he swings in a silver censor. We just watch not really knowing anything but somehow waiting with a sense of expectation. Once or twice or maybe more, one of us or more sees the extraordinary thing when as his hands are raised the light of the sun streams into the space where the mosaic of the transfiguration looks down and the whole scene becomes one glorious vision of nature showing its mystical magical supernatural self and we hold our breath full of a new joy. This is what we come to see, all the different levels and layers of beings drawn towards this new vision. We feel that we have touched the feet of those who touch the feet of the ones who KNOW without any doubt that transcendence is this.
But even the monks need the everyday things of life! This photograph of the new washing machine just delivered is just part of that everydayness of the rest of the day for them.

New and old together