Journey Back to Eden.pdf - St Mark Coptic Orthodox Church Chicago

100 JANUARYyour ageless love are crying out in our abandonment and forsakenness;exhausted, broken, emptied and humiliated. Nowwe can see you! You correspond with our senses, our sorrows,our sinfulness, and our death. Now we can hear you speak,and now we can answer your voice.Yet you have done this all unchangingly. Your total transformationinto our time is but a revelation that you are alwaysLove unmeasured, unbounded, unreserved. Your heart islike the desert after all, and our hearts still retain enough ofyour image to be able to find you as you are, in the conditioninto which you came. You still bear the wounds in glory thatyou showed after your Passion; the Lamb on the throne is stillthe Lamb once slain.The Monastic MystiqueJANUARY 28, WEDNESDAYI spoke this morning to a seminarian who is newly consecrated,a priest in the diocese of Cairo who was just ordained byPope Shenouda. He will now make his forty-day retreat and receivehis seminary education here at St. Bishoi Monastery duringthat time.He was pleasant and agreeable, but immediately he seemedsuspicious of what this American monk and anthropologist wasdoing in the monastery. He feared that perhaps I was going to presentthe monastery in a superficial light, not necessarily even unfavorably,but in a way which could miss its genuine nature or itsmore mysterious identity. He told me that only people who areconcerned with the inner life of faith should attempt to ponder thehistory—or, what I think he meant, its sociological aspects—of amonastery. Otherwise he is sure that one can never understand theinner dynamism of a monastery and may inadvertently focus attentionon its incidental aspects.He told me that he thinks the monastery is not an institutionthat somehow coasts on its own historical momentum. No matterhow long its history has been, he said, a monastery does not carryon its life because it has a long heritage which keeps it afloat. If anancient monastery continues to keep its monks through time, it ex-