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

112 FEBRUARYjust visiting the desert. They could hardly understand me, and theydidn’t care. It was late at night and they wanted a blessing. (InEgypt, to give a blessing, one says a prayer while putting a woodenhand-cross on the person’s head. The monks had given me one tocarry in my pocket when I arrived at the monastery.)So I blessed the children with the hand-cross and they wentaway. Five minutes later they came back with their friends: fifteenof them now, and they wanted a blessing. When these children left,they came back with their parents and their uncles and their aunts.By midnight the church was filled! Even at that hour, they turnedout to receive a blessing, such is the lively faith in this district nearthe church. They were coming up the aisle toward me like a solidCommunion line. So there I was, putting the wooden cross onpeoples’ heads, giving each of them a blessing.While I was thus occupied, those who had already received ablessing went out the back of the church into an open-air courtyard.Soon they began to shout, “Shuf, el Adra! Halwah alwee!Look! the Virgin! How sweet she is!” and to point to the air abovethe church. They could see the Virgin Mary there! I didn’t know itthen, but that was, in fact, where she most often appeared: outside,above the church. But I was under the roof on the inside and I didn’tsee anything. I expected that everyone, the whole mob, would allrush out to see the apparition. But they didn’t. They stayed rightwhere they were. They had come for a blessing and they weregoing to get it, no matter what! It occurred to me that the apparitionswere well known to the inhabitants of the district roundabout. My eagerness to see them was not the same as theirs. I triedto push my way through the crowd to get to the back of thechurch. Actually, I had to try to make an opening by blessing peopleto my right and to my left to get through.I had almost reached a place where I thought I would be ableto see what the people outside were seeing when suddenly, in frontof me, stood a little man in a brown suit. He couldn’t have beenmore than five feet tall. He was carrying a small bundle. He had avery sad look on his face; his eyes were sunken in. He had beencrying—and not just for a day or two. His expression was that ofsomeone who has known grief for a long time. He put his littlebundle in my arms and explained to me, in English, that he is adoctor, that his wife had died in childbirth, and that this baby, hisdaughter, was a month old.