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

A TIME TO INTERCEDE 127whole experience. It saturates their difficulties, their crosses, andtheir problems as well as their prayers and their joys with its transformingpower.Prayers for the AfflictedFEBRUARY 27, FRIDAYToday we visited St. George Monastery for nuns in Old Cairo.It is in an almost subterranean section of the city, below the presentsurface of the city by several meters. There is a room in thebasement of this monastery with a large chain affixed to the wall.From time to time rather severely troubled people are brought into be chained to the wall here. They spend some hours or a nightin chains, while the Sisters above pray that St. George may visitthem and bring liberation from whatever evil is besetting them.Some of the Westerners in our group thought this was a terriblydisturbing and psychologically oppressive practice. But I find italtogether a consoling thought to be the object of the prayers ofthe sisters above and the solicitude of the saint below in order to befreed by just a few hours of wrenching transition rather than spendmonths or years of one’s life in an in-between state of mental disability.It is precisely because the Coptic people have such culturalunity and religious and spiritual consensus that they can availthemselves of the grace of such experiences as these. It is preciselybecause we in the West lack such a consensus and are deprived ofsuch a spiritual understanding of the world around us that we cannotmake use of such cathartic rites. Instead, we assume that suchpractices have to do with superstition or ignorance. I am not sosure at all that this is superstition or ignorance. I wonder, indeed,if the Copts might not have a significantly higher rate of successin caring for their troubled and disturbed members than do we—with all of our much more refined apparatus of purely secular psychology.Grace builds on nature and must also build on culture aswell, which is, after all, “connatural” to man. After all, we do grapplewith realities “seen and unseen,” whether we realize it or not.Why not seek the assistance of a saint who shares in the ministryof the Cross to combat the darkness and the evils around us?