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

2 INTRODUCTIONI will be traveling into the midst of an old people, where myorientation as an American will serve me far less than the deeperorientation I have as a Catholic. It is an orientation that is rare inmy generation, and even in many of the institutions of my Church.I have learned to become forgiving of the sins of the past, unlikethe Protestant heart of my nation and its national Churches. I donot wish to repudiate everybody and every thing. History must bemore than an exposé, more than a radical critique and dismissal.Surely history—Catholic history, at least, like the living history ofEgypt—must seek to reclaim the good and the true of the past.Certainly biblical history does. Which generation of Israel excommunicatedthe former generation for all its sins, and sought to reinventthe Covenant? Which heir of King David repudiated his ancestorand sought to set up another line? Even Jesus came to fulfill,not to abolish.So I go to Egypt, knowing that everything I discover is a rediscoveryof something timeless and old. Old things and ancientthemes quicken in me as I get ready to go. St. Mark, my patronsaint, was Egypt’s first evangelist and apostolic patriarch. St. Benedict,the founder of my monastic order, derived his idea of monasticlife from Egypt’s Desert Fathers. Benedictine monasticism isdesert-rooted till now. Even the name of Infant Jesus Church,where I have been living and working in residence for the pastthree years, reminds me of our Savior’s childhood in Egyptianexile. Out of Egypt I have called my son (Hosea 11:1).Suddenly I feel that I have been hemmed in, that the selectionof my area of anthropological research was no accident at all.Something in the solitariness of my temperament and the abstractedlook of my face has the feel of finally making the pilgrimageall men must make. I am becoming the refugee we all must becomein order to come home.An Accident or Providence?How has it happened that my doctoral research is sending me offto Egypt? What were the “accidental” details that have conspiredto send me into exile in the desert for a whole year?I well remember the scenario, how the monks of St. VincentArchabbey pressed me to hurry the pace of my studies. My graduate