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

156 APRILIn the papal compound I met a certain gentleman named NasrHakim, a nephew of Mr. Tewfik, the owner of the hotel I have visitedin Cairo. Nasr is from Khartoum and works in the importingand exporting of lumber. He told me about the suffering of theChristians in the Sudan and said that the situation there is deteriorating.In the next few years he imagines that there will be muchloss of Christian life in that country. This is not something aboutwhich I am at all familiar at present, so I listened attentively to hisdescriptions of the situation there.I also had another opportunity to meet Bishop Serapion, thesecretary of Pope Shenouda and the bishop in charge of EcumenicalAffairs. He is always observing what I am doing and askingquestions about my progress. Anba Serapion questioned me, in agentle way, about my need to stay so long in Egypt. He doesn’tfully understand the “participant-observation” requirement of theanthropologist, although I have tried to explain to him that the intensityof the process requires about a year of sustained presence.He keeps imagining that I am trying to learn something of theart and the spirit of monasticism in Egypt so that I can transplant itto the States. He told me that American culture would not permitmonasticism such as it is practiced in Egypt, that my country is antitheticalto this kind of monasticism. I neither agreed nor disagreedwith him. I’m not sure to what kind of monasticism American culturewould be agreeable. I feel that even to live Benedictine monasticismin America is already something so countercultural that most ofus who are trying to do so are unconsciously compromised in manyof our efforts, inasmuch as we are as much the children of our cultureas we are the sons of St. Benedict. So if we, who are WesternReligious and have been living in Western culture for all these centuries,are compromised, it may well be that the mentality of Easternmonasticism could not easily be transplanted into the States.To Visit or To Stay?I had a two-hour conversation with Pope Shenouda this afternoon.He told me about new buildings that are being constructed in thepapal compound and in the Monastery of St. Bishoi. He talkedabout the need for a spirit of calm amongst his people: that they