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

50 NOVEMBEROf course, it is not true that his prayers are a failure, or that myprayers are more successful. But what he said in his own simpleway reminds me that all of our prayers are failures unless they areconjoined to the prayers of the One who does know how to pray.That is the work of the Spirit: to gather our prayers into the prayerof the One who knows how to offer the true sacrifice of praise andobedience: Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus in the Garden; Christ Jesuson the Cross; Christ Jesus in the Upper Room with his disciplesafter the Resurrection; Christ Jesus at the right hand of the Father,Christ Jesus who intercedes and prays for us, and with us, day andnight before his heavenly Father.The Ark in the DesertNOVEMBER 24, MONDAYAfter the Kodes in the monastery church, I celebrate my ownMass privately. It is later in the morning by then, and I often take awalk. Like some of the monks here, I try to avoid the press of thepilgrims who come on the weekends.Today, I walked out to the monastery Deir el Suriani, or theMonastery of the Syrians, named after the Syrian monk who establishedit centuries ago. Many monks from a variety of national andethnic backgrounds came to Egypt after the fourth century to establishmonasteries and to share in the special genius of monasticismthat had been initiated in the Egyptian desert.I walked around the perimeter of the monastery and countedmy paces. It’s an oddly shaped monastery, unlike any of the othersI’ve visited so far. It is twenty paces or so in width, and one hundredand twenty paces in length. The whole complex gives the impressionof being an oblong box with steep walls rising up from thedesert floor. It is a completely self-contained box in which the lifeof the monastery abides.When I came back to the monastery of Deir St. Bishoi, I askedAbuna Arsenious why Deir el Suriani is so oddly shaped. AbunaArsenious answered that it has the general proportions of the Arkof Noah as described in the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis.So I looked it up. Sure enough, the Ark of Noah was three hundredcubits long and fifty cubits wide, so both the Ark of Noah andthe Monastery of el Suriani are built on a ratio of six to one. I guess