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

A TIME TO VISIT ABRAHAM 53community. Life in the monastery is a life of charity; life in the worldoutside is a life of desperation, just as it was in the time of Noah.Outside the Ark, every living thing was in dire straits, scratching,clawing, trying to survive. Inside the walls of the Ark, God preservedthe peaceable kingdom. There the lion lay down with the lamb.After the Ark landed on the Mount of Ararat and its inhabitantsredispersed over the world, it must have remained for some time asa shrine of Divine Providence and human obedience. According tothe flood story in Genesis, the rainbow was given as a sign, and theMonastery of el Suriani remains as a witness to that Providence.TraditionNOVEMBER 25, TUESDAYWithin the grounds of Deir el Suriani, there is a great tamarindtree, a huge tree with a trunk so large that many people armto-armcan hardly encircle it. It’s a remarkable sight, becausescarcely a shrub or a blade of grass grows in the desert in this area,and to see this tree fabulously large and luxuriant is almost miraculous.In fact, that’s exactly what the monks say of it: that long agowhen St. Ephraim, the founder of the monastery, arrived in theplace, he planted his staff there just before he died. According tolegend, his staff sprouted leaves and sent out roots and became aliving tree. So now, many centuries later, that tender shoot of a treehas become this great tamarind.In my mind, as a true Westerner, I tried to imagine a plausible,natural sequence of events whereby such a tree might grow in themiddle of the Sahara. I thought about a seed which might havebeen dropped by a bird during one of those very rare desert rainstorms.If the seed fell in a place that was relatively low-lying, perhapseven into a muddy crevasse, its small roots, which would havesprouted in the moisture, might have been able to recede deeperand deeper down into the sands of the desert. At length, the rootsmay have tapped into an underground reservoir that was somehowcloser to the surface than usual. It might have happened that, givena steady supply of water, the plant continued to grow where nothingelse had grown or would grow. It might have drawn its nourishmentfrom the underground spring and eventually grown intothis great tamarind. The Scriptures speak about a tree that draws