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ARTICLES |
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DEVOTION TO THE SAINTS IN THE COPTIC TRADITION
GK Chesterton once famously said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been found difficult and not tried. We are all called to live the life of the Spirit, for through our baptism God’s Spirit has made his home in us, but it is not always easy to live up to that. All too often our interests seem unspiritual and we struggle to reflect the Light of Christ undimmed to those around us. Many might think it is not just difficult, but impossible! But this is exactly where the saints come in, why they are so important, for they show us that it is not impossible. With God’s help we can live as Christ lived. In the kaleidoscope of the lives of the saints we see that when Christianity is really tried it works. In those countless inspirational lives, in their wonderful vitality and variety we see many different aspects of Christ’s life and teaching, all reflected and “incarnated” in the lives of the saints. In them we see what it means to be fully human, to be fully centred on Christ.
I have an especial interest in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the national church of Egypt, and so I want to look at what we can learn from them about devotion to the Saints. The Coptic Church is a church very much in touch with its roots, a church which proudly boasts that it teaches “Christianity as it has always been taught.” On my many visits to Egypt and to the Coptic Church I have always felt in touch with the spirit of the early church in a way which is true nowhere else. In the various desert monasteries which I have visited and at which I have stayed you quickly realise that monasticism, which started in third century Egypt, is still alive and flourishing, and that there are still monks and hermits whose lives are strikingly similar to those of the early desert fathers. In the same way Coptic devotion to the saints puts in touch with traditional belief and practice.
The most popular saints are probably St George the Martyr (and various other armed warrior saints) and St Damiana, who with her forty virgin companions, was martyred in the year 304, but supreme among all the saints honoured by the Copts is Our Lady. Coptic theology and liturgy have deeply Marian characteristics, and hymns and poems praising the Blessed Virgin Mary are an essential part of Coptic worship. Devotion to Mary is all the stronger because of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt after Our Lord’s birth at Bethlehem. According to Coptic tradition they stayed in Egypt for three years, six months and ten days, and the tradition goes on to give a detailed itinerary for all that time. All the places they visited are now marked by churches, chapels, holy wells, sacred trees etc, and are places of regular pilgrimage.
I have myself visited the three sites associated with the Holy family in Cairo. One of them is at a place called Ma’adi, six miles South of Old Cairo, on the East bank of the river Nile. Some sources also claim it as the site of the finding of Moses in the bulrushes by Pharaoh’s daughter, but a site by the ancient Synagogue in Old Cairo also claims this distinction! At Ma’adi there is a large church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but beneath it is a subterranean chapel, at the old ground level and reached by a winding tunnel. This is supposed to be the room where the Holy Family stayed for two nights before embarking from that point on a boat which took them all the way to Upper Egypt.
The furthest South the Holy Family reached was Deir el-Muharraq, now a famous monastery and almost the exact geographical centre of the modern state of Egypt. The Copts see this as very significant : Mary and her divine son travel to the very centre of Egypt in order to bless it. In this way Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled: ”Blessed be Egypt my people.” The Copts see their native land as a blessed land, a Holy Land quite as much as Palestine, for it was these two lands alone in which the Incarnate Son of God chose to dwell. In fact Egypt was arguably the first country which became almost completely Christian, so that in the early Christian persecutions Egypt probably suffered far more than any other province of the Roman Empire. All this gives the Egyptian Christians a great awareness of Egypt as a Holy Land, and many look forward with confidence to the day when Egypt will once again be a completely Christian land. In one monastery I met a monk who assured me, on the basis of the apparition and message of a particular saint, that this would happen within thirty years! There is also a strain of Coptic nationalism among a minority of Copts, who see themselves as the true ethnic Egyptians, successors of the Pharaohs, as opposed to the Moslems, who are descended from the seventh century Arab conquerors.
The reality of course is that Egypt has been under Moslem rule since that Arab conquest in 639. Christians formed a majority of the population as late as the eleventh or twelfth centuries, but from the very beginning of Moslem rule Christians had a definitely second class status, were always discriminated against, and suffered intermittent but regular persecution, so much so that they now form only around fifteen percent of the population (estimates of the Christian percentage of the population range from ten to twenty percent, depending on which authority you follow). As a result of this long history of discrimination and persecution the Cult of the Martyrs has an important place in the life of the coptic church. Copts today still see themselves as the Suffering Church, the Martyr Church, and therefore the place where the Kingdom of heaven will be built on earth. It is interesting that Copts do not number the years by Anno Domini, from the birth of Our Lord, but from the great persecution of the Emperor Diocletian in the early fourth century; according to this computation we are now in the Era of the Martyrs. In recent years there have been many Marian apparitions, but whenever the Virgin Mary appears she never speaks. She only weeps, and looks down sadly but lovingly on her children. The Copts see themselves as being without a voice, being led like a lamb to the slaughter. They must suffer in silence, as Mary so often had to in the gospels.
One of the best-known appearances of Our Lady took place on numerous occasions during the months of April and May 1968 at Zeitoon, a suburb of Cairo. A shining full-size apparition of Our Lady, surrounded by a glorious halo of Light, appeared over the dome of the Church of Our Lady. Often the Apparition lasted several hours: crowds of people flocked there, and many miracles took place. In 2004 I went there myself, and spoke with an old man on the steps of the large new church which has been built opposite the original one. He had been there in 1968, and he assured me that the apparitions were real. The facial features of the virgin were quite clear, and profoundly moving: Our Lady gazing sadly but lovingly over her people.
I experienced another aspect of this sense the Copts have of being a Martyr Church in 2006, when I visited the Monastery of St Gabriel at Naqlun. This ancient monastery is just in the desert, about a quarter of a mile from the South-Western edge of the great oasis of the Fayoum ( it is about the size of a medium sized English county ) in the Western Desert. One of the monks was showing me around, and at the end of the tour we entered a modern chapel built onto the old church. Along the north and South walls of the nave were five large cylindrical boxes, like bolsters, covered with embroidered red velvet. This is the way in which the Copts keep holy relics, though the size of these bolsters can vary from large, the size of an entire body, to quite small.
The monk explained whose relics were in the five bolsters. In the summer of 1991 archaeological excavations were being carried out about one hundred and fifty yards from the monastery, and three caskets were discovered, each containing four mummies. The clothing suggested they were monks, and all bodies bore the marks of torture. Some seem to have been strangled, including one who must have been a boy of about fifteen years of age. Others bore wounds inflicted by an axe or knife. Carbon dating has suggested a date from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, a time when the Mameluke rulers of Egypt carried out many persecutions and massacres of Christians. The response of the Coptic Church has been to declare them martyrs and to canonize them. Throughout Egypt there is now a great devotion to the Twelve Martyrs of Naqlun, and though the bulk of their remains are kept at the monastery, small portions of the relics have been despatched to churches not only throughout Egypt, but also to the Coptic diaspora throughout the rest of the world.
In fact devotion to the saints is undergoing a great revival; numerous new saints have been canonised, and for some time the search has been on for the relics of saints whose burial sites were previously only vaguely known. Relics are honoured as important sources of supernatural grace and healing. The whole theology of relics is well summarised by the following passage taken from a book about St George the Roman written by the nuns of the Convent of St George in Old Cairo under the supervision of His Grace bishop Yohanna, General Bishop over the Churches of Old Cairo:
The spiritual significance of relics is that they can do miracles and heal people, just as a dead body was raised to life when it touched the relics of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 13:21).The idea does not depend only on the bones, but on the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, who does not leave the body after death. The sanctification of the Holy Fathers by the Holy Spirit affects both body and soul. When the body is separated from the soul by death the effect of that sanctification departs from neither body nor soul. Therefore every relic has the power and strength of the Holy Spirit. This is one of the gifts God gave to his beloved church. This veneration of the blessed relics helps the church in her struggles and gives aid to the brethren in the trials of this life.
It should also be mentioned that in common with the rest of the Orthodox world the Copts give great honour to Icons, and as in so many areas of contemporary Coptic life, there is an important revival of icon painting. As with us in the West, the saints are seen not only as inspiring examples to be followed, but also as powerful intercessors. We can and should ask for their prayers. In any Coptic church you can see people praying before the red cylindrical bolsters containing the relics, embracing them, and leaving behind slips of paper on which they have written prayer requests. If the saints are those who most clearly reflect the Light of Christ, then honouring a favourite saint or saints, studying their lives and message, can help us to know Christ better. The first Bishop of Alexandria was St Mark the Evangelist, whose bodily remains were kept in a church in Alexandria until they were stolen by Venetian sailors in the ninth century. There was immense rejoicing in 1967 when some of those relics were returned by Pope Paul V1 to Pope Cyril VI, the predecessor of the present Pope, Shenouda III, who is the 117th successor of St Mark.
If only we had the same love for our English saints, all those wonderful Anglo-Saxon saints from the springtime of Christianity in our land, when England was truly an Island of Saints! Of course there is also a vast number of saints from succeeding centuries, St Anselm, St Thomas a Becket, St Thomas More, St John Fisher and Blessed King Charles the Martyr , to Name but a few .It is all these saints who have helped make England what it is today, moulded its history, culture and faith. Only if, like the Copts, we are aware of the glory of our Christian past can we have a true vision for our Christian future.
Father Christopher Cook SSC Vicar of the Parish of St Agnes & St Pancras Toxteth Park, Liverpool.
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A NEW CHAPEL IN THE
CHURCH OF ST AGNES & ST PANCRAS, TOXTETH PARK, LIVERPOOL
It can be annoying when
advocates of innovation in the Church of England accuse us of
being inward-looking, narrow and exclusive. In my three years at
St Agnes’s since leaving the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department in
2004 I have most definitely found that not to be the case.
Through our PEV, Bishop Martyn, we have good links with other
parishes across the North of England, and through SSC, the
Society of Mary etc we have a close working relationship with
many other parishes not only in our own diocese of Liverpool,
but also in the dioceses of Manchester, Blackburn and Chester.
Another very important and developing link we have is with the
Ethiopian community in Merseyside. Although the number of
Moslems in Ethiopia is growing, Ethiopia has always been a
Christian country, and right up until the shocking deposition
and murder of the late Emperor Haile Selasse the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church was the established state church. It still
remains the most important and influential institution in the
land. Ethiopia was evangelised from Egypt, and like the Coptic
Church the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is pre-Chalcedonian, which
means that like the other “Oriental Churches” they did not
accept the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon concerning the
two natures of Christ. During the last few decades there has
been a series of conversations with both Rome and the Orthodox,
which established that there was no essential doctrinal
difference. I have never visited Ethiopia, but have some first
hand knowledge of the Coptic Church in Egypt; the strength of
their faith, their resilience and courage in the face of an
increasingly assertive Moslem majority certainly evokes my
admiration. In Egypt, as also in Ethiopia, religious faith is
the very air one breathes, and contact with the indigenous
church in either land seems to bring you into contact with what
it must have been like in the early Church.
Every other Sunday
afternoon the Ethiopian community in Liverpool and the Wirral
comes to worship in St Agnes’s, and to share a meal together in
the church hall afterwards. There is no Ethiopian priest in
Liverpool, and just a deacon in Manchester, who occasionally
comes over to preside at prayers. A recent development is that
there is now a new Ethiopian chapel in St Agnes’s. The
South-East transept was being used only as a storage area, but
it has now been cleared and a new chapel created. Pride of place
goes to a large Ethiopian Icon of St George. We are used to
having St George as Patron Saint of England, but perhaps we are
not so aware exactly how popular St George is in the East, and
how widespread his cult is. He is in fact the Patron Saint of
Ethiopia, and the 1896 victory won by Ethiopian arms over an
invading army intent on reducing the country to colonial status
is ascribed to the intercession of St George. In fact the battle
of Adwa took place on St George’s day, and early in the morning
the Emperor Menelik II, the Empress Taitu and the entire army
rose to pray to St George for victory. This great victory is
celebrated by all Ethiopians to this day.
Our new Icon of St George
is traditional in style and was created by an Ethiopian
icon-writer resident in Italy, with encouragement and funding
from “Liverpool Community Spirit”, which runs community support
programmes for ethnic and religious minorities in the Toxteth
and Aigburth areas of Liverpool. On the occasion of the opening
by HRH the Prince of Wales of the newly restored St George’s
Hall in Liverpool City Centre this last summer, the magnificent
icon was on display, and the Prince showed much interest in it.
Shown with the Prince in the photograph are members both of the
Ethiopian Community and of Liverpool Community Spirit. Following
Ethiopian custom the icon stood veiled in St Agnes’s for the
space of forty days before being solemnly blessed. On 7th
October 2007 it was anointed and blessed in the course of the
Parish Mass, and in the afternoon an Ethiopian Orthodox priest
travelled from London to bless the icon using Ethiopian rites. A
wonderful party, with much delicious Ethiopian food, was held in
the church hall afterwards. Since then there has been added to
the chapel an icon of St Tekle Haimanot, one of the most popular
of Ethiopia’s indigenous saints, who lived in the 13th
century and founded the great monastery of Debre Libanos, the
“Westminster Abbey” of Ethiopia.
Such ecumenical links
remind us that it is Forward in Faith which is more in tune with
mainstream Christianity than anyone else in the Church of
England; like the rest of Orthodoxy the Copts and Ethiopians
would have little time for the doctrinal and liturgical
innovations we know only too well! Let us not forget to seek the
prayers of the saints in all our efforts to maintain catholic
faith and order in our church. Let us seek the aid of our patron
saint, using the words of the Ethiopian Hymn of St George: Liberator of captives, And defender of the poor, Physician of the sick, And champion of kings, O trophy-bearer, And great martyr Saint George, Intercede with Christ our God That our souls be saved. AMEN Father Christopher CookVicar of St Agnes and St Pancras, Toxteth Park, Liverpool. |
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