Tag: god

Flip It on Its Head

Flip It on Its Head

Adapted from a sermon by Fr Antony Paul

On the first day of my first long retreat at the monastery, I saw what could’ve changed the course of my life completely. Prior to this stay, I had only been allowed to stay for a few days at a time. This time was different because they gave me my own room to stay for a few months. It reminds me of our current global climate and how we can all work together to make this pandemic of coronavirus a blessed experience for all.

One of the monks took me to my room and gave me a key. He told me that this was the only key in existence for this particular room. I could not lose it. This didn’t bother me too much as I was not a careless person.

A day or two later I wanted to go trekking in the mountains. The canteen was about 20 metres from my room and you only needed to walk in a straight line to get there. I had been assigned regular hours to work in the canteen so it was natural for me to stop there on my way to inform someone of where I was going to be for the rest of the day, especially because there were no phones around and they may have been worried if they noticed my prolonged absence.

Upon telling the canteen workers I would be leaving, I realised I had forgotten my Bible and writing tools. I put my hand in my pocket to feel for where the key to my room should be. I couldn’t find the key in my pocket. I searched up and down from the canteen to my room to find the key but could not find it. It was gone.

All I could think was, “I’m going to get wrecked.”

“But monks are nice,” I thought to myself, “so nice! He won’t be upset that I did the one thing I was not supposed to. He will be so nice about it and this will be just fine.”

Not long after, the Abouna that gave me the key came to the canteen because he had arranged with the head canteen worker, Arsany, that he would teach him to drive that day.

He walks in smiling, what a great time to tell him. As soon as I tell him, he stops smiling. I grin awkwardly. He frowns. I know I am in trouble now. He becomes visibly upset and I become internally upset that I made him upset.

It gets worse. The other Abouna that oversaw running the canteen did not want Arsany to learn how to drive that day. He gets angry at the Abouna that I had just upset and the peace that I had associated with the monastery was gone. The first Abouna does not care what the other Abouna thinks and takes Arsany in the car for his driving lesson, and he takes me with them as well.

As we drive, Abouna says to me, “Listen, I am not here to baby sit you. If you want something, just ask, but I am not going to run around trying to figure out what you need.”

I internally cried a little as he spoke, that wasn’t what I wanted at all. The tension remains high throughout the entire drive.

We get back from Arsany’s driving lesson and there is someone with a huge smirk waiting for him. Arsany treated the monastery as his own home and the canteen as his biggest honour. Every penny accounted for and his faithfulness was beyond reproach.

He asks Arsany, “how much money did you make in the canteen today?”

Arsany looks confused, he hasn’t been there all day so he’s unsure.

He continues, “How about 2500 EGP? Maybe you should take a bit more care of the monastery’s money.” He pulls out a huge stack of money and hands it to him.

Arsany turned red and runs to his room.

The two Abounas exchange angry looks and the second Abouna leaves.

The Abouna that gave me the key is quiet for a minute and then bursts out in laughter. He looked at me and says, “This is shoo shoo.” I later found out that shoo shoo was a nickname they used in the monastery for the “shaytan” (devil) so that he is a joke compared to God.

“Oh,” I reply, I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to say.

“Don’t you see? If it is him then we have been playing his game all day long. We need to flip it on his head.”

“What does that mean?” I reply, still unsure how this related to anything.

We must do the opposite of what he wants. Follow me.”

We went to my room where he had asked for a carpenter to come and see if he could open the room. They failed. So Abouna picks up his galabeya and kicks the door down with his feet. We laughed hysterically and he says to me, “see you have your room now.”

Then he turns to me and says, “Listen you are upset, stop, I didn’t mean to offend or hurt you. What I was meant to say was the monastery is now your home so don’t be shy. I am so glad you’re here but I don’t want you to feel tied to me or anyone else.”

This lifted my mood completely, that’s exactly what I wanted and I felt much better knowing that he didn’t hate me. I was being sensitive and he was being well, less sensitive.

The second Abouna returned to the canteen. The first Abouna takes me with him back to the canteen and boldly storms in and makes a matanya before the second Abouna and says, “Akhtet (I have sinned)! You asked me not to take him for his driving lesson and I took him anyway, forgive me.”

The second Abouna panics and start prostrating as well, “no! I have sinned. It was me.”

They started crying and hugging each other and immediately realise there was still an upset Arsany that they needed to console. We went to Arsany’s room and knocked. He was not willing to answer. He ignored us completely. They forced the door open and sat on either side of him. They tried to engage him in conversation but it was not working.

I still don’t know why the second Abouna thought this was a good idea but he starts using his baby voice saying, “are you upset? Don’t be sad, Arsany” and pours an entire bottle of water on his head. No one could contain their laughter, even Arsany.

We went back to the canteen and ate a meal together in thanksgiving. We rejoiced in the Lord and in one another.

“Welcome to the monastery.” The first Abouna says to me

Real warfare doesn’t look how you think it looks. Don’t let the devil get to you during these hard times. The devil wants us to flip out, fight and go against each other. When we pontificate about why we are right or yell about how hurt we are, we do exactly what he wants. Everyone has opinions on what is right and wrong.

By using this time to be more divisive, we lose the blessing of having a different kind of Eucharist. If we had not reconciled that night, my entire life would be different. I would’ve left the monastery at this one issue.

This room key could have completely changed the course of my life.

Let us look at this situation and flip it on its head. Let us love one another and share the bread (and toilet paper). God is good.

Why is God Punishing me?

Why is God Punishing me?

Adapted from a sermon by Fr David Shehata

John 9:1-41

The Gospel of John was written after the other three gospels. John did not aim to write a narrative of Jesus’ life but to reflect on the seven signs He performed that revealed His divinity. The sixth of the seven signs was the healing of the man born blind.

While walking with His disciples, they ask Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). They didn’t wait to ask Him privately, but in front of the man born blind who could clearly hear what they were saying.

In first century Palestine, there was a close association between sin and suffering. If someone sins, there will be punishment. This was the Judaic mentality and it went unquestioned, up until this moment. If this man was blind, it had to be the result of sin. If he was born this way, then it was clearly a sin of his parents that was passed on to their offspring.

While this may seem absurd to us now, it is possible that we share a similar logic. How many times have people speculated that the coronavirus pandemic is God punishing the world? How many times have people inferred that this must be the result of God’s anger and wrath? Even on a personal level, when faced with tribulation many of us will question, “God, why are You punishing me?” We will reason and speculate that every bad thing I have done in my life is what has caused my tribulation, that my sin has triggered God’s wrath.

Jesus, in this story, gives us a third alternative. It’s not punishment, it’s not sin, “but that the works of God should be revealed in him” (John 9:3).

Christ’s response is for our benefit also. There is a different purpose to tribulation. Maybe God wants us to learn something new from this experience that we wouldn’t be able to learn in any other way. Maybe God knows the nature of my heart and knows the best way to reveal His glory in my life.

In Orthodoxy, we argue that always – in any trial, in any tribulation – there is always a bigger purpose. There is always a hidden blessing that will come from my struggles, if we choose to dig a little deeper. The very best is coming, and we won’t know the full extent of it until we have reached eternal life. This is especially difficult to see while the tribulation is unfolding before us.

In the case of the man born blind, he was about 35-40 years old, we don’t know his exact age. Why would God allow so much time to pass before revealing the purpose of his blindness? Does that not seem like an unnecessarily excessive period?

In all their affliction He was afflicted,
And the Angel of His Presence saved them;
In His love and in His pity He redeemed them; – Isaiah 63:9

In Isaiah, we are given divine reassurance. Make no mistake. Every single bit of suffering and discomfort, the Lord shares in all our suffering. He doesn’t just watch over us as a distant observer. This could never be the case. He bestows compassion and mercy upon us during our times of suffering, every step of the way.

In the Gospel of Temptation, the Lord underwent every temptation that we can face. Every bit of suffering, He has endured too. The difference being that He overcame every temptation. He never bowed down nor fell, and that is our source of strength.

Fr Daoud Lamei puts forth the image of the Lord that does everything for our own benefit and our ultimate salvation. Imagine if we could go to the man born blind in heaven and ask him about what he endured on earth. If he was asked the question, “If you could go back, would you prefer to have your eye sight from day one?” This man would turn around, surrounded by God, the angels, the saints and the congregation of heaven, seeing where he is compared to the mere 40 years of suffering and the one encounter he had with the Lord that led to his place in heaven and say with full assurance, “I would not change one thing, this is what led to my edification and salvation. If I had my eyesight, I wouldn’t have encountered Christ in this way. My heart wouldn’t have been changed. My heart wouldn’t have been moved in a way that granted me salvation. It wouldn’t have been worth the risk.”

The lesson for us to learn is to stop focusing on who or what is to blame for our situation. The early church fathers argue that the Lord’s voice is clearer in our lives through tribulation.

HH Pope Shenouda III used to say that during tribulation, we hear the voice of the Lord and learn more than if we listened to 1000 sermons.

It is during this time that we no longer focus on who to blame or what to do but we look to God. When we turn to the Lord, He lifts the conversation to Heaven. This is how He responded to His disciples when they questioned whose sin was responsible for the man’s blindness. He told them to stop looking for who to blame and look to the glory that will come from his healing.

The questions we should be asking are, how is the healing going to come? How will his life change and How will this tribulation lead him to heaven?

In our tribulations, the questions we should be asking are, Lord, what can I benefit? What do you want me to learn?

When our focus shifts, we learn to walk by faith and not by sight, just as the blind man did. He didn’t know that the Man that spat on the ground before him, then put dirt where his eyes should be was doing this for his benefit. But he walked by faith, not questioning Christ. This was pivotal to his healing. We must walk with eyes focused on the Lord, looking for the lessons Christ is teaching us that will ultimately bring us to His glory.

Our Relationship With God

 Our Relationship with God

Sermon by Bishop David (Bishop of NY & NE, USA)
Article by St Mark’s Youth

If an Orthodox Christian were asked to name the most important thing regarding their spiritual life, the answer would be “my relationship with God”. How well we know God, through not only our personal but communal worship, ultimately determines our salvation. This important relationship is determined by our understanding of who God is, i.e. the God-image we have created in our minds. The focuses of today’s sermon are the famous Parable of the Talents and The Prodigal Son, taken from the Gospel according to St Matthew (Matthew 14-30) and St Luke (Luke 15:11-32). By analyzing the three main characters of these parables, Bishop David talks to us today about three different levels of relationships.

 1. The Relationship of the Slave

In the parable of the talents, upon being asked for a return on the talent he had received, the wicked servant said “Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed” (v 24). Already, this servant created the false image of a purely vengeful God in his mind. A God who is unfair and claims what He has not worked for. Hence, due to tremendous fear, the servant said, “I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground” (v 25). We must ask ourselves, is this me? Is this how I view God? Bishop David says that the problem with this relationship is that it is based only on fear of God or the gravity of His punishments. There is a lack of love in this relationship. If our image of God is like this wicked servant, then we will very likely behave like him and likewise be cast “into the outer darkness” (v 30).

2. The Relationship of the Hired Servant
Using the example of the parable of the prodigal son, Bishop David reminds us that a hired servant is one who works, earns his pay and leaves at the end of the day. When the son returned to his father, he asked to be treated as one of the “hired servants” (Luke 15:11-32). Bishop David teaches us that the secret in this parable is that the son did not want to come back with all his heart but rather wanted to work as a hired servant. The son forgot who he was to his father and just wanted things of this world. Do we have this transactional relationship with God? Do we come to God chasing after money, careers or good grades rather than Him? As sayedna said, “This is the problem with the hired servants. They come to church because they need something from God.” Like cleaner fish to a whale, so also are these hired servants to God. Once again this affiliation with God emerges when one imagines God as merely a giver of things and not a Giver of life.

3. The Relationship of the Son
The relationship of the son is ultimately centered on love for God; As it is written, “We love Him because He first loved us”. The son realises that by grace, through baptism and living the life of the church, he will inherit the kingdom of God and so, in turn, seeks after it. The son’s eyes are not focused on the Earth, but rather, on God and His Heaven. He correctly understands God to be the one who “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever should believe in Him should never perish but have eternal life”. (John 3:16). When God gives the son things, he is joyful not because of the gift but because God is the Giver. Bishop David provides us with a very beautiful example to explain this relationship: When a husband gives a wife a wedding anniversary present, though the gift may not have much value itself, the wife is extremely joyful because it came from her husband. Likewise the source of the son’s joy is God and subsequently, his relationship is one of love.

May the Lord give us the grace to understand that we are His beloved children whom He holds dear. As it is written, “he who touches you touches the apple of His eye” (Zechariah 2:8). We pray that the Lord give us a better understanding of who He is so that we may worship Him in love and enter into His joy in the last day.

Glory be to God Amen.

Bears in Alaska

Bears in Alaska

By: Christopher Nour

I was 22 the first time I experienced ‘fear’.

We can all say we’ve experienced fear at various stages in our lives. Whether it be the fear of failing an exam or subject, a fear of failure, a fear of breaking the law or general phobias such as a fear of heights. In my 22 years on this Earth I have experienced all of these. From failing an exam, to having a police car pull me over for mobile phone use or speeding. I believed that I had experienced the full spectrum of human emotions by the time I had reached the age of 22! How very wrong I was. This is how it started:

There is always a sense of adventure within me, fuelled by my willingness to explore the unknown and my ‘risk taking nature’, as I’m told by my family and friends. This brings us to a 24 kilometre hike to two of the most gorgeous lakes in all of Alaska – Eagle Lake and Symphony Lake. I began my hike just after midday leaving my car in the parking lot. I brought my tent, sleeping bag and pad, a stove, cookware, food, water, camera and drone. All packed! And so my hike began. Along the way I passed numerous people, around twenty to thirty, all heading back to the car park. No one seemed to be going in my direction, which lead me to believe that I would have the lakes to myself. That’s good I guess, right? What could be better than spending a night in this serene wild? After crossing 3 bridges, walking through mud, resting on several rocks, snacking on lots of beef jerky and crossing a painful, …….NO!,…. horrendous granite boulder field capable of breaking your knees and ankles like twigs of wood; I made it to the most perfect little island that would be my home for the next 12 hours.

I arrived steaming hot having lugged two backpacks, and the mental battle I was going through to make it there and not just quit was exhausting! I decided for the quick setup option which consisted of my tent being put up as bare as possible (to allow a nice breeze to enter). I quickly filled up the pot with water and brought it to a quick boil to cook my all time, nutritious and extremely healthy “Mac n Cheese”. I ate, had some more beef jerky, some PowerAde and packed my food away in my dry bag. Now ‘101’ to camping in Alaska is to NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER!!! Sleep with ANY food, or scented items (including sunscreen, lotions etc). This is to prevent bears coming into your tent looking for food. I continued to carry my dry bag containing my food and scented items some 200 meters away from my camp site. DONE! Time for bed!

I quickly ripped off my hiking boots and sweat dripping socks and went in for bed at 9pm. I brought my Bluetooth speakers, Satellite phone and Bear spray with me into the night. Oh what a peaceful sleep it was. 10pm, 11pm, 12pm, 1am, 2am…

At 2am in the dead of the night, I awoke to the sound of beautiful crashing waves on the lake that I’m literally inches away from (remember it’s an island that my tent is set up on). As I lay on my sleeping mat contemplating what a serene experience it is to be camping alone, with no one for at least 12km’s and the sounds of these crashing waves, I start to consider how these waves are occurring. I begin to register what is happening…

I am sleeping on a lake! There is a little wind but not enough for the waves to be splashing this much… I prop myself up onto one elbow and listen harder. I hear something running… Something big is running through the water, causing these waves… I can feel its weight through the blown up air that I’m lying on… I hear the sounds Tsh Tsh Tsh Tsh, as the running object comes to a stop, and then the undoubted sound of a fish splashing on the surface of the water. As I lay there wondering, No!, not wondering, but furiously thinking about what on earth is outside, I confirm the worst thought that can enter any campers mind.

There is a bear. Probably a Grizzly bear (due to the size), 10 feet from my tent – fishing!

All of a sudden there is an enormous grunting and snorting sound that fills the mountains surrounding me.

GRSHHHHH!!!

And then the sound of a beast filling its lungs with litres of air fills me with fear.

What do I do?!?

My heart is pounding against my chest, through my fingers and my ear drums. For a few moments I mistake my beating heart for the bears coming towards me!

“Fight or Flight” instincts take control of me and I choose flight instantly. But where would I run to? I am 12 km’s away from my car, and that’s not a direct path, I must go across rivers, boulders the size of small cars, through mud and past more bears, deers, wolves and all other creatures that walk this earth. There was nowhere to seek protection. If I jump into the lake and swim into the middle I will either die from severe hypothermia (a glacial lake is between 1 to 5 degrees Celsius) or from the bear swimming after me (bears are tremendous swimmers). I remember the satellite phone I have and whip it out putting it into the SOS mode. If I press ONE button the US Coast Guard, Police or Ranger will be here by helicopter. But I haven’t been attacked! And this will surely take time and communication must occur before they decide to come. I decide to ditch the SOS button in fear of being a laughing stock in Alaska and in Australia for the news headline “Australian hiker rescued by helicopter due to bears in camp”.

I stay frozen in the position listening to the bear continuing to fish inches away now from my tent. I’m stopped mid-thought by the sounds that I’ve been hearing for the past 15 minutes on my left, suddenly occurring on my right.

There were two Bears on either side of my tent now! The sounds had doubled! More splashing, more running, and heavier breathing and snorting.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in 22 years I felt a new emotion. Something I have never experienced before. I’m frozen in my tent, trembling, my head about to explode with ideas of how I was going to die. Trying to cry but unable to bring tears out, I prepare myself for my death. I quickly beg the Lord to forgive me and my never ending sins, the big and the small, afraid to be refused heaven for forgetting the smallest details! I bargain with the Lord telling him if he were to keep me alive I would fix the wrongs and do good! I apologise to my parents and brother for what I will put them through and for being in this situation. After having taken care of the important stuff, I think of how the martyrs are sent off when death is imminent – anything to bring peace to me. I try and remember any hymns from church to sing to myself. However none come to mind… except for “My Coptic Church”.

As I ever so slowly put my head back to the floor in fear of making too much noise that the bears come, I start to sing “My Coptic church” silently. I can only remember the first 2 verses and the harmoniously simple tune. So I start to improvise and make up my own verses praising the Lord and his Church. I don’t know how but 1 hour later I fall asleep; too tired from the hike and the mental battle I had just competed in.

I open my eyes! Its daylight! I get out of the tent and walk to where hours before two adult Grizzly bears were standing, each weighing between 250 to 400kg and capable of tearing me limb to limb. I thanked the Lord ever so much for granting me to survive and to live. I walk back some 3 kilometres and find two campers who were camping out with their dogs. As I see humans I feel like embracing them with a hug!

I had been given another chance. I had to fulfil my promises!

The Lord watched over me!