Miracle in Cairo

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 347 28 April 2009

Miracle in Cairo

‘Out of Egypt I have called My Son’ Hosea 11:1

Easter Sunday in Cairo, Egypt. Late at night in my comfy flat, watching an old black and white movie on a French TV channel. About the life of Bernadette Soubirous. The young girl blessed with 18 apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, near Lourdes - today a famous place of pilgrimage. I went to sleep contented, pleased about Bernadette and her delightful, miraculous story. Little I imagined…

The facts are these. I was in Cairo for a three week crash course in Arabic. At the worthy Sibawayh Centre, a school named after a celebrated Imam and grammarian. Week-ends were devoted to exploring the famed city, Umm ad Dunya, ‘the Mother of the World’. One evening last week I was heading back home from downtown in a battered taxi. Somewhere – God knows where, it looked like any poor area – we passed by some women standing by the roadside. A curve made the car slow down a bit. Somewhat apart from the others, a figure stood out. She wore a simple, long dark cloak, similar to the wide-sleeved jalabiyya worn by many Egyptian men. In her arms, close to her face, she held a small child.

No, she was not a vision. She was real. As real as my burly, unshaven taxi driver. A tall, slender, graceful silhouette. Oval face amazingly beautiful. Her mien a combination of dignity, melancholy and, yes, royalty. Remarkably, she returned and followed my gaze. Egyptians women do not normally do that. A foreign-looking, vertiginously tall chap like me naturally gets noticed but Egyptians are not starerers. Women especially look away from a male stranger. Not her. She did not avert her eyes. Unostentatiously, naturally, sadly, while holding her child lovingly to her cheek, her eyes and mine became intertwined. She was like a living Madonna stepped out of a Coptic icon…no, forget that, a false comparison. Most icons are stylised, non-naturalistic, and hieratic. Their characters are not like anyone you would ever meet in the real world. Instead, the woman I saw was enchantingly human. Yet more than that. At the same time, she was other-worldly. And regal. She held herself like a film star, a princess or a queen. But there also, I felt sure, something infinitely vulnerable, an imploration, a request, a beggar-like demand in her stupendous dark eyes.

Alas, the taxi speeded up and the woman was gone. Yet… could I ever forget her? She has been haunting me ever since.

‘Perhaps… just a prostitute’ some devil later whispered into my ear. ‘With a child? Impossible!’ I answered. One of my teachers at Sibawayh, to whom I related the experience, agreed. Not possible. Who, what was she then?

‘Have you considered whether the Blessed Virgin and Her Son might have appeared to you?’ Father Longin, a Byzantine monk passing through Cairo, gravely put to me. Think me unhinged, arrogant, silly, whatever, I have indeed wondered about that.

‘…behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, take the young child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.’ Thus St Matthew’s Gospel records. And Joseph obeyed. The carpenter, his young wife and child set out from Bethlehem on their foreordained journey. God had willed that Egypt should give refuge to the Saviour who was to bring the Good News of peace and brotherly love to humanity. The Bible is silent as to the particulars of the Holy Family’s sojourn in the land of the pyramids but, providentially, the Virgin Mary later appeared to St Theophilus, a Patriarch of Alexandria, and gave him much information. Today the Coptic Church preserves a rich oral tradition of prodigies and wonders concomitant with the presence of a Heavenly Child in the towns and villages of Egypt 2000 years ago. The district of Old Cairo or Fustat is among the places that gave asylum to the three humble refugees. As idols bowed down and crumbled before Mary’s Son, an enraged pagan prince sought to kill him. The Holy Family then found refuge in a cave, over which stands today the Church of St Sergius & St Bacchus. I thought it appropriate to go and pray there. Ignoring the tourists and their flash photography, I knelt at a side shrine dedicated to some obscure martyr saint. I am a Protestant but I still know how to pray Hail Mary. So I did, again and again, innumerable times. Then I got up, lit a candle and left. Outside a turbaned old man spoke to me in rapid Arabic. I hadn’t a clue but suddenly it felt as if the Virgin was answering my prayers through him. I became convinced I understood his words: ‘You have found the answer to the riddle of your life here in Egypt. The land blessed by the presence of Mary and her Son. The beautiful woman you saw by the roadside was indeed the Virgin. She appeared to you in order to bring you here. Now she has heard your implorations. Continue your work. Be at peace.’ I put a coin into the man’s hand and walked away into the sun, feeling extraordinarily elated.

The riddle of my life. A man called Oedipus long ago travelled to Egypt to solve another riddle. That of the Sphinx. He was lucky – or so he thought after answering the riddle. But the Sphinx, a malevolent monster (Abu al-Howl, the Father of Terror, the Arabs call it), deceived him. It did not tell him of the atrocious ordeal that lay ahead. Fortunately for me, the Blessed Virgin is the loving Mother of Believers. (Quite big figure in the Qur’an, by the way.) Through her Son, the merciful, kind, benevolent patron of sinners. She does not lie. And she is on our side. Viva, viva Maria!

Sceptics will smile, I know. Joseph, Mary and Jesus journeyed through ancient Egypt as obscure, unrecognised refugees whom nobody noticed. The mysterious woman I saw was no mystery but an ordinary, poor person waiting for a bus. Striking she may have been but so what? The fellow outside St Sergius was just a beggar asking for baksheesh. It is all in my imagination, they’ll say.

Huh! How to answer them?

Like this: they can keep their Sphinx. As for me, I will keep my beautiful lady.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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