It Is Humbling, Quietly

I don’t want to order a car today, like we did yesterday.  Let’s try the subway.  Can’t be that bad.  No one likes this idea, but eventually, we're out on the main boulevard crossing one and then the second bride over the Nile.  I try to explain to the girls, what I recall about Tahir Square as we walk passed an embassy building.  The main entrance to the subway station in the middle of the Square says: “no entrance” on one side and something in Arabic on the other.  I proceed down the stairs till a cop disabuses me of any lingering ambiguity as to what the Arabic meant. 

The subway is three Egyptian pounds or about thirty cents, which works for me and our group of six.  Four of our team are ladies and they eyed the ‘Ladies’ car sign and wondered if it made sense to try but decided we’d only get separated.  The subway seems more like a train, but there was room enough and we found ourselves a place to stand as we sped down to the Coptic center of Cairo, by the Mar Girgis station. I hadn’t necessarily planned it this way, but after seeing the ancient Egyptian Museum yesterday this is the logical next stop on Egypt’s progression of historical profundity.  We’ll consider the Islamic period tomorrow. 

The Coptic Museum had armed guards out front, who directed us to the ticket office.  This, presumably now at all Coptic sites after the attack on the Church in Alexandria.  I’m sure it’s a thankless post, but they don’t look particularly prepared for action.  I did my best to brush up just why the Copts split with the Catholics and the Greek Orthodox at the Nicaean Counsel and then explain as much to everyone else.  This early Christian artwork seems crude and of course violent, after the majesty of the Pharaonic art the day before. 

We visit a Coptic Church St. Sergius and Bacchus which was built in 400 A.D. over a cave where Mary and Jesus apparently stayed, in flight from King Herrod and his ‘massacre of the first born.’  Surely this is older than any church standing in Western Europe.  I point this out to my teens, reminding them of the Hagia Sophia, and that church we in Georgia, last summer that were of similar vintage.  I’m not faithful, but it is humbling, quietly, to be standing on the same ground, apparently, for the first time in my fifty-three years, where Christ too, once walked the earth.

We take a seat near the nave and try to enjoy some quiet, though there are Spanish tours, and Italian tours and what appears to be a Filipino all considering the hallowed ground.  My kids ask some basic questions about Christianity which makes me feel as if I hadn’t I’d done an underwhelming job rearing them. I try to explain that in the Middle Ages it was the wives of the kings who were the earliest converts and they in turn persuaded their husbands.  My older one asks:  Why were women interested in Christianity when it was so clearly misogynistic.   Oh dear.  Where to begin. I try my best to give medieval ladies some credit to explain the power of that faith at that time, when suddenly all souls, were equal and it was no longer expected that wives should be burned alive on their dead husband’s funeral pyres but I’m not sure I’ve done much to address the questions.

Around the corner was is the Ben Ezra synagogue.  If Coptic buildings seem endangered in Cairo a synagogue must be very fragile indeed.  Inside were a large group of older (reed peer level) African Americans who all had Ankh medallions on and were talking intently. We ended our trip through this walled area at the Church of St. Barbara, a martyred daughter, who was apparently murdered by her father after she tried one too many times to convert him.  Murder’s never nice, but one can imagine such a child become rather tiresome. 

No one minds taking the subway back home.  By now we’re veterans and know how to get tickets and know how much they cost and where to change trains and it helps to make the city feel manageable. 

Wednesday, 07/03/19