Word: deserted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nature completed what man began in Beirut last week. A khamsin, the seasonal wind from the desert, blew clouds of choking yellow dust into the tortured city, and between them, the storm and new political maneuvers brought an end to renewed fighting between leftists and rightists. Before the battles tapered off and an "armed truce" was reinstated, however, some 200 people had been killed in a single day in wild artillery and mortar duels. In one more senseless scene from a year long tragedy, three mortar rounds fell on a crowd of women shoppers and their children in West Beirut...
...words could almost have been written by some early Christian hermit, forsaking the pleasures of the city for the austere spiritual life of the desert. Instead, they are the thoughts of a 20th century monk, Malta el Meskin (Matthew the Poor), who is at the forefront of a remarkable renaissance of monasticism in the Coptic Church of Egypt...
...enjoyed the company of women, of my sisters and family. I love music and used to attend concerts in Alexandria almost every week. How could my heart be filled in lonely isolation? But God kept his promise to me. When I retreated to the desert, God gave me mountains of celestial sympathy. Instead of symphony concerts, I heard celestial music...
...Eastern Orthodox Christians in liturgy and doctrine. As in other Eastern churches, monks play an important role, since only they can become bishops. While the number of monks in Western religious communities has declined by the hundreds during the past decade, the nine ancient Coptic monasteries of Egypt, almost deserted a few years ago, are now filled to overflowing. Though Egypt is identified with Islam, no place could be more appropriate for a monastic renaissance. It was in Egypt that monasticism first flowered, nurtured by the formidable example of the great 4th century anchorite, St. Anthony of the Desert...
...Mina el Muttawahad (Mina the Hermit), who spent years in the desert, then ruled the church until 1971 as Pope Kyrillos VI. He reformed the monasteries through renewed austerity and discipline. The second was Kyrillos' successor, Antonius as Suriani, who currently heads the church as Pope Shenouda lII. Before becoming a monk, Pope Shenouda was once a lay teacher in the Coptic Sunday school movement, another church development that inspired renewed interest in monasticism. Even now Pope Shenouda retires each week to a mud-stuccoed hut in the des ert for a day or more of meditation and prayer...