I think the biggest problem is that we introduce things without thinking about their consequence.
Like we introduce microphones for instance.
The biggest church before the big cathedral that we have in Egypt was Al-Izbakiya.
Like what happened when we introduced microphones?
We got these huge cathedrals that we can't do liturgy in.
They don't work with liturgy.
People can't see, the scales are weird.
The icon to space scales are weird.
Like everything is far, everyone is associated from it.
And I understand in Egypt it might be different because it was difficult to build churches
for a while.
So maybe they had to sort of settle for larger churches.
So there was an opportunity.
Maybe, maybe that's true.
But we're not in the same situation today and we're trying to mimic all these things
without thinking about the consequences of what we're doing.
Hello everyone.
This is Father Paul and I hope you're having a good day.
You're listening to Copts in Conversation.
Welcome to this episode of Copts in Conversation where it's basically two cops sitting across
the table, across the desk and having a conversation.
Today I have the pleasure of having a conversation with Kareem Girgis.
He is a software engineer who moonlights as a PhD student, patristic scholar, extraordinary
liturgical scholar at Trinity College, U of T. And you're looking to produce an edition,
a liturgical theological study of the Eucologian of the White Monastery.
Very impressive.
If all goes well.
If all goes well, God willing.
In your MTS at the Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity, your thesis was on the formative
telus of liturgy and was under the supervision of Father Jeffrey Reddy.
And I'm very excited to hear about this and about your conclusions.
Full-time software engineer, graduated from McMaster University and married.
Your parish is St. Mary and St. John of Lovett in Pickering.
Awesome.
So what drives a software engineer to study theology academically, more than beyond just
reading a book or two here and there?
God.
Yeah, no, no.
It happened almost very haphazardly, to be honest.
You know, I first just, I was reading here and there.
I was no, by no means a prolific reader or anything.
I just read a few things and I was interested.
I just wanted to say, you know, is there, I had a very, I think, restricted and incomplete
vision of what orthodox theology would look like.
But with that incomplete vision, I thought maybe I can, maybe it could be exhausted.
Maybe I could read a book or take a course or something and I can just know orthodox
theology.
Yeah.
And then to us studying it academically, I'm like, is there a course I can just take?
Just one course, audit or something, and I can get like the highlights, get the spark
notes of whatever belief you know.
He's like, you know, why don't you masters?
And in my mind, I'm an engineer.
I'm like, what do you mean, man?
I'm just an engineer.
From the other side of the aisle, the sciences and you know, analytical thinking.
Yeah, exactly.
And in my mind, you know, a master's is a professional degree.
Like if I do a master's degree in my engineering life, it will be because I want to get a better
job if I want to, you know, maybe go into academia, but it's never, you know, for fun
or it's never just personal development.
Yeah, I'm just going to do a master's.
But he really sold me well on it.
He sold me, you know, it's just in the evening.
You don't need to, you know, you're already reading already.
It's not too much more reading.
You're already doing the amount of reading.
So why not, you know, it would just be asked to write a paper here and there or something.
You could do as slow as you want.
He told me, you know, he did the he said he gave me the bad advice of saying, you know,
if you if you if you don't like it, you just like you're paying per course.
Right.
You could you could take a course like get admitted into the master's program.
You could take the course that you want to take.
Yeah.
And then you're done.
That's it.
It can end there if you want.
Yeah.
And he's like, this is the first step really for taking a course instead of just doing
it for for ordering or something.
But again, it makes sense.
Yeah.
OK, I'll just I'll enroll and I'll do the one course.
And if I'm convinced, I'll like in my mind, there's no one going to be convinced.
There's no one going to do a master's degree in theology for fun, for fun, especially.
Yeah.
And yeah, I enrolled in two courses that first semester.
And yeah, it's one thing led to another and one course.
We are on your second degree.
Like a graduate degree, a PhD in theology.
It's amazing.
Well, thank God.
Yeah, but really it was by God's.
I think that's the answer.
That's what leads someone to just one step at a time.
Yeah, even in my master's, I didn't consider doing a PhD.
It was just sort of a last minute decision, really.
In my last semester, I thought, you know, maybe I'll apply and we'll see how it goes.
I'm still seeing how it's going.
I can definitely read like coming from an engineering background, too, like we don't
take courses for fun.
Like the only courses that you're required to take.
And after a lot of negotiating with the department, I really have to take this course.
Once it's settled, you have to take it, then you take it.
But the idea of taking a course just for fun, for interest, that was something new for me
as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I'm glad.
I'm glad.
You know, this is a very inspiring story because it just it starts with that one course.
And that's why I tell people all the time, like, try this one course.
You don't even have to take it for credit.
Take it as audit.
So you don't have to be responsible.
So the thing is, when you audit a course versus taking it for credit, you know, you're not
really you're losing on accountability and you might find yourself just not taking it
as seriously as you would if it was for credit.
And don't worry, these courses are, you know, for beginners, for people, for non specialists,
for people who are just coming off the street.
And you know, this is your first course in theology.
You take it.
They take you one step at a time and then you go from there.
And before you know it, you're doing PhD in theology.
Just you.
Yeah, it's it's it's certainly interesting looking back even, you know, because it's
as you said, you know, you know, and even even you or I at least didn't anticipate any
of the things and who knows what happens next.
You know, God does what he does.
Absolutely.
That's amazing.
And the second is the environment at U of T in terms of, you know, were they helpful,
you know, guiding you along the process?
Because I can imagine this is something like this was brand new territory for you.
You're an engineer.
Yeah.
This is like you're venturing literally, you know, blind into this area where you've never
ventured before beyond, you know, reading, of course, you know, just for personal interest.
And now you're like taking it like academically.
Did you have any help with anyone kind of?
Yeah.
For assistance.
To be honest, I read my first paper that I wrote and I was disgusted by it.
It's terrible.
I don't know how and it makes sense.
An engineer writing a paper, it doesn't, it doesn't naturally flow.
You only write equations, by the way, for the record, just equations.
Papers are like this thing that like we hear about people do sometimes or may have done
in the past, but we don't do.
We don't do papers.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I read engineering papers every now and then and it's just all equations and I compare
it with the theology papers.
I mean, it's just complete.
It's such a stark difference.
It's two different worlds really.
But yeah, I read those papers and I think...
Especially those first ones, right?
Oh my goodness.
I'm surprised they passed me even.
It was, they were not good at all.
But certainly, yes, there was a lot of guidance from really two sides.
I started and my first couple of semesters, it was just me and one other, that other friend.
Actually it was his last semester was my first semester and he went on to do a PhD after
that and he just finished recently.
And so there was that side of support.
You have a familiar face, someone who can relate to the background you're coming from.
There's many tropes that we hear in the Coptic Church and there's many patterns of what we
do and stuff.
So it was easy to confide in someone who's familiar with all these things, all these
patterns and tropes and ways of life and liturgical things that we do.
Liturgical not in ritual liturgy but we're very liturgical beings, there are things that
we just do.
But it was easy to confide in someone who understands all this background.
And you know, and he's my friend, he knows that I'm an engineer, he knows I can't write,
he knows these things and he can...
He knows those weaknesses and he overlooks them.
But he knows, at least intellectually, the concerns that I have.
But there's also lots of support that I found in the school itself.
For instance, Fr.
Jeffrey, who we mentioned, supervised my thesis, he really sort of guided me through the program.
And there's an admission interview at the beginning of the program, I know you're familiar
with it.
So he was asking me, you're coming from an engineering background, are you going to be
able to...
Are you not...
What's the word?
Intimidated by the readings and writing that you might be required to do.
And I said yes.
So he advised that the first two courses I took were by him.
He said, just come to my courses for the first semester and I'll...
Walk you through the process sort of step by step.
I think he just took it easy on me and I'm thankful for it.
But he's certainly been a great help along with all the other faculty there.
They've really been role models in how someone can really be in academia and still not be
detached from the church or from the life of...
Oftentimes these things are separated, but it was very good seeing people who really
enact the things they do.
So that was very, I think...
And that's been my experience too, that the experience there is very liturgical.
It's not just an academic exercise.
It's very much participation in what we're learning and a lived theology.
And Father Jeffrey is the director now of the program.
He was a joint director with the late Professor Schneider who recently passed away and he
was also a world class scholar.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually in...
So after that first semester or those first couple of semesters that I had alone, there
was a sort of influx of cops that happened in the school.
So that...
It really created an environment, I think, to promote that first aspect of support, I
think that I mentioned.
For instance, after lectures in the evening, we'll finish at nine or 10 or something.
We'll go to pray tazbaha together or something.
And it was very encouraging and it was very good.
In the symposium in honor of Professor Schneider, there were quite a few cops who actually presented
papers and stuff.
Yeah, no, it was...
Absolutely.
And at U of T in St. Michael's, we have a Coptic Chapel where we prayed there and tazbaha
and everything.
So as an environment, they were very supportive and they took you from the gate and walked
you through step by step.
And I'm sure these first few papers were just...
Atrocious.
I wish the pain of reading them on no one.
But you can only imagine the pain of someone going and correcting them and going through
them and reading them.
And for that same person like Father Jeffrey, as you mentioned, he was the thesis advisor.
So to see your development over the years and over time over all these courses and then
your final product as your thesis.
And I'm sure in his mind, I compare like, wow, very proud, where he came from and where
he is now.
That's amazing, an amazing journey.
And all the different parts that came together for this to work, your support group, your
friends.
And I want to ask you also, how has the support been from church?
Father confession, how did that play into it?
So when I first applied Father Daniel from St. Mary's and St. John's blot and bickering,
I asked him, what do you think?
And he said, yes, I absolutely do it.
And he was going to apply with me.
He actually applied.
He went through the application process so we could do it together.
I didn't know that.
But then his second letter of recommendation didn't go through on time.
So they told him, okay, apply next semester.
And then he was overwhelmed with things to do and stuff.
But he was very, very supportive of it in terms of encouragement.
And he's like, hey, I absolutely should do it.
And other sort of spiritual ventures and stuff, whom I spoke with about the masters, but also
after I was considering doing the PhD and stuff, it's certainly been very encouraging.
And I know and I realize it's not always consistent with everybody's experience, but I found it
to be thank God, very encouraged and very well supported in it.
Thank God.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
So after having gone through the experience of going through MTS master's degree and then
going through the advanced degree of the PhD, how has this affected your service and liturgical
participation in your life in church?
What was the impact on that?
Oh, you should ask my wife, I complain about things all the time now.
It's very interesting because it happened at a very particular time.
So we lived in Ajax for a very long time.
We got married in 2020 and we lived in Ajax.
We both lived in Ajax from before that.
But since we got married, we lived in Ajax until two years ago where I got a job offer
in Kitchener.
I was still doing my masters.
I was finishing it up.
So we lived there for a year for that job.
And that's when I would have started applying for the PhD programs.
In Kitchener, it was such a great community and everything, but just because of the time
that we stayed, it was very brief.
It was just a year and our families were in Ajax and Toronto and wherever.
So we would try to come back on weekends.
Cool.
Lots of driving back and forth.
Exactly.
And driving tended to be concentrated on the weekends when you would otherwise go to the
parish locally.
Exactly.
So we ended up going to the parish in Kitchener very little.
We weren't very consistent in one parish.
Sometimes we'd go to Kitchener, sometimes we'd go to St Mark's because my family goes
there.
Sometimes we'd go to St Mary's and St John's and blah blah blah because some of our friends
and some of her family and stuff go there.
So the timelines really conflicted.
And that year, we attended liturgies consistently, but we never actually got very integrated
in a community.
We were able to serve in the same way that we were serving before leaving Ajax.
So we stayed there for a year and went back to Ajax.
And it's interesting to look at the service aspect of it because just before we left,
it was the end of COVID.
You were just starting to come back from home.
Services weren't fully up and running again.
Not yet.
They're slowly coming back in person.
So it wasn't just the one year that we weren't serving in this traditional way that one
would serve.
It was for a very long time.
It was like three years.
So it was interesting because the people now that you served three years ago are now serving
themselves.
They're old.
They're adults.
I will never consider them adults.
No, they're incredible.
And I find that my service is much less contained in a sort of didactic classroom setting that
you would in Sunday school or something.
You would go stand up and say, here's the lesson for today and whatever.
It shifted a lot more to being just sort of more colloquial, to put it crudely.
I don't know how you would explain it.
Less formal maybe.
Yes, absolutely.
And it became, for instance, like I help out with the bookstore.
These are the quote unquote formalized things.
But as you said, the more relational aspect of it has been very, very de-formalized.
And the quote unquote didactic piece became just me sort of ranting sometimes.
My wife hears lots of it and she's like, it's her loss.
What brings you to my next question?
None of this would have been possible without her support.
And I'm sure she read a lot of papers and helped you edit things and read things and
she's back.
She's incredible in every way.
I married up in every single definition of it.
She's absolutely wonderful.
So she has earned honorary degrees, several degrees through the course of your studies.
She's so much above this whole thing.
She has, of course, she's earned all these degrees.
It's nothing to her.
She's way above that.
No, no, yeah, no, she's incredible.
And she's much, I think she provides the impetus always to bring back the head knowledge into
sort of a practical sense.
I'm usually the one.
She keeps you grounded.
She brings you back to the real, how do we put this into practice?
Yeah.
And I'm terrible.
I have this very bad tendency to look at, I don't know, the way the architecture of
our church maybe doesn't help our literature or something.
And start grumbling and complaining.
And she's like, are you going to go change it?
Are you going to take the kit?
Like are you going to break down the church and put it back up?
Exactly.
Good point.
I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's humbling.
Yeah.
And it makes it real.
It's not just I'm writing a paper or thinking about something and then stopping there.
That's obviously what she means.
She doesn't mean like go break the church down and build it up.
But what she means is that ultimately value isn't in the thing that you do.
If there's nothing that you can do, then pray.
And if there's something that you do, that's the value.
Very nice.
And God bless her and bless all the spouses.
Whether the husband is studying or the wife is studying.
It's the spouse really that carries the lion's share of the load.
So God bless them.
I wanted to ask you about your MTS thesis.
What got you interested in liturgical theology?
What got you...
Before we get into that, white monastery.
What is that?
Oh, the white monastery is one of the major monasteries in Stoheg, Egypt.
It's the monastery that had Amashnouda, essentially the Arkhmai Rite, Beats Abbot.
And he's the one with the sort of the largest literary corpus in Coptic, really.
I was reading a book about it and it's estimated that he's written...
I forget, but like hundreds of manuscripts or something.
It's incredible.
And it really houses most, if not all, the Sahi'itic sort of Coptic manuscripts that
we have.
It's really incredible.
It houses so much, like liturgical manuscripts, hagiographies, like as I said, sort of literary
things by Amashnouda.
Otherwise it's quite a place.
It was interesting to learn that it was in the council, I think, who's in Constantinople?
Yeah, it's said that he was there and they entrusted the care of Nestorius to him.
To keep him on a short leash, so to speak, to give the expression, to manage the situation,
manage his rehabilitation.
Anywhere in the empire, it was, let's send him to upper Egypt with San Shinouda.
San Shinouda actually was very...
He's one of the people who was very adamant on removing the Coptic church into actually
using Coptic as opposed to Greek.
He was one of those people.
And that's why, for instance, I know when I was learning Coptic, there's two levels
of Coptic, learning because they had a Coptic and then learning because they had a Coptic
to understand San Shinouda because he uses this sort of high rhetoric and very complicated
things to really sell you on the language, to say like, oh, look, we're just as good
as the Greeks.
And for a man in upper Egypt to use such highfalutin language, very philosophical, very philosophical,
it's amazing.
He was very well educated.
And he knew Greek.
He did.
It's sort of generally accepted that he's, from the way he writes and stuff.
It's not that he chose Coptic because he didn't know anything else, but he's fluent.
No, no, he's certainly a very incredible character in history.
And so much interest in his work these days.
There's a whole host of scholars just focused on his work and translation and cataloging,
manuscripts and archaeology and also there was a recent expedition, I think it was Yale
University that restored the Red Monastery.
Yes, yes, yes.
Stephen Davis, I know you and I were attending the conference and he was presenting about
the restoration there.
It was unfortunate.
One of the walls fell because of many factors and it was difficult to keep up because of
limitations with COVID and travel restrictions and whatnot.
But thankfully they seem to be putting it back together or somewhat at least trying to avoid
further damage.
Have you had a chance to go?
I have not, but we're going to Egypt soon, God willing.
We're going in August.
I'm sure there's going to be one of the stops.
I'm really pushing for it.
It seems like I'm winning, but I won't rest until it's conclusive.
You're in the process of negotiating.
Exactly.
Negotiating the itinerary.
The problem is that it's summer.
We're going in August, so it's very hot.
It's quite...
Yeah, I mean, it's nothing like Canada summer, nothing like Canada heat.
It's hot here, it's humid, but nothing like upper Egypt.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was pushing for even further south.
I was pushing for Luxor and Aswan and everything, but that's being feared at the moment.
It's so weird because when I was in Egypt, I came very young, but even then, it's not
something that a lot of Egyptians who live in Egypt do.
My parents never took me and none of my friends, their parents took them to Luxor, Aswan, all
of these places.
I think the maximum Egyptians do is the pyramids, if that, but most of the time, we don't.
It's all tourists and it's all Egyptians from abroad coming, visiting and going.
It's such a strange phenomenon because same with us.
I came, I was young.
I came when I was 11 or 12, 11, I think, and we didn't do any of this until we knew we
were coming to Canada.
Then we went to Luxor and Aswan, we went to the pyramids.
Because you're thinking, I was going to be there, I'll go later.
Exactly.
So we went to all these places.
So in the process of writing your thesis for the MTS, what was your aim?
What was your direction?
What did you want to accomplish and what did you find through the writing and research?
So to preface, I guess, many of the courses that I took were initially very scandalizing
to me.
They were very shocking.
It was like, what are you saying?
How can you say this?
For the liturgy course was one of those.
And it was the first course, it was one of those first two courses that I took.
I took the Eucharistic Liturgies course and the Pastoral course called the Church of the
Margins.
The Eucharistic Liturgies course was extremely scandalizing to me because one of the theses
was, well, we have a tendency sometimes to look at liturgy as the word that was used
in the class and because it's used by Father Alexander Schramm, who wrote a lot about liturgy
in the Eastern Orthodox Church, that we perceive it often as illustratively symbolic.
Whereas we should view it as what he calls symbolically real.
And the distinction he makes is that the illustratively symbolic is when we imagine things that are
not there.
Right.
You know, we hold the lefepha and we flap it around to imagine the Shirebun.
We, I don't know, you know, there's all sorts of things like that.
And it's not to remove from the rites that we do, but it's actually to add to it.
That it's not just, we're not just imagining something that it's not there, but things,
there's actually something happening that maybe it might be valuable to look at.
So I had a hard time distinguishing between these two things.
I was asking myself, like, why don't we aren't the Shirebun there?
And why is that different than anything else that we call symbolically real?
But I think intuitively we still, despite the intellectual sort of block, intuitively
we understand.
Like I understand that this is different than the Eucharist being the body and blood, you
know, and nobody will question that.
Like I can, people can forget to, you know, to wave the lefepha around and the liturgy
would still be the liturgy, but you can't forget the bread and the wine.
There's obviously something different.
And it's not to ask, you know, how much can we take away from the liturgy before it becomes
liturgy, but it's what is the liturgy providing for us?
That was a very crude way of saying it, because it's not really about what it gives us.
It's about what we are giving ourselves to.
And what's happening in liturgy, what's happening in elements.
Yeah.
So that was sort of the ground that I was still sort of wrestling with.
So I wanted to sort of understand, like, okay, we say there are things that are symbolically
real.
We say there are things that are illustratively symbolic.
And it's about interpretation.
It's about how we read liturgy, how we interpret and internalize it.
So there's then a way that we should internalize liturgy and experience it.
But why?
Why is that the better way?
Why should I then not imagine the sherbim doing the rings?
Why should I not?
You know, the example given by Shmemmin is like, you know, when they're processing in,
it's like for Christ's burial and things like that.
They have their own versions of these things.
So why should I not do this?
What happens when I not do this?
What happens when I do the other thing?
So that's the question that I'm trying to understand.
Like, what is the end of liturgy?
What does it do?
And in a sense, what, like purpose?
Yeah, like telescope.
Like, what's the, what's the, where are we moving towards?
What's the end of this quote unquote end of this road?
It's not the end of liturgy, like this missile like I'm going to say.
No, no, no, sorry.
It's a bad source of words.
No, it's perfect.
Christ is the end of liturgy.
Right.
But yeah, that was the question I was trying to understand.
And it's, it's, it's to put it in a one-liner.
I think the proposition that I made based off of, I tried to, to not keep it, there's
a lot of modern liturgical theology, so to speak.
There's a lot of people in the modern times that took an interest in liturgy and wrote
a lot about it.
There's people like Father Alexander Schremen, you know, David Fagerberg, Father Aiden Kavanagh,
Father Louis Bouillet, there's so many.
Even in the Coptic Church, I know Abouna Thedros wrote about liturgy beautifully.
Abouna Pshoye Kamel has some sermons that were transcribed.
A lot of modern people that wrote beautifully about liturgy.
But also the fathers didn't miss these things either.
And I think one of the, the character, like one of the benefits of being Orthodox, I think,
is that we don't distinguish between modern and ancient as much as, as we like to think
or others like to think or do.
You know, it's ultimately a church, you know, there's many voices that speak and harmonize
with each other.
I think that's the key that I think makes us identify tradition.
You know, like there's all these famous quotes, what tradition is, you know, there's like
an Eastern Orthodox author, Vladimir Lossky says, you know, tradition is the life of the
Holy Spirit in the church.
Yaroslav Felikian also famously says, you know, it's tradition is the life, the living
faith of the dead and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
And I think both of these speak to the fact that it begins, quote unquote, traditionally,
it begins with what's old because, you know, it was true, it's always true, Orthodoxy,
Christianity is always true.
So it begins with what's true then, but every sort of new voice comes in and doesn't add
something new, but it harmonizes with what's old, you know, and sort of to carry the symphonic
effect of a whole sort of symphony.
And those kind of along the lines of, you know, early Christians, early church fathers
who thought of the bishop as, you know, the conductor of the orchestra and the harmony
of the church and, you know, harmonizes, you know, all the sheep in a flock and getting
them to be, you know, one voice that, you know, noise, their voices are all, you know,
in unison in harmony.
Yeah.
I was reading actually, sorry, I'm going on a tangent, but I was reading this, the life
of Hilaria, the Coptic life of St. Hilaria.
And in the opening lines, it describes God as Khurige, as the word, it's a Greek word
that God sort of borrowed into the Coptic.
And in the Greek, it's used to describe the person leading an orchestra or like organizing
choir, the person who does the choir, like sort of the choir leader, so to speak.
And I found that to be a beautiful image, very consistent, again, I'm going on another
tangent, like Saint Jacob of Sarug in the sixth century.
Also like in his text on creation, he talks about how God is directing this beautiful
liturgy at the beginning.
The creation is really God creating a liturgy, doing a liturgy.
But sorry, I'll go off the statements.
And I did hear, you know, that first chapter of Genesis being this liturgical hymn, you
know, with the chorus, you know, it was evening, it was morning.
Exactly.
It's a very, like, it's a trope of rhetoric.
There is that, it's to someone who knows the language and knows the patterns and stuff,
it's an obvious pattern.
Right.
This is a liturgical hymn, there's something to be sung and said, what's the word?
Rhythmically.
Yeah, yeah.
There's like it's prose.
It's not just like, you know, I think one thing we lose is when we take it out of the
book, like, especially for example, like with the songs, if you read in your Bible, often
times you'll find it, again, written in prose, but then sometimes we lose these tropes.
But we didn't lose them, like we lost them in print, really.
It's the way it's printed, that's right.
Yeah.
Like I was looking at like an Arabic 19th century, like very late manuscript that preserved
these prose.
It was all in text because, you know, they try to say paper and stuff, but they broke
them up in red dots to distinguish the...
Yeah, but like in my experience, Psalm 117, like it's not this acrostic, no, it's like
all just one big block of text.
Exactly.
And it loses that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There is a beauty that's preserved in the text that we sort of lose sometimes.
There's an English version of the Bible, I think the John Dock version that he translates
from the Vulgate, from the Latin, but he consults the Greek, like the Septuagint in the Old
Testament and the Masoretic Hebrew to try to preserve the rhetorical elements of it.
So for example, Psalm 118 is acrostic.
He tried in English, like he preserves all these rhetorical devices that are used that
we miss otherwise.
Because it only works in Hebrew, so to get it to work in English, that's not easy.
It's very good.
It was beautiful.
It's available online, like if you go there.
I'm sorry, I went on like three tangents.
My thesis.
Back to your thesis.
Yeah, so I tried to really make use of this sort of Orthodox framework that we have, that
these voices are meant to harmonize with each other.
So I tried to answer this question looking that way.
So it's not exclusively, you know, patristic, it's not exclusively modern, it's not exclusively
anything other than Orthodox, I think, because that's the methodology that we've lived with,
you know, for like 2000 years.
And so the, I think that the end that I think this methodology reaches is really that liturgy
is made to form us.
And it's not arbitrary.
It really forms us into Christ, and it's not a passive formation.
It puts us in this environment that we're able to sort of internalize all these stimuli
that push us on the story that we're sort of participating in, that we're enacting,
that we're doing something.
It's a choreographed dance, if you will.
You know, we prostrate, we kiss icons going to processions, we kiss each other, like with
the kiss of peace, we smell incense, we hear...
Engages all of the senses.
Everything.
When we were moving, we're doing all these things.
Historically, liturgy was also like the procession that we enter with in every feast was the
thing that happened in every liturgy.
And liturgy was sort of broken up into two places.
So the time, you know, that we go around with the gospel book inside the altar before the
litany of the gospel, or after the litany of the gospel, before the reading of the gospel,
that was another pivotal point of procession in liturgy.
We didn't have benches.
The pews just restrict so much of the movement.
Exactly.
You know, to sit is not the same as to prostrate.
If I'm tired at home, I'm not going to prostrate.
I'm going to sit.
And I perceive that differently, completely.
So when I go and sit in liturgy, that's not the same as prostrating.
And I pretend like it is, but it's not.
Yeah, pews suck.
Get rid of pews.
And while we get rid of the pews, get rid of the crying room.
Oh, crying, the microphones, electrical lighting.
And I, my wife makes the joke, says if I ever am giving the key to design churches, nobody
will come.
I've heard actually of one bishop saying to his choir, this is an Eastern Orthodox church,
saying to his choir, you can only have what the apostles had.
So they didn't have microphones.
You can't have microphones if, you know, they don't have any digital.
You know, iPads, whatever screens, you can't have that.
Whatever they had, you can have.
Yeah, I think there's so much wisdom in this.
It seems, you know, someone might hear it and say that's just fundamentalist, traditionalist.
He doesn't understand, you know, that they use the letter over spirit type.
Yeah.
Or like, you know, they like it.
Someone might say dismisses the fact that they use their own technology or electric
candles.
Oh my goodness.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, ohoh oh, oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o
oh oh oh oh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh
ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh ohoh nine oh oh oh ohoh ohoh ohoh and
you want to know how to turn them on.
It demands that I'm not playing around with it.
It demands that people around me are watching me
to make sure I'm not gonna burn anyone or anything.
It actually can't do anything.
It's light and fire.
It's not this passive thing that's just been declawed
and the threat of it, the danger of it has been removed
in order just to mimic something,
a shadow of itself kind of thing.
Exactly, exactly.
And there's a natural response to fire.
I feel it, it's hot.
I know that the wax is melting on my hand
to tell me this is dangerous.
I know people, like uncle is gonna yell at me
if I hold it close to my hair
because it's gonna catch on fire.
If we're walking in a procession,
somebody's hair is gonna go on fire if I get too close.
If I'm not careful, I'm not paying attention.
Exactly.
If I'm distracted, it demands that.
It demands, yeah, it demands attention.
It demands care.
It demands a lot of things
that are not demanded by electrical candles.
And we do this with so many aspects of liturgy.
We do this with electrical lighting.
I can go on this, like a similar rant with that.
I can go on rants on anything.
My poor wife.
She gets to hear all these rants.
All these random tangents happening.
But it's important thoughts to have
and discussions to have and to engage in
to think about why we do the things that we do
and if doing them different changes the experience
and if these changes are significant
or if they just don't matter.
These are very important conversations.
I think the biggest problem is that we introduce things
without thinking about the consequence.
Like we introduce microphones, for instance.
The biggest church before the big cathedral
that we have in Egypt was Al-Azbakiya.
Like what happened when we introduced microphones?
We got these huge cathedrals that we can't do liturgy in.
They don't work with liturgy.
People can't see.
The scales are weird.
The icon to space scales are weird.
Like everything is far.
Everyone's associated from it.
And I understand in Egypt it might be different
because it was difficult to build churches for a while.
So maybe they had to sort of settle for larger churches.
So there was an opportunity.
Maybe that's true.
But we're not in the same situation today
and we're trying to mimic all these things
without thinking about the consequences of what we're doing.
And you don't find large cathedrals often in the East.
And when you do, it's not used in the same way
or even in the West actually.
Even in the West when you have large cathedrals,
they're not actually used as like parish churches.
You have, to say an old trope,
oftentimes European cities are built around churches,
large cathedrals.
But the town churches are not the large cathedrals.
People would go on Sunday in the local churches
and the local parishes.
In the small places where you're able to do liturgy,
the large cathedrals were exclusive for high feasts
when you're processing through the town or something
and you end in the cathedral.
In the cathedral, right.
Or, and they had multiple altars.
You notice, especially in the West,
there's like five or six altars all around the cathedral
because the main-
Different feasts, right?
Yeah, and the main altar,
that implies that you're using the fullness
of the cathedral is impractical.
That's right, yeah.
Especially given the fact that you don't have mics
for a very long time.
And you have side chapels
and chapels behind the main sanctuary.
Right.
Notre Dame has all sorts of different areas
and chapels and places and altars all over.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We, in the Co-op Church,
we've introduced these large cathedrals
without thinking about what this is doing to liturgy.
Our experience is completely different
than what others might've experienced.
And we forget that this experience is the way
that we're sort of internalizing our knowledge of liturgy.
You know, no one is just sitting there
reading books about liturgy.
How should I understand this?
How should I do this?
And I don't think everyone should.
Like, I don't think you need that to actually appreciate,
to be formed by liturgy.
Like, liturgy doesn't require that you've read
all these like books about how it works.
Kavanaugh or Schmemann.
Yeah. Right.
Like, liturgy works because it works.
People were formed by liturgy before any books
about liturgy were written.
In the early centuries, for instance,
like Cyril of Jerusalem,
he has these catechetical orations.
And the five mystological orations,
like the ones, the last,
so basically those orations or sermons
that he gave to people being baptized into Christianity.
The last five were about the mysteries.
Yeah.
He didn't give those before people were baptized.
People were first baptized, went to liturgy,
had communion, did all the things.
And then he took them, okay,
this is what just happened to you.
And he explains it to them.
Because liturgy speaks for itself.
Like, experience comes first
and then we try and understand it.
But when we disrupt this experience,
we have to say in the books,
like imagine it was dark.
Imagine fire burned you.
Imagine you couldn't see outside from the windows.
Imagine all these things.
And it becomes very inorganic.
Right.
And it becomes almost like performative almost.
You have the electric candle or the electric screen.
I'm not against using modern technology,
but it has to be thoughtfully used,
not just randomly haphazardly.
Like, we use it just because we can.
Just because it's available, we use it and it's fine.
And it makes the liturgy,
like it doesn't affect it in any way.
That's not true.
And oftentimes, like when I have these conversations
with people, they tell me,
well, you're just trying to make liturgy.
It's all about comfort.
It's because it's comfortable.
People are gonna be standing, it's gonna hurt their legs.
Microphones, it's because they're uncomfortable.
People are not gonna hear.
You're making it difficult for people.
Candles, it's because it's uncomfortable.
Someone's gonna get burned.
Something's gonna happen, whatever.
But liturgy is not about comfort.
Love is actually very uncomfortable.
Christ is in fact, up on our churches on a cross,
which is quite uncomfortable.
And we say that this is love,
because it's uncomfortable,
to really, really reduce what it is.
Because it's uncomfortable.
It's not just uncomfortable.
It's much more than that.
And if comfort then becomes the ultimate measure
of how successful or accommodating a church is,
then we've lost the point.
Then why do liturgy?
It's not about comfort or convenience.
Like there's nothing convenient about waking up at six
in the morning and praying prime.
There's nothing comfortable about tasbih midnight prayer.
Like it's not about that.
That's not the goal.
That's not the point.
There's nothing comfortable about fasting,
or at least it shouldn't be.
If it's comfortable, I think we might be doing something else.
Have you tried those Beyond Meat burgers?
Oh, Beyond Meat.
It's Beyond Meat.
Beyond Meat.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I think it's because we're not having these conversations
before we implement changes,
that by the time we realize something is off
or something's different, we might not even realize that.
I know that in many churches, for example, the icons,
they're not Orthodox icons.
They're Western paintings.
And not even good ones.
And sometimes, yeah.
And sometimes they're not even good copies
or prints of really nice ones.
But when people ask, it becomes aesthetics.
It becomes whatever is pleasing to the eye,
whatever looks nice, whatever people are used to.
And instead of the icon pointing you somewhere,
taking you somewhere,
the icon becomes almost like a stumbling block.
Like you get caught up in the detail.
Instead of the icon leading you to a deeper mystery,
it just catches your senses and says,
no, you're gonna stay here.
You're not going anywhere else.
Look at all the detail.
Look at all the artistic expression that's included
and all the beautiful detail that's included.
And to be honest, like I heard this before
about the icon of Christ and how the Orthodox icon,
it looks like the proportions are off
and the eyes are different and there's something there.
Why is it the way it is?
Versus when you see something that's like a Western painting,
it's pleasing to the eye.
And both are of the same subject,
but they're doing something different, right?
Yeah, and I think like there's something
to be said about beauty.
Like, liturgy is supposed to be very beautiful.
Liturgy is very beautiful to correct myself,
but like it's designed to be so.
But beauty ultimately
is nothing other than God himself.
Like Gregory of Nyssa says this and Dionysius
and all these great fathers.
That it's not to be removed from God.
And when it becomes self-referential,
it almost becomes an imitation of beauty.
Is it really beautiful even?
And I'm not saying that you can't have icons
that point to Christ in a Western style.
Like there are some beautifully painted
and decorated Western churches in their Western style.
But the problem is in the Coptic Church,
we've sort of, unfortunately, sometimes we forget
how an icon points to Christ.
And we look at the stylistic elements of a Western,
not even a Renaissance painting,
like a badly imitated Baroque painting
with all the extravagant sort of exaggerated movements
and whatever.
It becomes just sort of loud.
When something is loud, it points to itself.
If someone comes in the middle of the church and yells,
actually, I'm sure we have experience of this
as cops all over the place.
When you have a chorus of chanters singing,
you have one guy just really off key or really off beat.
And he's super loud.
He's not like quiet, very loud.
Points to himself.
It highlights the disruption of that otherwise harmonious,
exactly, image.
And I think that's what loud icons do.
They don't point to something else.
Like the whole liturgy is designed to point to God.
I think everyone would agree to this.
But when something is loud and obnoxious
and sort of stands in contradistinction
to the rest of this pattern,
it doesn't point to the thing anymore.
The person singing off key and off beat
isn't pointing to that hymn
that you're recognizing otherwise.
It's something that seems different
than the thing that you're listening.
That's what makes it weird.
For these icons, so to speak,
I use icons simply as images.
Don't point in the same direction
that the rest of the liturgy is pointing anymore.
And it's not just about style.
It's about the way they're organized,
the way they're patterned,
the way they're sort of quote unquote programmed.
You can have badly programmed icons
even in a Coptic style, I think.
So just for reference, when you say
an icon is programmed, what do you mean?
It's designed intentionally.
I think, for instance,
to give some examples,
I think they just help illustrate the point.
Like, oftentimes, again, this is not a rule,
but oftentimes Christ is painted
in Coptic iconography with open eyes
to say, look, despite the fact that
he's obviously dead on a cross, he's alive.
He's alive.
You know, you'll have angels or St. Mary
holding a chalice, catching the blood
and the water from Christ.
So look, he is the Eucharist.
This is programming.
Like, it's not just haphazard artistic sort of
like salad.
We're saying something.
In the same way that we say things rhetorically in text,
we say things rhetorically through visual stimuli.
And the program can encompass the whole church as well,
like all the icons working together.
Exactly.
Saying something, leading you to...
That's what it should be.
Right.
Like, you were there in the conference
that we heard Dr. Ineme speak
about the programming of the Syrian monastery in Egypt,
the Restorian.
That was incredible.
That was beautiful.
And that was obviously programmed.
He just pointed to this whole program of iconography
in the Syrian monastery and how it all
like sort of participates liturgically,
how it works in the terms of liturgy
and how all the icons are related to each other
and they're pointing to this thing.
It wasn't just a random selection of icons here and there
just to fill space.
Exactly.
They work together.
They do something together.
Exactly.
I know there's also a paper written by Dr. Mehdi Farag
relating the liturgy of St. Thomas, I believe.
I think it is the liturgy of St. Thomas,
which is one of the liturgies
in the Ithlokion of the White Monastery.
And otherwise it's in other places,
but it's one of the liturgies there.
To the iconographic program in the White Monastery.
To show like, yeah, it's all like,
iconography is part of liturgy.
Right.
Architecture is part of liturgy.
Our movements are part of liturgy.
That's why benches matter.
Right. Or don't.
And that's why any of these elements that,
like a new element that's introduced,
we always have to think like, how does it work?
Does it maintain the harmony?
Does it break the harmony?
And if so, in what way?
And this is really important to think about
before kind of making changes,
introducing new elements, things like that.
How does it work with the rest of the elements?
With the rest of the liturgy?
What we're trying to do here?
No, absolutely.
And it's, and like I mentioned, you know,
you can have beautiful Western style images, icons,
even statues, everything.
You can have that.
But given the beauty of liturgy,
given the beauty of liturgy,
not just Eucharistic liturgy,
but liturgy in all that the church does,
everything the church does is liturgy in a sense.
Right.
You know, that's why as you come through,
we say Christ, or God creates a liturgy in the world.
We're living in liturgy,
because we are the church and we're living,
but you know, that's neither you nor there now.
We live currently today, for instance,
I am part of the Coptic church.
So I practice and experience liturgy
in its Coptic sort of notes.
It would be weird then to introduce something
that's not in that same sort of stylistic vocabulary
in that pattern.
Like imagine you're listening to Om Kalsoum
who has beautiful music,
and then introducing like, I don't know,
Nat King Cole, like the jazz musician,
also beautiful music,
but it would be really weird
if you try to like play them together.
Or even just like in a single playlist,
that would be strange to us.
Both very beautiful music.
But it would be weird,
and it would be very sort of abrupt
and like takes us aback when we listen,
when we transition from the one style to the next.
So I think, yeah, like maybe that's why orthodoxy,
you know, even the Roman rites,
but like I think it's highlighted
in Oriental orthodoxy specifically,
has so many different styles and tunes
and ways of doing things.
Because liturgy is the same.
It just gets enacted in all these flavors.
But the problem is when we forget about it,
when we're enacting,
when I forget about how iconography fits in this thing
that I'm enacting,
I just do it as like a decoration to it,
as opposed to an integral part of it.
When really everything is integral to it.
There's nothing that's not integral to liturgy.
There's nothing superficial, there's nothing aesthetic.
It's all like designed to make you an active participant
of what is happening at this moment.
Yeah, even aesthetics are part of the, you know,
I think it's a completely like ridiculous distinction
between like when we asked like,
oh, is it really form or function?
Right.
Like form functions.
Yeah, it's yes and it's both.
Yeah, like form is totally functional.
Like that's why the father would say like,
look at creation and you'll know God, you know?
It's unfortunate because we take these things for granted
and we don't really take the time to criticize them
or think about whether they're true or not.
I don't think they're true.
I think if I go into an unfinished basement,
I'm gonna have a very different experience
from when I go into like, you know, like beds, you know,
the rocky mountains and just walk through there.
It's a completely different experience
and that speaks to the functional difference.
Right.
Like it functioned differently on me
and I experienced things differently,
I appreciated things differently.
I was speaking with a friend, his name is Joe.
And you know, he was reading this book,
I forget what it was called, but it speaks about, you know,
how the gifts, for example, are often very,
they're not a quote, to contradict what we just said,
not really though.
They're not really functional, you know,
like you don't buy somebody socks.
Like if I'm gonna get my wife like a Rolanda a gift,
I'm not gonna get her like a pack of socks.
I'm not gonna get her like, I don't know,
a really cool vacuum.
I'm not gonna get her like things
that are quote unquote functional.
I'm gonna get her something that's beautiful.
I'm gonna get her a stone that she can't use,
like a really shiny stone that she won't do anything with.
I'm gonna get her like a bunch of flowers
that are gonna die in like a week.
I'm gonna get her things
that she won't be able to do things with.
Because the expression of love shows us
that you're worth wasting on.
Right, I see what you mean.
And in a sense that makes it functional.
I don't like the word because of how we scandalized it,
that function became devoid of beauty, devoid of form.
But in a sense, the flowers become functional.
It expresses that I love her.
It expresses that she's worth things that I can give her
that she won't otherwise need or use.
And I think in a sense, the aesthetics,
the beauty of liturgy are an expression of this.
We're like sort of wasting quote unquote on God.
We're like giving him flowers
and giving him like diamond rings and whatever.
Really, he's the one giving us all these things.
That's why we say, we offer it to you from what is yours.
It's really, these are the things that he's given us.
And we're sort of, when I give my wife the flowers
and she puts them in a vase in the house or something.
And we are drawn in by that beauty.
It's not just something that's there and it's wasted
and it's just something that has no function.
We're drawn in by that.
And the reason we're drawn in by that
should alert us to the fact that we're drawn in by that.
You feel like there's something different here
when you experience that majestic scene
in the Rocky Mountain.
You look and you say, wow, this is beautiful.
The creation and the work of God, this is amazing.
We forget that we're in God's image and likeness sometimes.
We forget that the things, when I appreciate beauty,
it's because I'm in God's image.
I forget that the pattern of me giving my wife the flowers
and her decorating the house with it.
I forget that this relationship is really an icon of God.
I forget that this is, that it's real,
that I'm really created in His image.
That what I do in church really should reflect the same thing.
Like we forget that He puts all these seeds of Himself
in all things, in all creation to show us who He is.
Like, you know, like Gregory of Nyssa says,
what God is, this is what He does.
This tells us something that, you know,
what He does is in fact He creates.
So when we see His creation, we should see who He is.
It reveals Him.
Yeah, and we are His creation.
Like we are His creation.
Not just that, we're sort of the crown of creation
that exists as spiritual and physical
and takes all these things together and offers it to us.
So beauty, truth and goodness.
Can they be separated?
Do they work together?
Are they all one and the same?
They're the same thing.
It's the good, the truth, the beautiful.
Yeah, you know, and this is so, I mean,
they borrow obviously from Hellenic philosophy,
but this is true.
Like the fathers would look at it and say,
well, like, you know, God is truth, God is beauty,
God is goodness, He's good itself.
You know, they look at the verse from Exodus,
like when God reveals Himself to Moses,
as I am who I am, and they say,
well, like, yeah, that's what it is.
Like He's being, He's goodness, He's truth, He's beauty.
I think one of the people who fleshes out the most
is the Dynasius, like, you know, the Dynasian text.
Suda, Dynasius is gonna be technical.
Probably a sixth century author
who probably knew Severus, people say.
He fleshes it out so much and I hate,
like it bothers me so much when people try to like,
oh, look, you know, look at his philosophy,
look at really how Hellenic or, you know,
whatever he is or, I'm like, okay, sure.
Like, okay, like he took the Greek language
to express these truths,
but does that make them any less real?
You know, when I speak in English about God today,
is it less real that I'm using sort of
metaphors and analogies from the world that we live in?
Like, I don't know, it would be weird if like,
in 1500 years someone does like a study on how,
how affected am I by like, you know,
the English language or something, it would be kind of strange.
And you know, it's these categories of thought
that are brought into communion with the revelation,
the biblical revelation with scripture and with the tradition.
And that's how it function,
like it's brought into conversation with it.
The Father's, you know, using a co-optic and expression,
changing its meaning, changing its use and using it, you know.
Like, I can't speak about God, I can't pray liturgy,
I can't do anything outside of my culture, really.
Because like, what does culture encompass?
It encompasses language,
it encompasses like patterns of thought,
it encompasses like, you know, all sorts of things.
All the sorts of things that I will use to pray.
If I remove culture, I remove language, for instance.
How am I gonna pray?
Like, I remove the incarnational aspect of...
Then worship becomes, you know, yeah.
Intellectual, it becomes a thing that's in my mind.
It's like something foreign, something alien,
something that's not incarnational.
Right.
Absolutely.
I like, of course, of course he used the language
that he used, of course I use the language that I use,
of course.
You know, in 500 years, if...
You know, orthodoxy goes into some like unknown place,
it's gonna incarnate in the same way.
Like, that's why, for instance,
you have all these missions that go to Africa from Egypt,
or like, you know, the southern places in Africa from Egypt,
and they pray in their languages,
and they have the drums and stuff and liturgies,
and it's perfectly fine.
Because it incarnate in the culture in which they live.
I was just there recently in Kenya with Mbabulis,
and the liturgy was, I think, seven, eight hours,
and the entire time, you know,
the energy level is like right at max,
and, you know, no one taking a break, no one, right?
It was just, it goes on,
and people are in full participation,
and there is no one watching,
there's no one just sitting and observing what's like,
except, of course, for the people who came from Canada,
from abroad, they're just in awe of all that is happening,
and to see this level of participation
for that amount of time, whereas here,
like, if the liturgy goes over time by like 15 minutes,
we started getting looks like,
I'm gonna like, yo, that's 15 minutes,
you better play next week.
It's like, we expect liturgy to be 15 minutes less,
because this week, we're gonna be over.
Oh my goodness.
And, you know, on days like, you know, Good Friday,
and we have to be cognizant of the time,
we don't want it to be, you know,
that's why I have like this running joke with the deacons,
like, we have a starting time,
and then we end when we end, we'll say all the hymns,
and we'll say them, you know, at a good rhythm,
not too slow, not too fast,
a good rhythm where we can all participate,
and at the same time, like,
we're not worshiping to the clock,
like, the clock is an afterthought,
like, just be in the moment,
don't worry about like, am I on time, am I too early,
am I too late,
am I, you know, starting, you know, ninth hour,
a bit too late, or too early, or this,
and it takes you out of worship,
it takes you out of the liturgy, it takes you out of that.
I stopped wearing my watch, to be honest,
for that particular reason,
I found myself in church sometimes looking at my watch,
and I'm like, there's no, what do I have to do?
What's so important that I have next, it's Sunday, like, I'm off.
What am I so behind on?
Why do I need to know the time?
Why do I need to know when we started the gospel,
or whatever, how long of a sermon was,
what did that benefit me?
In fact, it didn't benefit at all,
in fact, it actually took away from me.
It takes away, right?
But it's hard, it's hard to let go of that, like,
you know, you step into the liturgy,
you step into church, and it's different,
like, it's a break in the normal flow of things
that you have throughout the week,
and it's this encounter with Christ.
And then you look at him and straight in the eyes,
and you tell him, you know what, I have no practice,
I have activities, I have to go, you don't do that.
So, but it's hard to get out of that mode of, you know,
Kronos and getting into the Kairos type of mode,
and just stopping everything, like I'm here,
being in the moment, present in this moment, fully,
not just, you know, part of me is here,
but another part of me, like, I'm distracted
by a million other thoughts and all the things,
and all of the responsibilities,
and all the cares and worries, and, you know,
I'm bringing them all to throw at the feet of Christ,
but at the same time, I'm still keeping them,
I'm holding onto them, and I hold onto them so tight
that it just takes me out of the liturgy,
because I'm just so focused on everything else
that's happening before and after and outside of the liturgy.
Yeah, and we know this intuitively, you know what I mean?
Like if I ever go on a date with my wife,
and like I start looking at the time,
I'm like, oh, of course.
When, not if.
When I go on a date with my wife?
When?
That's what I meant, that's what I meant.
Of course, of course.
Is that what I said?
Why did I go on a date with my wife?
And I, I-
Rookie mistake.
Yeah, if I start looking at the watch.
Can you imagine, you know, you're on a date
and you start looking at your watch, it's, what is this?
We didn't start the, I don't know, the dinner, yeah,
we're gonna be late.
Imagine, imagine I did that.
Of course.
And she's loving and great,
and she wouldn't even bat an eye because she's incredible,
but colloquially we speak of it,
and people would be like, oh my goodness,
how could he do this?
If somebody's sitting on the table next to us,
like, what does he have?
You remember when, you know, there was a,
there was a joke going around,
like when Morsi was president in Egypt,
and he went to Germany to ask for money,
and he started looking at the clock, at his watch,
and there was like all these memes that came up,
like, what do you have to do?
Like, are you busy?
Are you, like, and we make,
and we understand this intuitively.
We understand that this is ridiculous,
but like, we come out on the noon,
forget all about this, and we do it.
I was reading this book-
But it's the force of habit, right?
Yeah, but for some reason,
it only takes over in liturgy.
It doesn't take over on my date with my wife,
doesn't take over.
Maybe it takes over when I meet with the German,
I don't know, lady, but,
but it doesn't take over otherwise.
It just takes over, for some reason, in liturgy,
and I was reading this book by Mr. Paul Martin Paulus
Margergourios, who's an Indian Orthodox,
like Molankara bishop, who passed away,
and he says, and the beginning of the book
really like took me aback, and he says,
we don't go to liturgy to benefit.
And I was very scandalous.
What do you mean?
Like, yes, we do go to liturgy to benefit,
but for all the small gregarious.
He says, no, no, we don't go to benefit.
Imagine you go on, like, he doesn't say this,
but this is how I sort of internalize it,
but the pericope is mine.
He didn't say this, but imagine,
I go on a date with my wife, and I tell her,
hey, I'm here because it's, I'm in it for me, you know?
This is for me.
I'm here because, whatever.
I don't know what, you know?
I'm in it for a free dinner or something.
You're gonna pay for me today, I'm in it for whatever.
Or if she tells me, I'm in it for a free dinner,
it will be very strange.
Like, what do you mean?
Right?
I'm in it, like, we're not in liturgy for the benefits.
We're actually in liturgy to love.
It's the complete opposite.
I'm not in it to benefit something.
I'm in it to give myself.
I'm not in it to, like, to give my time,
to give my effort, to give my, like,
sort of the little that I have to give it,
because that's what love is.
It's not to gain something, it's not whatever.
It happens that God is so generous and loving
and gives himself completely to us,
and really the exchange that happens
when He loves us and we love Him,
we're the ones really benefiting.
But I'm not there to benefit.
I'm there, He does give it to me.
He gives me all that He is all the time,
eternally, in Keros, and on the cross.
He did the liturgy and He gave Himself to us.
But I'm there to love.
And then I look at my watch.
And then you look at your watch.
In the midst of all of this, all this is happening.
And then, you know, for some reason,
it's almost like, you know, that habit of checking your phone.
You check it every two seconds.
Yeah.
And it becomes like this stumbling block.
Like you're in the liturgy,
but this little devil in your pocket
keeps taking you out.
It's like, hey, you haven't checked me in three seconds.
Check again.
Maybe something happened.
Maybe someone sent a notification.
Some app is telling you something.
And if we were to take this sort of idea
of what's symbolically real happening in liturgy,
what's happening in liturgy?
Like it's the cross and resurrection of Christ.
Imagine, you know, I'm at the cross.
Christ is being crucified.
And I'm like looking at my watch.
I'm like, I'll manage.
I have a brunch.
I mean, after like Christ, like, come on, like, hurry up.
I have a brunch to go after.
I have like, I don't know,
to see my friend after my family or whatever.
Like how lunatic would that be?
Like we look at scriptures and we're surprised.
Like, how could they not recognize Him?
How could they be so foolish
when the disciples are in sort of the synoptic gospels?
Like, how could they be so foolish?
And then I do this exact same thing in liturgy.
You know, someone, a spiritual advisor was telling me,
you know, if you don't recognize Christ on the altar,
you would not have recognized,
you would have done the same.
You would have never recognized Him 2000 years ago,
walking around Judea.
Like, don't kid yourself.
Like every week He's on the cross and you're on your phone
or you're looking at your watch and you're doing whatever.
Of course, like the thing that you think they're ridiculous
for, you're doing that every single week, not just once.
And it's the disciples, they recognized Him
when He broke the bread.
Exactly.
It happened like at the breaking of the bread,
the disciples of Immo, at the breaking of the bread,
they're like, it's Him.
Yeah.
And then He vanishes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So keep your gaze on Him, keep looking at Him.
Right. Yes.
Imagine they're on their phones.
Imagine, yeah.
And then they say to each other,
like weren't our hearts burning when He was speaking?
But if they were on their phone,
if they had whatever distraction they were into,
if they were giving themselves to those distractions,
would their hearts be burning?
Would they experience it?
Would they miss out on the experience?
Would the experience be lessened somehow?
And in fact, what happens is while they were walking,
like socializing and doing whatever
and not doing the Eucharist,
that's when they didn't recognize Him.
It's only when they stopped doing that,
when they stopped being on the sort of proverbial phones,
that's when they really recognized Him.
That's when they stopped looking down on the phone.
It's weird that looking down on our phone
is sort of mimics frustrations in a sense,
or bowing down.
It's very strange.
It's a liturgical action,
but it's a different kind of liturgy.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, exactly that.
And if we start looking down
and look up at the Eucharist for a moment being offered,
at the cross, Christ being offered,
then maybe we will recognize Him.
And speaking of technology,
like Coptic reader revolutionized the Hulegi.
Oh my goodness.
And everyone has all the books, all the prayers,
everything in an app, right?
And in Eastern Orthodox Church,
they have tons of books for service books
and all sorts of occasions and cycles and everything.
And they're so impressive, like I was talking
with Father Jeffrey and he was like,
I can't believe you're able to fit everything in one app.
How convenient, how amazing, how wonderful.
But at the end of the day,
like it, you know, as convenient as it,
and I use it all the time,
and all the fathers, we all use all the time.
And any service, you know, outside of the church,
it's exclusively Coptic reader.
Like we don't carry books with us anymore.
It's just using app on the phone.
But the price of that is that you're looking down
at your phone, right?
Like, and it does happen from time to time,
like as you're praying, maybe you get a notification,
you can, you know, go into airplane mode
and do all of that stuff.
But it's still like, you're training your mind,
like, you know, just stare at your phone.
Like you stare at your phone for prayer,
you stare at your phone for entertainment,
you stare at your phone for distraction.
Like it's all one direction, one gaze.
I completely agree.
And I, this might be a hot thing.
I don't like Coptic reader.
I don't know how to hear first folks.
I don't know how controversial this is yet.
Maybe I'll find out next week or something.
I don't like Coptic reader, but for a few reasons,
but apart from the practical reasons,
but apart from the technical reasons,
as you said, like I'm in liturgy,
I've stopped looking at the liturgy.
I started looking at the screen.
At some point I used to listen to the words.
Of course we had books and stuff,
but most of the theoretical experience for up until,
I don't know what year the Coptic reader was done,
people predominantly experienced liturgy audibly.
Now people just read it.
Oftentimes we don't even recognize the words at all.
If somebody just reading the gospel
and it's not a Coptic reader,
somebody put the wrong gospel up by accident or something.
Oh my goodness.
How could I even interpret what this person is reading?
It provokes even like mumbling, for instance, at church,
I don't need to speak clearly anymore because I,
so they have the screen, they could read.
People forget the liturgical patterns that we have.
Oh, what?
People used to know this stuff.
Oh, the struggle is real.
This is a struggle that has so many times of like,
which one is it?
It's Saturday, not Saturday, but we're lent.
Okay.
Exactly.
And people used to know these things.
And there's value in knowing them
because then I can interpret them
and understand why we do these things
and then get a full understanding of our liturgy.
But we don't know these things.
It's like, we're just saying the words.
It's still, it was magic.
I'll just say the right words today
and the magic will happen
and I'll eat the body and the blood and I'll go home.
I don't need, I could do whatever.
It's fine.
As long as I'm eating the Eucharist at the end.
It's terrible.
As you said, it conditions us to look down.
It conditions us to be on our phones.
It conditions us to not experience the world
in an analog way anymore.
At some point, you know, what's the word?
Admittedly, a very long time ago,
there was no electrical lighting.
The people would bring up the agbeas out
and hold the candle to see.
And that's how we experienced the worlds.
When we prayed, oh, true light,
who enlightens every man coming into the world.
In fact, the light was coming up.
The sun was coming up.
And I saw and sort of related my experience
with what I'm saying.
But now, no, I have my electrical light on.
I'm looking at my phone lighting up and all these things.
It feels almost like synthetic, like artificial.
It's not as organic.
Which brings me to my next point
is that the language of the liturgy
is seen as this obstacle.
If I don't pray, like,
it's a controversial topic in many circles.
Like, what language do you pray in?
But the fact is that even if 100% of the liturgy
is translated, this is still a mystical experience.
You're still encountering the mystery of Christ.
And even if the words you understand
the literal meaning of it,
all of them are, you know, signposts on the road,
pointing you to this deeper mystery
to participate, to be active in this mystery.
And sometimes it feels like, you know,
it's a red herring, like we're looking at the wrong thing.
We're focusing on just getting, you know,
the basic translation done so that it just, you know,
instead of saying, Erini Pasi, say, peace be with you all.
And somehow saying, peace be with you
means that I understand.
But where I pray, I keep certain things in Coptic
so that, and these are things like we all know 100%.
And they're not, you know, very, like I just said,
like Erini Pasi is peace be with you.
But I don't say peace be with you, I say Erini Pasi.
It retains some of the alerts us at least,
like not all of it is gonna be in English.
Because even if it were in English,
it doesn't mean or guarantee 100% participation
in the liturgy or understanding.
Yeah, and actually that mirrors the liturgy better.
Like if we were to pray the whole liturgy
in not English and not Arabic,
we weren't, we're actually not praying in all Coptic.
We're praying in Coptic in Greek.
Right.
Erini Pasi is a Greek sentence.
It's not a Coptic sentence.
It's not Coptic, that's right.
Yeah, it would be like, you know, peace,
forgetting the word, but whatever.
It will be something else.
Actually translated as Erini,
but it's okay, it's neither here nor there.
And like it makes one wonder,
were they not concerned with understanding
when they were praying in Greek and Coptic?
Why were they praying in Greek and Coptic?
Yeah, I know there's certain sort of justifications
that people bring up saying, you know,
it was at the time when they were shifting from Greek
to Coptic and the Coptic church,
people didn't understand the Greek,
sorry, the Coptic that people were saying,
presbyters were praying in.
So, you know, deacons, chanters, subdeacons,
whatever, readers, whatever,
were translating into Greek.
And that's a hypothesis perhaps,
but that certainly didn't persist for a very long time.
It wasn't, you know, very quickly,
Greek was lost from Egypt.
That didn't stay for a very long time.
And you had Coptic up until like the 10th century,
Masan, when you have Soezim Qafi, I believe,
who laments the loss of Coptic even.
And, you know, but it's like,
oh, nobody understands anything
because we're praying in Coptic,
and nobody knows Coptic anymore.
Yeah, everybody's speaking Arabic now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're still getting Coptic Arabic,
you know, manuscripts and literature
and the writings and things like that.
Exactly, and it was so interesting
because like Ibn Kabir, I think in the 14th century says,
you know, now about the readings specifically.
Now we read the readings both in Coptic and Arabic
because people don't know Coptic anymore,
except for the St. Macarius monastery.
They still do just in Coptic.
It's very interesting.
But-
And actually the Maaseri of Al-Muharrq.
Yeah.
I prayed the liturgy once on the altar, St. Mary.
You remember the name of the altar?
I can't remember.
The altar that was consecrated by our Lord
during the visit of the Holy Family.
And I prayed there and it's all Coptic.
It's all supposed to be in Coptic.
Now, when I went, it was right after my ordination,
so I didn't know.
So like they gave me a part in commemoration
just to make sure like I'm saying names, so it's fine.
Like if I say the names and a little bit
of an English accent or whatever, it still passes.
It's fine.
But in other places, like in some places,
it's 100% Coptic.
That's incredible.
I think there's a lot of value in that otherwise.
Even like in terms, for instance, of,
I'm not imagining we're gonna revive the language
or anything, but there's value in being able
to preserve the language, at least to be able
to translate things and understand the nuances
of the texts and being able to interpret liturgies
and whatnot.
So there's lots of value, I think,
in preserving it at least partially.
But I mean, yeah, like it leads to the question,
I think of the fact that there's Greek in Coptic.
It's like, well, for those few hundred years
between the point where Greek was lost in Egypt
and people knew Coptic, why was there Greek?
And how did people just not participate
for a few hundred years in liturgy?
I don't think the answer was,
yeah, they just didn't know anything.
They just didn't understand anything or participate fully
or they were not formed by liturgy.
It just literally stopped working for a few hundred years.
I don't think that's the answer.
That would be silly.
And it applies to us today.
Like today, for instance, a lot of people in Canada,
and I'm sure elsewhere, there are congregations
that are split between, for instance,
Arabic and English in Canada.
Like, are you saying you're only participating
in half the liturgy, the half of your understanding
if we're doing liturgy, sorry.
If you do a fully English liturgy
and somebody only speaks Arabic,
they're just not participating today?
And other like vice versa, some Arabic.
The question is, does understanding
the words of the liturgy,
prerequisite for participation?
And in what sense is that understanding required
and to what extent?
I don't think so.
My opinion, this is, I take it with a grain of salt.
I don't think it's
like necessarily required in a sense.
But this is like, like there's a huge caveat to this.
Understanding the words alone doesn't mean I participate.
Doesn't guarantee participation.
And with that, I don't think participation
is completely precluded, but it becomes more difficult,
I think.
For instance, I went to an Ethiopian liturgy
and I understood nothing.
But I understand that I've been in enough liturgies
that I'm able to recognize the patterns of what's going on.
And because there's a similar sort of rhetorical style,
so to speak, between the Coptic church and the Ethiopian church,
I kind of understood what's going on
without understanding the words.
And the experience is universal.
Like there's always the experience of hymns and beauty.
There's always the experience of icons.
There's always the experience of incense.
There's always the experience of movement
and kissing and whatever.
And I think there's all these three levels of liturgy
have their own rhetorical sets through which they
sort of communicate what's going on.
Icons, hymns, experience, or words,
sort of auditory stimuli, such as words,
visual stimuli, such as icons and sort of ones of movement.
Like when I kiss, when I prostrate,
when I walk around in a circle as I process or something.
Each of those has their own rhetorical sets
that they communicate things with.
So I lose something, of course,
when I just lose one of those.
Even though the auditory has two levels,
as the hymnographic sense that sometimes I'm singing
melismatically in very long tunes and whatever.
Sometimes I'm singing somnolatically very quickly.
Sometimes I'm singing chorally.
Sometimes I'm singing by myself.
And all these, again, add a dimension to
how I experience liturgy.
But of course I'm losing something
when I just don't understand anything.
So that's the question is that kind of like scripture.
Scripture is not self-explanatory in a sense where,
like the Ethiopian eunuch clearly says,
how can I understand unless someone explains it to me?
Is the liturgy self-explanatory?
Is it supposed to be this standalone experience
where you just go and it will work on its own
regardless of your understanding,
regardless of your participation,
or is religious education for people coming into it,
like catechumen it, is that a necessary component
in being able to participate?
I think yes and no.
Yes, I'll start with the no.
The no because we begin with experience ultimately.
And ultimately liturgy is the place
through which scripture is interpreted.
Right.
Like, aslo.
Yeah.
You know, at some point scripture is only read
in liturgy for a very long time.
Liturgy is the starting point.
Yeah.
That's the experience of it.
And it interprets other things.
Liturgy is not something like I hate when we,
hate is a strong word.
I get bothered when we separate liturgy from patristics,
from like Christology.
And there's all these different sources, different, you know.
Yeah, like all these quote unquote fields of theology.
That's silly, like ascetic theology.
I don't know.
That's a very artificial separation.
Systematic theology and all these different categorizations.
I think it's kind of very artificial, very synthetic.
In reality, it's all the same thing.
Liturgy shows us what it means for Christ to be incarnate.
It showed us what it is that the Father does all things
through the Spirit.
It shows us scripture, interprets for a scripture.
It shows us, if you want to sort of speak patristically,
like, you know, it shows us, I mean, there's two sentences
in that, you know, in the Holy Week,
we have all these homilies, but also it shows us
how the Fathers might have approached liturgy
because these are very old texts.
It shows us all sorts of things.
It shows us, you know, how to live.
It shows us what asceticism is, what the cross is,
because that's asceticism.
Like, there's no separation.
So liturgy really is the place, I think,
through which we enact theology.
And if we let it affect our lives,
then it becomes the sort of grander macrocosmic liturgy
that Jacob of Syrup might have explained,
that life is in fact a liturgy.
And this microcosmic ritual liturgy
just sort of shapes this grander one.
If we understand liturgy properly
and move with it properly,
we're sort of being conditioned and habituated
to move in our lives otherwise correctly.
But I also think, yes,
it also needs to be interpreted for us in a sense.
Like, that's why you have the serial of Jerusalem
explaining the mysteries to his newly baptized catechumens
or Gregor of Nyssa doing the same,
and all these sort of catechetical orations
are for newly baptized catechumens by all sorts of Fathers.
Those are very sort of common.
Yeah, like literary texts that we have from the Fathers.
But I think it comes second.
So experience comes first.
Yes.
But education secondary to that?
Secondary, but also happens second,
like in terms of the chronological sets.
Like, I go to liturgy, I do the thing,
and then my Father of Confession,
or maybe the priest in the sermon, or I don't know,
in whatever venue for education that we're experiencing,
then they explain, like, actually,
what just happened is this.
What you just experienced is this.
This is what's going on.
And we see this pattern also in sort of ascetic literature.
Like, for example, there's the famous story
of Abba John the Short, you know, with the stick.
You know, being told, okay, you know,
go and water the stick every day
for like three years or something.
And he goes every day, waters the stick,
and eventually the stick becomes a tree,
it freezes fruit, so your Father takes it,
so the monk says, look, here's the fruit of obedience.
What happened in the story is that ritual came first.
He was told, just do the thing.
Just go and water this every day.
And that was the ritual, that was the liturgy,
so to speak, that he did.
It was only afterwards that he took the lesson.
And like, look, this is what happens when you do the thing.
This is what happens when you're obedient, in this case.
And obedience was necessary, right?
Like it was, the ritual was also interpreted correctly.
That's one key thing that I wanted to highlight too,
is that like had, I was on the short thought,
oh, like maybe misunderstood his spiritual father.
And like, oh, he really doesn't want me to.
And he did it like out of spite,
like I'm gonna show him, I'm gonna water it anyways.
That then, like we could conclude,
like of course this wasn't a frown,
it was a fruit of obedience, as the spiritual father said.
So we do only correctly understood through the experience.
Yeah, it's liturgy that we do, ritual that we do,
with our end being Christ.
But if we understand the end, if we understand the goal,
the goal for him was the obedience.
The goal for him was like he didn't have any other thing
that he was expecting out of this ritual.
He's like, I'm gonna be obedient to my spiritual father.
I think if we understand the goal, that's the requirement.
I'm doing this because I'm obedient,
because I am emptying myself for God,
because I love God, because I'm his spouse,
because I long for union with him,
because that's what it is to live.
To live is in fact to die.
It's not about me, because I need to be formed.
All these things, if I understand the goal
of what I'm doing, then,
and I think obviously with guidance,
I don't just know things, you know,
I'm guided into knowing things.
I'm sure, I was on the show,
it was told that obedience is something that's desirable.
We do the thing and something happens.
And I think these things that happen
can only be described retroactively.
I can then be shown, you know,
what you just did, this is what happened.
You just went to liturgy.
You're just united to Christ because look at all this.
Because it's something that we experience first.
Like I'm going to experience the fruit first.
I'm going to experience the tree growing first.
It might sound ridiculous if my spiritual father comes
and tells me if you water this thick enough,
it will be a tree.
But it's not as ridiculous when I see it.
Right.
And it's a different kind of knowledge, you know.
Experiential knowledge is the kind of knowledge
that no one can take away from you.
It's something you've experienced.
Yeah.
And we don't think about it often,
but like there's, but we know this sort of again,
like from our day-to-day intuition, like, you know,
the first person who wrote a book about a tree
must have experienced the tree.
Like he didn't just come up with the idea of a tree
and then found the tree in the wild.
He first experienced the tree
and then wrote the book about the tree.
Experience comes first.
Yeah.
And I cannot come to the second point of knowledge.
Like there's no way to produce it
without the experience first.
Like I have to do the thing, I have to see the tree first.
And then I could write a book about trees.
But I can't write a book about trees
and then go look for a tree.
Right.
Then...
In the world of academia, you know,
there are a lot of liturgical scholars
who are non-practicing, they're non-Christian even.
And, you know, they take it as a study in, you know,
a historical study, you know, a sociological study
and to see how, you know, communities are formed
and how they organize themselves and all that stuff.
And it doesn't mean that their conclusion is Christ
because experience is no part of their process,
it is no part of their, you know, the research.
It's just purely just looking at data and analyzing
and, you know, saying like, this is how they pray
and this is how they structure their prayer
and all that stuff.
And, you know, end of the day.
That's the end of it.
Right.
I was speaking with a friend.
Actually, after that conference,
Coptic Studies, where we saw the, you know,
examples of the icons from the Syrian monastery.
Yeah.
And my friend was telling me, you know,
if someone from strictly sort of ritual studies
or, you know, from what you're describing,
comes and sees this, like, not the presentation,
but the iconography, their only conclusion would be like,
oh, the donor was rich.
Like that would be because the icons are so beautiful
because they're so elaborate.
Because they're all that stuff.
Like, oh, they must have been rich.
But that would be the conclusion.
But look how much more we're able to sort of to see
and understand when it's put in the context
of this matrix of interpretation.
Right.
When we're able to interpret it and understand it correctly,
then we glean all these things out of it.
And that's why I mean, the scripture itself,
outside of the tradition of the church,
is merely a historical book.
Like it's people looking, you know,
historical critical method and, you know,
the history of the Israelites and how they lived and,
you know, their habits and all that stuff.
And that's it, just like any other ancient group of people.
But there's no encounter with the risen Lord.
There's none of that.
There's just a flattened kind of, you know,
simplified version of what it is.
Which brings me to my last question.
Orders, major, minor orders, and specifically the deacons.
There are very few deacons.
There are few deacons.
And at the same time, we have a lot of deacons.
Right.
We have young deacons, we have old deacons.
We have deacons who read.
We have deacons who chant.
We have readers who chant, and chanters who read.
We have subdeacons who don't chant or read.
And we have deacons who are, for all intents and purposes,
are liturgical assistants.
And, you know, you read about St. Stephen the Archdeacon.
And you see the rank of deacons in the Book of Acts.
And you see what deacons were entrusted with,
and what the purpose of a deacon is.
And you see, like, it's not just a liturgical assistant.
There's so much more than that.
And then, yes, like rank and function are almost,
like, they're mismatched.
Right.
And why is that?
How did we get here?
Oh, my goodness.
It's such a...
It's a whole other conversation.
That's a whole other rant that I have.
You should ask for London.
Oh, yeah.
This is something that I think we really
need to fix in the Coptic Church.
Like, there's a reason why we have all these orders, right?
And orders were standardized very, very, very late.
Like, we have this imagination that this is, like,
from day one, it was like this.
Like, in medieval canons and commentaries and stuff,
I can think of Ibn Turek.
Like, he has canons about...
Ibn Turek is which century?
12th.
12th century.
Yeah.
He has canons about, for instance,
like another order of doorkeepers,
which is separate from the subdeacons.
The subdeacons were one of their tasks
for the stray cats and stray animals
to make sure they don't...
If you read the description, it's like, you know,
or not description, but if you read the commands
that they're given, you know, and you will keep out...
Dogs and heretics.
Dogs and heretics, right, yes.
It's very aggressive.
But there's this other rank where doorkeepers...
Yeah, there's all these variations,
and it's okay, and that's good.
And I think this highlights the point that I'm trying to make
is that there are things that we do in the church.
Like, for instance, when we make Qurbun,
we chant, we read, we keep the doors,
we clean the church, we have to fill up the oil in the candles,
we have to get new candles for the ones,
like the wax ones that, you know, burn up, we have to do...
All sorts of things.
And so the church just sort of puts...
Like, okay, you're gonna help out with the service,
you're gonna help out with the service, you're gonna do this,
you're gonna chant, because you're a good singer,
you're gonna read, because you're a good reader,
or you can read, or whatever reason, you know,
because you can...
What's the word?
You're literate.
Yeah, literate, but also, like, I think today,
and like most people are literate,
but they can't enunciate.
They're not the word, thank you.
Because you're a good enunciator.
Phonetically, you're very good, you know, people understand you.
Which is very important.
So important!
It makes a huge difference when a deacon reads well,
and, you know, when the reading is kind of done weakly
and not very strong.
100%.
It's different, I think, you know...
It's different, for example, if we speak about something
versus when I read about something.
Yes.
We experience the thing differently, so it's...
Again, if we just reduce it to me just following along
with Coptic Reader or something, it's not the same experience
that I'm having as someone reading,
and we're sort of dialoguing, in a sense.
Like, he reads to me, and I respond with the response.
It's a completely different...
way of doing things.
But yeah, it's unfortunate where we've come,
that, you know, it's...
Like, I understand the impetus.
I understand that we want to encourage little boys,
for example, to participate in the church,
and so we, like, taunt them,
chant their very young and whatever.
But I think there's two problems, though.
The first problem is that we're not doing
the same thing as we did before.
The first problem is that we're saying participation
is precluded outside of taunturing.
So then you have, like, all the girls
not considered as participants in the church implicitly.
Nobody says it.
But implicitly, like, yeah, you know, for example,
I used to teach, like, some hymns classes at church,
and, you know...
So it's something another uncle used to,
and I'd...
Like, a couple of weeks, I'd fill in for him
and go grab them, like, you guys are starting now,
and the girls would be like, no, no, no,
we're not koro koro, deacons.
I'm like, okay, but this is...
What's wrong?
Hands up for everyone, yeah.
Like, can you sing?
Yes.
I didn't know what to say.
I was sort of taken aback.
I'm like, it's fine, you can come.
It's okay, please come.
So even if we don't explicitly say it,
that's how it's perceived.
Yeah.
I don't need to chant, I don't need to respond.
That's what they do.
I'm just gonna be here on my phone, or whatever,
looking at my watch,
and I'll just wait for them to finish.
I can come later.
Because the chants are for the deacon.
Exactly.
The reading is for the deacons.
That's what they do.
You know, the liturgy essentially is for the ordained.
Exactly.
The laymen are...
Observers.
Observing.
Yeah.
And it's not helpful at all to think of it that way, right?
So...
Controversial thing.
I think it's fine to taunt your women, for instance,
as chanters.
But even if not...
Even if not,
we can't understand liturgical participation
as strictly singing, and only singing.
Because, again, it's implied by the fact
that we taunt our boys very young,
because that's the only way they're gonna participate
in the church.
And it works, right?
But I think it's because we understand
participation as singing, as chanting.
Like, go early, because Abunah's gonna start matins,
and he needs, quote unquote, deacons with him.
Right.
Like, go early, like go tzabaha,
because deacons are the ones singing.
All these sort of things.
If we understand participation as only singing,
then we first sort of remove all the people
who can't sing from participating.
And also, we limit participation.
That's when you have, for example,
chanters speaking to each other when Abunah's saying stuff,
because it's not my turn, I'm not participating now.
I'm waiting for my turn?
Yeah.
Like, what are we saying next?
What are we doing now?
What's going on?
You know, whatever.
That's because we misunderstood participation.
I'm not participating now, it's not my turn.
It's his turn, he's doing his thing.
When he's done, I'll participate, it'll be my turn,
and I'll say stuff.
We've conditioned ourselves to think of participation
as only singing.
Right.
Because we forgot all about the other things,
about the hearing, about the iconography,
the listening, the watching,
like all the perceptive pieces.
Right.
And it's ironic, because when we look at aesthetic texts,
for example, oftentimes we're told to be led to silence.
In a sense, this is liturgical silence.
Like malismatic hymns, when the chanter is reading
the psalm in Pascha, this is a form,
like he's the only one singing,
it doesn't mean I should just go pull up a book,
this is something I had to struggle with,
because I used to just read books during the psalm and stuff.
I don't just pull up a book,
I don't just speak to my friend, pull up my phone,
go to the bathroom, do whatever,
because this is an invitation to liturgical silence.
This is a silence, this is an invitation
to the highest step of the ascetic life.
Right.
The one that leads to illumination.
Right.
This is what I actually need to step into,
to be able to fully participate in the liturgy,
if liturgy is in fact union with God,
which is what parallels illumination in the aesthetic text.
So just to get the illumination, purification, perfection.
Yeah.
Correct, that's the three,
the three stages of the spiritual.
Yeah, if you follow some of the,
yeah, some of the, like the Evangrian for example,
like model.
But it all starts with silence.
Right.
It's like lead to silence, remove, you know,
have imageless thoughts if you're a Vegas or others.
Which is kind of different from Western spirituality,
where it encourages the imagination,
encourages, you know, imagining a heavenly scene,
picturing yourself within it,
and having conversations and having interactions.
Exactly.
Actually you'll find for that reasons,
oftentimes Eastern writers would say,
don't close your eyes in prayer,
because you're not imagining things.
Right.
You look at what's happening.
Like imagination is discouraged.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Orthodox spirituality.
And I haven't, you know, I haven't,
you know, maybe there's a place for it in the,
maybe within the Western sort of front of my,
it makes sense, I don't know.
But certainly in the Eastern one, it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, like overall, like it's pretty hard to find
in Orthodox spirituality encouragement
for this kind of engagement,
where imagination is kind of, you know,
given preeminence and the lead kind of role
in this whole participation.
Yeah.
I think in liturgy,
we're encouraged to fully participate.
That doesn't mean we should always be singing,
or like always, we can only participate if we're singing.
Or if all these things.
Or if I'm a deacon, I'm only participating
if I'm holding a microphone.
Or if I have a task, if I have the Shoria, for example,
or lighting the candle, like,
if I'm only participating when I'm participating,
you know, to echo St. Gregory,
then I'm not really participating.
Right.
If I'm, yeah.
But I would take it even a step further.
I don't think counseling women or children
is necessarily like, is a solution,
because it pushes that thinking forward,
that you only participate if you're taught,
if you have a liturgical role, a text.
Like, if we, historically speaking,
you know, the role of the deaconess,
there are certain moments in time
where there were deaconesses ordained,
and there was a function, right?
Once that function stopped being there,
that necessity went away.
Like, so it's always the rank that followed the function.
Like, at least in my understanding,
is the rank that followed the function.
Once the function is not there,
it's not just for the sake of, you know,
equality is the goal.
Because, you know, what about all the men
who aren't deacons?
Are they not participating?
Are they forever, you know, sentenced to live out
the rest of their days in the name of the church,
just sitting somewhere and waiting out the liturgy,
waiting out Abunah Fabbun,
until he wants to pray Gregorian?
You know, just, or if, you know, during sermon time,
it's like, you know, you sit down, shut down,
and just Abunah's gonna finish when he finishes, and...
Yeah, no, no, I totally agree about the point of that,
of role follows need.
Need, exactly.
That's what I was trying to highlight
with the doorkeeper and the whatever,
and there's different rules came up and down and whatever.
It was out of need that these things came up.
And it stops us from looking at today's needs
and saying just like, whatever needs were in the church
at one point in time, one point in history,
then we have to have that.
And different periods of history had different things
happening because of different needs, right?
It doesn't mean that if we're not praying in the catacombs,
we're not praying, we're not faithfully praying the liturgy.
Like, no, we can pray above ground,
we can pray in daylight,
we can have the address of the church published on Google
without fear of the Romans coming down and, you know,
persecuting us.
Yeah, it's, and I agree with you that, you know,
the solution isn't just to taunt your women.
I think the solution is to taunt your people who can sing.
It's like if the need is for people to sing,
and to sing with the understanding that, like,
you're not doing this on behalf of the people,
but with the people, with the full participation
of the people.
Exactly.
As soon as it becomes like you're outsourcing chanting.
Yeah.
Like we don't have to chant because we have these
professional chanters.
So why would I chant?
There's so much better at it.
No, no, God wants your imperfect chant.
God wants your imperfect words.
And that's why we should remove mics.
I think, I don't know.
You know what, St. Paul told, like, you want to pray,
but you don't even know the words,
and the spirit gives you the word.
It's fine.
Just come in with your imperfect words,
imperfect hymns, and imperfect chants,
and just say them.
100%.
But say them wholeheartedly, where your heart is,
there your treasure will be also,
and it will be fine.
That'd be perfect.
That's exactly it.
That's what we're looking for.
I completely agree.
But I think once we, but I think still,
once we taunt your people based off of the need.
Like for instance, the need is for someone
to be musically inclined and lead the rest
of the congregation in chants.
So you get people who are musically inclined.
When you're taunting based off of this,
then it becomes meaningful.
And then you're able to then say,
okay, we have the need for someone
to cook the aghaibi after church.
Maybe that will be a role.
Maybe, and I'm not saying, okay,
we'll come up with like taunting prayers and whatever.
But that's the idea.
That's how these came to be.
From the beginning, it's like there was a need
for people to chant.
So people are like, okay, these people can chant.
Let them chant.
Or they can sort of lead the people in chanting.
And the same thing, like, okay, we could say,
you know, the kitchen needs people to help us cook.
Okay, let's do that.
The church needs to be cleaned.
You know, maybe we should use the subdeacons
as the subdeacons we're supposed to be used.
Clean the church, fill the candles, do whatever,
make the urbon.
Maybe we should use the deacons as the deacons
which used to be sort of designed to be used.
But, you know, it's the arms of the church
that goes to the margins and extends the liturgy
to those people.
Like maybe the deacons should be the ones
going to the prisons, going to the orphanages,
going to the hospitals.
The hospitals.
Exactly, and taking the eucharists to those people.
That's how the deaconate began.
And that's one of the reasons actually
why you had the deaconesses, to like visit women.
Yeah, and widows and-
Exactly, widows and stuff, yeah.
Like you had-
And women's houses and-
Precisely.
Like actually Ibn Tureik, in his list of orders,
he has deaconesses.
And he includes the roles and all this stuff.
In the 12th century, that's very late.
Right.
Like, personally, until I read that,
I thought it was gone long before.
Yeah.
So yeah, like I think if we stop, quote unquote,
clericalizing all these roles,
if we start understanding them as different ways
that the body loves and extends itself to its members
and to the world as a whole,
then maybe we can begin sort of adjusting
and optimally performing these things.
Maybe the church can really then be able to
live in the margins as she might've done and does.
Right.
Like we do that very well in Egypt.
Maybe we could improve that here.
And maybe that might be a way
that we might be able to do this.
Right.
So with all this said, any concluding remarks,
anything, any advice for young up and comers,
any sort of encouragement for people who,
let's say, for lack of a better term,
middle-aged individuals who are well established
in their careers, is studying theology
a thing that they should be looking into?
Is it doable?
Is it only for a certain group of people
who have a certain kind of inclination,
or people who like to read,
or people who like to read history?
I think there's different, like,
I don't think there's a single way of doing even sort of
the quote unquote academic way of theology.
Like, you know, there's the,
like the MTS and the MDIF, for instance,
are understood to be vocational degrees.
Like they're not designed to be super duper academic
or anything.
They're not designed for beginners.
Yeah, they're designed, actually they're called colloquially
sort of basic degrees, because in Ontario,
you know, they don't require you to be,
to have done the previous degree in the same,
in the field, whereas, you know, the MA,
THM, Doctor of Ministry and PhD require you to do,
so they call them advanced degrees.
But the basic degrees, the MTS and the MDIF,
don't require that.
And so they, they, they cater for this.
In my opinion, I don't think they're,
they're strictly, I don't think their,
their goals should be strictly going into academia
or something.
I think they're beneficial in many ways, in my opinion,
but I still don't think they're required.
I think they're encouraged.
Like, obviously, like this is my opinion.
I don't know, I don't know anything.
But, you know, it's contextual, I think.
Father of Confession, I think, was my,
was my guide on taking it up.
But I think, regardless of, of,
doing something like that or not,
it's required, it's, it's, it's important for the church
as a community to, to, to, to take this,
I think, more seriously in the sense of being aware
of, of, of her theology, her, her, for lack of a better word,
her ritual, her, her movements, what she does
and, and how she does them.
Because these things are ultimately practical, I think.
And, and to think of them otherwise is
to not understand them.
Like, I think it's often the people who are,
who are not studying theology, who thinks theology
are strictly like a philosophical thing.
Again, this, and this is like a terrible disruption
of the word, like philosophy used to be a good thing.
It's pejorative now, it's like an insult.
Yeah, now it's like, oh, it's like, it's like,
people think of it now as a strictly intellectual thing.
Yeah.
Where it shouldn't be, and it's not.
So maybe, maybe it's with a sort of a sense of a reorientation
of how we perceive our theology as something enacted
and done, maybe it might be helpful.
And ultimately, you know, I go back to St. Macary's,
you know, who, the one who reads, let him read
for the, for the body, for the community.
The one who writes, let him write and read for the community.
The one who, who, who labors and does whatever.
Anyone who does something, he does it for the church.
So it's, it's, yeah, it shouldn't and isn't
something individualistic, be something individualistic
and it shouldn't and isn't something ethereal,
intellectual only, it's, it's, it's rather something communal
and liturgical and embodied and enacted and done
in every sense of the word, I think.
And for the benefit of the whole church.
Yeah, it should be.
It should be.
If done right.
Beautiful words.
So with that, I'd like to thank you, Karim,
for all the insights and awesome discussion and conversation.
Thank you so much, Karim.
I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode.
For questions, comments, feedback,
or if you'd like to make a suggestion on a topic
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God bless you and have a great day.