I say it flat out, and anyone is, you know, open to disagreeing with me, but as far as
I know, there is no practice of orthodoxy known to man through all of history, time,
space, that has been devoid of culture.
When we sing, we sing in a way that is cultural.
When we dress the vestments that we use, those are cultural.
When we paint our walls, those are cultural.
When we build our buildings, how we build them is cultural.
Hello everyone, this is Father Paul, and I hope you're having a good day.
You're listening to Copts in Conversation.
I'm excited to have Carol Marcos join me today.
Before I start, let me just say a few words about Carol.
So, Carol Marcos is an inspiring socio-cultural anthropologist and hopes to contribute to
the development of the social sciences in Coptic studies.
She is a recent graduate of Migration and Diaspora Studies at Carleton University in
Ottawa, where she completed her master's thesis on the role of religious identity in the lives
of Coptic youth in Mississauga, Ontario, which she also calls home.
So to begin with, what got you into this field of study?
It's not something that's very common, something that you hear, you know, a lot of people,
especially Copts, are into.
So how did this come about?
Yeah, that's a loaded question.
One day I think I'm going to figure out how to tell the story elegantly, but until then
I'm going to give it my best shot.
So I want to start by saying that this was not the plan.
The plan was to be a good Coptic kid and go be a lawyer and do something that I could
explain to Mama and Bubba's friends very easily.
You know, putting the questions, of course.
Yeah, here we are.
Here's where we ended up.
Yeah, so as you know, Abuna, in Canada and in the United States, before you go to law
school you have to do an undergraduate degree.
And that's kind of where everything went awry.
So I did my undergrad in political science and indigenous studies at McMaster.
And in McMaster, in the social science faculty, you need to take a research methods course
in your third year.
It was in the research methods courses that I did, both in political science and in indigenous
studies that the seed was planted for doing a study like this.
I had already been in, you know, undergrad is a time where a lot of people are figuring
themselves out.
And so I had already been thinking a lot about myself as a Coptic person.
It was during a time where I was just digging deeper into who I was, which is something
a lot of people do.
I started teaching myself Coptic, I got into hymns, all of this Coptic history.
And during my political science research methods course, we had to come up with a question
to ask and we had to do a literature review on it.
And I wanted to understand Coptic voting behavior in the diaspora.
And through that literature review, I came to discover that there was very little academic
research being done on Coptic people in modern times, just ordinary people living their lives.
That a lot of the research was either done on Cots who lived a very, very long time ago,
or it was a lot of research that had to do with the Coptic church and the Egyptian state.
Or, you know, it was never about ordinary Cots and how they lived, how they believed,
how they interact with the world around them.
Very little work in Egypt and then like basically zero at that time in Canada or anywhere in
the diaspora.
And so that I flagged that in my mind.
And then in my Indigenous Studies Research Methods course, I was introduced to the methodology
which I use today, which is one that is really community focused, which is how do we do research
that answers questions that are relevant to communities that isn't just for the academy.
And that was something that really struck me.
I loved that idea.
And I loved reading research that Indigenous scholars had done using that methodology.
And I wanted to use it towards our community.
But of course, again, law school.
So I ended up applying to law schools.
This little thing in the back of my head, it just wouldn't leave me alone.
And one night I just did it.
I sat on my bed and I wrote my personal statement for this master's program.
Totally on a whim.
Like in three days, I pulled recommendation letters together and I just sent it off and
I went, we'll see.
And I ended up getting the acceptance.
And I remember thinking, listen, if you go to law school, you're going to be able, no
one's going to go to law school and then go back, but you can do this little master's
degree and then if you want to do law school afterwards, you can do it.
That's what happened.
I did the master's degree and I fell in love with Coptic studies.
And here we are, a degree and a thesis later.
An amazing story and something that is a very refreshing approach to have something from
within the community and looking at how the community lives and interacts and understands
itself.
These are very, very valuable questions.
And the state of research as you're telling it and describing it, I'm surprised that there
are more of these studies.
It sounds like this is something that should be of utmost importance and more focus should
be done on these kinds of studies to see how people really make decisions and interact
with the society and with the culture around them, right?
These are important questions.
I totally agree.
There's a small group of upcoming studies now, but it's definitely an area that needs
a lot more work.
I think part of the reason why there isn't more is because we don't have the state of
Coptic studies scholarship.
We're such a small group.
So that's who's going to do the work in the first place.
Well, our community is going to, and so we're just starting to do that research on ourselves.
And if you don't know, you won't ask the questions.
And so I don't think if I wasn't Coptic, would I know to ask the questions that I ask in
the study?
Probably not.
And if you didn't have the experience that you had with the research and assignments
in your course of studies, which led you down this path, it would have been a different
outcome for Carol.
I'm glad you ended up where you did, because that's very important, very interesting.
And there's one word that keeps popping up in your thesis, and that's ethnography.
What is that?
Yeah.
So I love ethnography.
Thank you for this question, Abuna.
So ethnography is a way of doing social science research, which is really about life as it
is lived by people.
So when we're doing research, we're not taking people into a lab.
We're not doing social experiments.
We're not sending them surveys.
We are going to people.
Instead of bringing people to the academy, we as researchers are going into the community
and we want to exist with people.
We want to see how people live.
So the field, when we do research, it is in the field among the people.
There's this quote that I've never forgotten by an anthropologist whose name escapes me
right now, but he says, let the field carry you.
It's almost a cliche that when an anthropologist goes into the field, their question changes
completely because it's not about you.
You walk in and you live among people, and that's your research.
That's your data is people, the way they live, the way they interact with each other, the
way they exist naturally in the world.
That's ethnography.
And ethnography relating it to Coptic studies.
When you say Coptic studies, what do you mean?
What is meant by Coptic studies?
And you mentioned that there's a small group of scholars into that field.
How come?
I mean, cops have been around for thousands of years.
And where are we at with this?
And what's the state of the current state of Coptic studies?
That's a big question.
So Coptic studies is, it's really been quite recent that there has been something that
we've come to call Coptic studies.
And what it is, is an amalgamation, a collection of scholarship and scholars from all different
kinds of fields.
And the thing that brings us together is that we study Coptic people.
So somebody who studies ancient Coptic manuscripts, they're in Coptic studies.
Somebody who studies the papacy, the history of the Coptic papacy is in Coptic studies.
Somebody who studies theology is in Coptic studies.
Somebody who studies Copts in modern Egypt today is in Coptic studies.
And somebody who studies Copts in Mississauga is in Coptic studies.
The thing that brings us all together is our interest in Copts and our investment in understanding
Coptic people through all of time and through a huge swath of geography through space.
The thing that brings us together is that we care a lot about understanding Copts.
And this isn't just a group of people who are themselves Copts.
Some are, but some also are from outside of the community.
Yes.
Yep.
It's actually the majority of Coptic studies up until this time has been non-Copts.
And it is quite recent that we've seen an influx of Copts who are interested in Coptic
studies and doing the work themselves, which is fascinating.
It's really, really interesting the work that's coming out because of that.
And the collaborative opportunities that are coming out because of that.
I was just going to ask about that.
How is it, or how has your experience been getting into this field as a Coptic Orthodox
person, getting into this field that's dominated by non-Copts?
How is that reception?
Did you feel welcomed?
Did you have any sort of opportunities to ask questions, guidance?
I've personally felt very welcomed.
I think when non-Copts who've dedicated their whole lives to understanding Copts find a
Copt who's really, really invested, they get really excited.
So I've personally found it to be a really, really supportive environment.
I think there have been a lot of non-Copts who've been doing Coptic studies for so long,
but now that there's this little influx, they're like, oh my God, oh my God.
They're very excited about it as far as I can tell.
From conversations, I hear that this looks like the seeds that they've planted are starting
to bear fruit and Copts from within the community are starting to ask these questions and to
go into these fields and do the research.
That's amazing.
That's beautiful.
From your story, so encouraging is that part of it is that I see it as encouraging to others
from within the community to walk down this path and to research and study Copts and the
Coptic community, not just as just another career, but it almost brings the whole idea
of us as a community out in the diaspora, outside of Egypt as having purpose and identity
that is important and significant enough for someone to dedicate their whole life, their
whole career in pursuit of understanding it better, studying it.
That's amazing.
That's beautiful.
It's so rich.
Before I get into your master's thesis, I wanted also to ask you, obviously, you're
Coptic Orthodox.
You grew up in Mississauga.
You call Mississauga home.
How has your experience been or what was your experience in terms of you're a child of immigrant
parents?
You've immigrated.
Were you born here?
Were you born in Egypt and immigrated young?
What's your story?
Yeah, I was born in Egypt and I came here when I was two, which for a lot of people
means that I might as well have been born here.
But I went back to Egypt a lot as a kid.
Every single summer, I would go back for the entire two months, up until I was 10 years
old.
A significant part of my childhood was in Egypt.
My experience was always like, Egypt, Canada, Egypt, Canada, Egypt, Canada.
That shaped me a lot and it shaped the research question that I ask, which is essentially
how do young Cots in the diaspora understand who they are between these two countries,
these two cultures, these two very, very different places?
The question of identity, right?
How do we identify?
How do we make sense of where we came from and where we are and where do we go from here?
And I really like the story, your encounter with Tantehela that you start your thesis
with.
Yeah.
So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yes.
So Tantehela, which is a pseudonym, was somebody who I served with.
And I had come back, the way my master's program is set up is you have one year that is courses
and then the second year that is your research and your writing your thesis.
And so I'd come back after year one.
And at the end of year one, you're supposed to have proposed your research project and
had it approved.
And so I had gone back with a research proposal in hand approved, ready to do the fieldwork.
And I sat down and spoke to her about my work.
And I was really surprised to learn that she was part of the early immigrant cohorts in
Mississauga.
We don't actually talk about those people very much, those early cohorts, because Mississauga
saw such a huge amount, a huge influx from Egypt in the 90s and 2000s.
We don't really think about or talk about the people who immigrated before that.
So she is in her mid 40s.
And she had immigrated with her family in high school during the earliest waves of cops
to Mississauga.
And she said to me-
Around what year?
She said that she came around the 80s.
And we know that cops began migrating to the GTA in numbers significant enough to record
in the 60s.
So that's the general, yeah, in the 60s.
That's the general GTA.
And then Mississauga specifically, we start to see some movement in the late 70s, early
80s.
And at that time, it's a very, very tiny community.
We don't even have a building at that point.
And so she says to me, to my surprise, she goes, I'm so glad you're researching this
because I used to think about, I think I quoted in thesis, she says-
I spent so many years trying to figure out my identity.
If I felt more Canadian or more Egyptian, she said, nothing felt right or made complete
sense to me.
So I just decided I would identify as Christian.
That's the only thing I'm a hundred percent sure about.
I don't know if I'm Canadian or Egyptian, but I know I'm Christian.
Isn't that amazing?
That like, I'm doing this research now and she's in the 80s thinking about this, going
through this.
It's incredible.
I think the fact that somehow this question was still relevant to her life helped me realize
that this was perhaps a crucial part of the Coptic Orthodox diasporic experience, at the
very least in Mississauga of am I Canadian?
Am I Egyptian?
I don't really know.
I like know one thing for sure.
I know that I am a Christian and maybe that's, you know what, maybe that's enough for me.
Maybe that's how I can live my life.
And you know, unfortunately, if we're all asking the same question, but nobody's talking
about it, we're all kind of struggling with these, you know, existential kind of thoughts
and angst all on our own.
And then comes along this person in the early 2020s and starts asking this question and
doing research.
This is an important question.
Let's talk about this.
This is an important conversation.
And the conversation that I had with her revealed to me that it's a question that for her is
intergenerational because now she's saying, well, I have kids now, right?
And you know, how do you raise your children with a robust sense of self and a robust sense
of identity?
Her kids were born here, but what is she going to give them as a mother, as a sense of identity?
And you mentioned that you met with some, you noticed some ambivalence about, you know,
the diasporic kind of identity, my Egyptian, my Canadian.
Can you give us a little bit about that?
Yeah.
So one of the major terms, one of the major concepts that I use in my thesis is diasporic
ambivalence.
So in migration studies, the word ambivalence has been used to describe this experience
that people face in a context where there's any type of migration, where they feel like
they're being pulled from two directions, they're being pulled between their place of
origin and the place that they've chosen to migrate.
And that can exist in people of all ages and all kinds of migratory contexts.
And what I do in my work is add the word diasporic in front of it, which is to say there is a
specific experience of migratory ambivalence that has to do with diaspora, which is when
I settle somewhere.
I leave somewhere and I settle somewhere and I feel like I'm still in between, like my
body is physically in Canada, but I'm still in between two places.
I'm still being pulled.
And that's why I use the word ambivalence.
I'm kind of in the middle.
But what I did find interesting, I will say, is that within that cohort of 18 to 29, you've
got people who came to Egypt, sorry, came to Canada at all different stages of their
lives.
So one of the secondary questions was, okay, well, I came when I was two, but what if somebody
came when they were 15 or 16?
Do they have the same experience of ambivalence or do they feel like an Egyptian in Canada?
And what I found really, really fascinating was that they also had the same experience
of ambivalence, that whether you came from Egypt at two or 15 or 16, you still felt that
pull.
So maybe each individual feels it in a different way, but you still felt that pull and you
still had these questions about your cultural identity.
Right.
And the question of identity is what's really behind all of this?
Am I Egyptian?
Am I Canadian?
Where do my loyalties lie ultimately?
And this question affects a lot of what we do in terms of how we make decisions, how
we choose whether to integrate or isolate from the culture.
And it all depends on what I identify as and what I feel in my heart.
So this question is very important.
And I see it behind a lot of the issues that many people face because it's almost, I'm
not just going to say it's a question that's ignored, but it's almost pushed aside purposely
that no, no, I can't be thinking about this.
I should be identifying as such and such.
I should be identifying as Egyptian.
And any question about that is almost something that you feel shame thinking about.
If you don't feel that kind of patriotic loyalty towards Egypt, you feel like, am I abandoning
my faith?
Am I no longer Coptic?
So this is such an important question behind so many of the issues that we face.
So I really appreciate that you're digging into this.
And of course, Tantela's answer, I don't know what I am, but what I do know is I'm 100%
Christian, right?
Yeah.
And it takes us to your first chapter that heavenly citizens.
I don't know if I'm from here or from there, but I know I am Christian.
So what kind of, I guess for lack of a better word, was it something that came out of the
conversations that you noticed that there is a trend here.
People are choosing to identify as Christian to kind of avoid this whole question, this
whole conversation, or is it coming out of the conversation that they've thought it through
and they've decided, you know what?
No, my loyalty is Christianity, is heaven.
So I think it's a little bit of both.
I think it's about at the end of the day, like what I heard from a lot of people was
at the end of the day, I could hit my head up against this wall for the rest of my life,
thinking about Egypt or Canada, but this life ends.
And there's a life after that, which matters much, much more to me in the long run, in
the very, very, very long run.
And maybe that's the one that I spend my time and my energy pursuing.
Maybe that is the citizenship that I put my energy and my loyalty and my personal sense
of self into.
One of the things you said of, you know, is this question of identity impacts so many
things.
It impacts how you exist, who you are, who you understand yourself to be impacts how
you exist in the world.
And so understanding who you are as a citizen of heaven impacts everything you do.
And so it's a question and an answer that has very, very far reaching impacts.
And I found that for most people, it was like, I tried, man.
Like I tried.
I was in high school.
I tried to figure it out.
I tried the different hairstyles.
I tried hanging out with the different groups of people.
I listened to music from here and from here and from here.
I went to this cultural club or this like nothing fit, like nothing fully fit.
And in one of my chapters, I believe it is actually the first chapter I talk about how
part of that is because what it means to be Egyptian kind of confounds so many of the
categories that we have in Canada of, you know, are you black or you white or you Arab?
And like Egyptians are like, ah, none, all, I don't know.
I don't know which one I fit in.
I know.
Like part of that is kind of a built in problem because we don't fit into any of these categories.
And it's almost like, well, you know, again, I could spend the rest of my life trying to
figure this out or I could just be like, I don't know, but there's one thing I do know.
And that thing, that is what I'm going to invest my energy into.
Yes, yes.
And I usually when I get faced with questions like this, my answer is usually just yes.
Yeah.
Which one are you?
Yes.
And jumping off of that Egyptianness, how much of what we do is kind of aimed to bolster
that cultural identity and is it a threat or is it an opportunity to kind of, you know,
venture out a little bit from that or is it kind of, did you find that there is, you know,
less ambivalence or maybe even fear kind of choosing to say like, you know what, I've
lived here a lot longer than I have in Egypt and I'm just, I don't feel Egyptianness in
my bones.
Like I love Egypt.
I love my family.
But this is where I am.
This is where I grew up.
This is how I see myself.
Yeah.
I think it's very important to point out that it's not a hostility to either Egypt or Canada
that is behind this.
It's not that people are like, oh, I hate Egypt or I hate this country.
I hate Canada.
It's really not any of that.
It's about priorities, which is a crucial part of my methodology, which is, you know,
I talk about in my introduction, we have to take people's faith seriously when we do research.
We cannot pretend to put it off to the side.
We have to take people's faith seriously.
It is about priorities.
There is fear in the older generation.
And I, even though I didn't interview people from the older generation that came through
in my number one, like in my own experiences, but also in my interviews, you know, youth
are talking about their interactions with members of the older generation and how they're
negotiating that sense of fear.
The diaspora offers cots a really unique opportunity because you're not in Egypt.
And so one of the other terms that I talk about in my thesis is cultural liminality.
You are in a sort of cultural no man's land.
And that can be a scary place to be, but it's also a place that is full of opportunity where
we can figure out what is what, what is important to us, what is not important to us, what is
working, what is not working.
And we can choose what to keep and what to take away or what to let go of perhaps.
That's something that the youth in my study are really, really choosing to take advantage
of.
They're excited by that opportunity, even though it comes with ambivalence, it does.
And the youth themselves argue about it.
I mean, in one of the chapters I have, you know, I quote an interaction between two young
people who argue about the role of the Coptic language, you know, does it matter?
I mean, this is a conversation and it would be dishonest to think that like, or to write
that all youth feel the same way about it.
They don't.
Some youth are really attached to the Coptic language and some youth are not.
A lot of young people are in the middle where they're like, I really love hearing Coptic,
but is it really crucial?
Is it?
These are important conversations.
That's ambivalence at play.
But the being in a diaspora gives us the opportunity to have that conversation and to say, what
is the role of language?
What is the role of art, of our iconography?
What is the role of any number of our practices?
Where is the line, you know, beyond which we cannot cross?
A lot of youth talked about big T tradition and small T tradition.
Being in a diaspora gives us the opportunity to really think about what is what and what
do we want to keep?
So it's a very opportune place to be, even though, yes, there is ambivalence, there is
discussion, there is argument, that's always going to be there.
But it's part of being in a diaspora.
Right.
So picking up on your last point, this place of being that term you use, liminality, kind
of that in between, it's a place of opportunity, but it's also, I'm sure like it causes anxiety,
fear, maybe even feelings of shame or guilt about kind of if you're not patriotic enough,
then you're kind of losing your values and replacing those by Western values.
And that in some circles is seen as something negative, like if you're kind of walking away
from that.
And I noticed that in your research, you noted about how the Egyptian identity and patriotism,
nationalism is kind of a hallmark in some circles of your belongness, like how much
you belong or whether you're sort of on the right track, there's your cat, I see you now,
whether you're on the right track or not in terms of this whole question of identity.
Now, how much of this is just limited to Egypt and how much of it have you found in your
research in Mississauga?
What do you mean when you say how much of it is limited to Egypt?
So the question of nationalism and how people identify as Egyptian and the flags and the
kind of like national pride.
So part of this issue has to do with the fact that forever, orthodox jurisdictions have
been set along cultural lines.
You have the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church,
the Russian Orthodox Church, and orthodoxy is really great in the way that it adapts
to whatever culture the people are.
And so that is how orthodoxy has flourished through the ages and when we come to Canada,
we bring that with us.
And for Coptic in particular, there's the added layer of persecution.
And for our parents' generation, there's a lot of excitement about being able to practice
Coptic Orthodoxy openly, freely, proudly, as loudly as we want to in Canada.
And so you have that and then you have young people who are wondering how important that
is.
They don't, they perhaps don't have the patriotic Egyptian attachment that their parents do.
Or maybe, you know, like, like there were people I interviewed who loved Egypt.
They don't have any problem with Egypt.
They'll listen to them as much as the next guy.
Okay, like Ramadan Mustazalat, come on, they're on the couch.
They're immersed in Egyptian culture.
It's really not about rejecting Egyptian culture in any way.
Again, the word priorities comes up.
It's about what is important and what is appropriate.
Also, what belongs where.
So whether, how much Egyptian culture belongs at church still in the diaspora is a question
that a lot of young people grapple with a lot.
One of the most basic ways that this happens is through language.
Yes, we talked about Coptic, but you know, before the Coptic debate was the Arabic debate,
you know, about whether or not we sing in Arabic, we prayed the liturgy in Arabic.
There is a real sense of tension between younger generations who may love that they're Egyptian
and really enjoy Egyptian culture, but who don't see it as absolutely essential to their
practice of orthodoxy and their personal idea of who they are in comparison to their parents
and grandparents for whom Egyptian identity is absolutely an essential part of who they
are and is really intertwined with how they understand themselves as Copts, like for them
to be a Copt, and for not just for them, for the vast majority of history, the vast majority
of the existence of Coptic people, being Coptic and being Egyptian were synonymous.
Like it's one and the same.
They're tied together.
So there is tension there about how, if we can and how we will, how we can and if we
should separate the two, distinguish between the two.
And that's difficult, especially in a place like Mississauga, where so many of the churches
are intergenerational.
It's not just like the vast majority of Mississauga churches are not adult churches or youth churches.
They're just churches where people go with their parents and their grandparents and themselves
and their kids.
And that's a question that we will have to continue to keep asking because we're going
to keep getting people coming from Egypt who are first generation.
And it's a gap that in some ways will continue to widen because in 20 years or so, I'm going
to have kids, right?
My kids are going to be like how many degrees removed away from Egypt.
And maybe there's going to be somebody who just showed up yesterday from Egypt.
And then maybe one day they're going to have kids and there's still going to be somebody
who just showed up yesterday from Egypt.
So that tension is built in a little bit to diaspora.
But for now, it's really an important intergenerational dynamic, we'll call it.
So with the church being this intergenerational place, this kind of arena where all these
negotiations are happening in terms of identity, whether we're one kind of cop or another or
whether we're Egyptian or Canadian, all of these conversations are happening.
So for a church being intergenerational, did you see that as slowing down and a kind of
process that's just inevitable?
Like at one point in time, we're going to lose touch with Egypt and we're going to become
our own thing.
Or is it not just as simple as saying it's just a matter of time?
There's something intrinsic here, something fundamental.
That connection is not separable.
For a lot of people when they discuss things like what is essential, what is peripheral?
Like you mentioned, small t, capital T. How do we distinguish the two?
How do we separate one from the other?
It's a very controversial question because some people do think it's inevitable.
But I would challenge that because one of maybe the more scandalous things that I say
in my thesis is that faith and culture, at least I won't talk about heaven, at least
on earth, faith and culture are totally intertwined.
I say it flat out and anyone is open to disagreeing with me.
But as far as I know, there is no practice of orthodoxy known to man through all of history,
time space that has been devoid of culture.
When we sing, we sing in a way that is cultural.
When we dress, the vestments that we use, those are cultural.
When we paint our walls, those are cultural.
When we build our buildings, how we build them is cultural.
On some level, there is zero way that we totally ever... I think sometimes when we have conversations
about small t and big T, we go, oh, small t, it's flippant.
We can just do away with all the small... That's not really true.
The small t is how we express as human beings.
That's a really special, beautiful thing.
That's been given to us.
That's been handed down to us by our forefathers.
Abuna, when you talk about is there some shame, is there some difficulty with that, that's
a lot of the times where the conversations go.
When we talk about, for example, the Coptic language, a lot of the times inevitably it
goes to people died for that language.
People really died.
To protect that, now we have to think about, okay, great.
We're really thankful that they kept it alive.
Do we need to keep it moving?
What do we do now?
That's a conversation.
We need to have that conversation.
We can't have people not understanding what's being said at church.
I'm sure if we went back and asked our forefathers, if they're good with a whole generation of
kids not knowing what's being said at church, they'd be like, I'm good.
I'm in heaven.
You guys get here.
However, you're going to do it.
I'm good.
But it is a question that is, the conversations are wrapped up in honor, shame.
Duty is a big one.
What is our duty as Coptic Orthodox Christians to uphold?
What can we let go of?
What is our responsibility, both to those who have come before us, but also to those
who will come after us?
Those are all values that are very heavy, very loaded and wrapped up in nearly every
conversation we have about whether it's music or iconography or language or the way we build
churches or any of that.
For some people, they'll say it's inevitable.
One day there's going to be a Coptic church without Egyptian culture at all.
I have no idea what, to be honest, that means recomposing the hymns.
I personally have no idea what that looks like.
But what is inevitable and what is already happening is that there will be a diasporic
church.
There is already a diasporic church.
There is going to be a transformation.
I don't really know what that transformation will look like, but it's going to happen.
That's inevitable.
Exactly what it will look like or sound like or feel like.
I have no idea.
So our brothers in Eastern Orthodox churches had their moment with nationalism and they
actually declared it as a heresy, something that's not part of the faith.
They call it ethnophilicism.
And that's something to say, no, we cannot put national pride ahead of our faith and
that becomes that the Greek Orthodox are somehow better than the Russian Orthodox or the Serbian
or the Antiochian.
That's something that's dividing and something that's leading away from the faith rather
than something positive and helpful.
And along that conversation is the question of what you mentioned.
There is no pure form of Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy pure from cultural elements.
Someone described it, a modern theologian described it as the yeast that ferments a
culture and the culture is transformed by it.
But at the same time, there is this thought in the back of our head that perhaps if we
go back to earlier sources, we can find a pure form of Orthodox.
If we look at the fathers, if we look at church history, somehow that might give us access
to kind of give us a way to answer that question.
How do we separate the small T from the big T?
But inevitably, we always bump into that.
Even the fathers, when we read them, they're fully immersed in their own culture.
And you mentioned that you found a lot of interest among the youth to go back to the
fathers, to go back to church history.
What were your findings?
I'm very curious because these are things that I see as well.
But I'm just very curious to see how you saw with your methodology.
What were your findings?
Another big question.
It comes out of...
Well, actually, let me speak in the first person, at least for the first part of this
question, because this all happened while I was part of all of this.
This came about as so many of us were wanting to dig deeper.
We were in an environment where we had our parents and our older generations who are
super immersed in Egyptian culture, and then in their own way, trying to give us services
that are relevant to Canadian culture by using non-orthodox material in order to do that,
because that's a bulk of the English language service material that is available on the
internet.
And a lot of us started wondering, what about our own stuff?
And it was the basic question of where are our roots?
And so we started digging into that.
There was a group of us, and I don't know if I talk about Orthodox Pillars of Faith,
but Orthodox Pillars of Faith, that program, there was already a spark, and then it just
lit the fire.
Can you describe briefly what that program was about?
So Orthodox Pillars of Faith is a program that is still running.
I believe it started in 2018 or 2019, and it started as a way for youth who wanted,
let's call it a little extra dose of orthodoxy, to get together and learn more.
And it started with a fateful trip to a resort, the Blue Mountain Resort, where all of us
were introduced for the first time to...
We all sat in this hotel conference room talking about what is patristics.
And we all left that day, or that trip that weekend, with a PDF copy of Athanasius' On
the Incarnation, and it just kind of all took off from there.
But of course, we weren't the only young people.
This is a group of, I believe, about a maximum of 50 young people, max, at the time in 2018
or 2019.
We weren't the only ones thinking about this.
There had been a generation before us.
People were already reading and thinking.
And at that point, we had started reading some patristic works.
And in the thesis, I talk about the emergence of a patristic book club, which is still...
It's a present service where youth gather together to read patristic texts.
And one of the reasons why youth delve into these texts, amidst, of course, spiritual
benefit and all of this, is to be able to sift...
If we exactly, like you said, if we go far back enough, we can find something that is
pure.
And I push up against this in my thesis a little bit, and you did as well, right?
Which is that the fathers were also immersed.
So when we talk about St. Basil, for example, we talk about the context of St. Basil.
In what context is he saying this sermon or giving this teaching?
When we talk about St. John Chrysostom, and it's not just what's amazing, is that we don't
just talk about their cultural context.
We talk about them, as human beings, as men, as people.
You go, when we talk about Augustine, we go, and this is what Augustine went through, and
this is why he might say these things, and this is what St. John Chrysostom...
This is his life.
So we're actually being very ethnographic, which is we're delving into life as lived.
What is the context of these people's lives?
What is their context?
And what are their desires?
What are their dreams?
What are they doing?
What is their life story?
And how does their life story shape their sermons and their teachings and their relationship
with God?
And so perhaps we did start by going there and looking for that pure, unadulterated,
totally zero culture nugget of ancient orthodoxy, but it had a different effect, which is that
if you look at all of these holy people through all of these ages and all of these different
cultures, it acts as this amazing multi-level filter where you actually...
What comes to the bottom, like what is left at the bottom is that big T, but you get to
see, you get to see how it was filtered through St. Basil, St. Augustine, St. John, St. Gregory.
Like, oh my goodness, orthodoxy has always been cultured, but it's adapted through all
of these times.
It has been, I mean, I really don't like the word pure, but it manifests itself fully.
That's a better word.
It manifests itself fully and can manifest itself fully through all of these different
cultural contexts.
Right.
And perhaps this is the opportunity we have today is that the orthodox faith is still
or yet to manifest itself fully in Western culture, in the Canadian context.
And this is where we come in.
You mentioned in the second chapter, someone said to you in an interview that many people
in older generations are very spiritual, but superficially orthodox.
And that reminds me of another quote that another father said, I think he's Eastern
orthodox.
He says that someone can be culturally orthodox, but not necessarily spiritually orthodox.
So we have all the things that we do as orthodox and someone can come in off the street and
engage in all of these things and do all of these things and have the same practices,
the same habits, even adopt the same language.
But that doesn't mean that this necessarily translates into that identity, that faith.
And the worry here is that these things become idols in of themselves.
These things become instead of pointing the way forward, they become ends in of themselves.
And someone could get stuck just being there.
And someone coming in from the outside would kind of not, whose eyes are on Christ and
they do not identify culturally as orthodox, would thereby be kind of excluded or feel
left out, feel like, you know, like I don't belong because I'm culturally not doing these
very same things that people are doing who are orthodox in faith.
So sometimes these things can be an obstacle.
But like you said, there are no point in history, can we find orthodoxy present outside of culture?
It's always inculturated.
It's always part of culture, expressed in culture and language and art.
It's always that way.
And like from conversations I have myself, I see that pursuit and I see it as like a
vain pursuit.
It's not that we're trying to separate the two and extricate culture from orthodoxy.
In fact, it's the opposite.
We're trying to put orthodoxy into culture, not separate the two, but put them properly
in the proper context.
And that's why I found your research fascinating because it's asking that very same question.
Like, how is it that you identify and how do you answer that question between all the
different things that are pulling you in different directions?
And the question I guess that comes to mind is that why are these things pulling in different
directions?
Like why isn't it that these things aren't all pulling us in one direction or pushing
us rather in the same direction?
It's either or.
It's either this or that.
Or 90% this, 10% that.
40% this, 60%.
Why is this tension?
Does this tension exist?
I don't know if I have the answer to that question, but I will say all of us experience
our faith on a very, very individual basis.
And part of that is the way that we understand orthodox Christianity to be a profound and
intimate relationship with Christ that exists, yes, within the context of the body of Christ,
but that I, as Carol, have a very intimate relationship with Christ, a one-on-one relationship.
And that means that when I go to church, there are things maybe that I cherish a lot about
that experience, that there are things I go to church and I'm like, man, this one hymn,
it takes me to heaven.
Or this way that we do things, really, some people will say, if I don't do tazbaqah, the
rest of my week is shot.
Or they have very, very beautiful memories with a particular hymn in Arabic, and it's
their favorite, and they love singing it every single year.
They look forward to it every single year.
That really personal experience is built into the way that we understand our faith as, again,
like I said, existing within the context of the body of Christ and also deeply personal.
I think the tension exists when we project that onto other people and we go, my personal
experience is the experience of orthodoxy.
If we don't sing-
The normative.
Yeah, if we don't sing, because I grew up singing this hymn in Arabic, and man, it just
takes me to heaven, and I think the English translation sucks and it's clunky and it doesn't
work for me, then if we take this Arabic translation, if we stop singing this in Arabic, like that
orthodoxy has been eroded.
Or this one way that we do things in church, it makes me feel at home, me.
It makes me feel at home, but now I'm going to project that onto orthodoxy writ large.
So if now youth are coming and saying, maybe we change it, maybe we do something else,
what do you mean?
This is the church.
This is tradition.
This is the way that we've always done it.
We have to realize that there's a lot, one of my interview participants, I don't know
if I included this in the third chapter, but she said to me, what reading the fathers has
taught me is how much flexibility there is with an orthodoxy, that orthodoxy really can
be expressed in so many beautiful different ways in its fullness, without dilution, without
exception.
But that tension exists when we take our personal experience and we project it onto everyone
and we assume that our personal experience is what everyone else needs to experience
in order to be truly orthodox, which is not true.
But if you feel that way, then you might be truly heartbroken if the, you know, the English,
you're going to be like, oh, these kids are singing so and so in English.
They're not having the true experience that I had, or they're doing things in a different
way.
They're not, yeah, you need like, they're not having the true experience of orthodoxy.
But you know, it's beautiful that that's, that's you, that's your experience.
That's your, those are your memories, that is your relationship with the tradition.
But that doesn't mean that other people can't have a different relationship with the tradition
based on different things.
And I think the irony is that thinking that, you know, someone's personal experience should
be definitive or normative for the entire group is the opposite side of the same coin
as people who think none of this matters.
Yes.
Both sides take the person out of the equation and that experience of the person in the church
with the hymns, with the iconography, the liturgical life of the church, it takes the
person out of it and saying that person doesn't matter, right?
Whether you say like, it should be this way, or none of it matters, both these points of
view take the person out and the person becomes kind of this placeholder for just, for, you
know, aesthetics.
Like it really doesn't matter who you are, where you come from.
They become a generic individual.
Exactly.
And that is, I've sat in on a lot of conversations, a lot of debates between people who are talking
about what we should do in the diaspora.
And I think my position on this throughout time, I've taken the position that there is
no one answer.
Every community is an individual community that has its own makeup of people and you
need, we need to have conversations as communities.
If you have a church that is the vast majority Arabic speakers and like you're not going
to go in and go, guys, we're in the diaspora.
Like it doesn't make any sense.
And if you have a community that's the vast majority English, I'm using language as a
kind of general, you know, point, just because it's the easiest one.
But you know, if you have a community that's mostly English speakers, you're not going
to go in and be like, it has to be Coptic, come hell or high water.
Like every community is different and every community needs to have these conversations.
And whether we like it or not, like people are going to get married and have kids.
These are conversations that will need to happen on an ongoing basis.
But the solution is, has to be tailor made.
Like there's no one big thing that we can impose on every diaspora community in terms
of how we do things.
And that's, if we look at the history of Coptic orthodoxy, there's so much variation in the
way that our hymns are sung from one locale to another.
Like you know, our colleagues that are in, who study manuscripts will be like, and this
manuscript we know it's from Fayyum because they do this weird thing on this lyric, you
know, like that kind of diversity, which is something that unfortunately in the Coptic
community through in the modern times, we've become very intolerant towards, has been built
into the experience of Coptic orthodoxy, even just throughout regions in Egypt for a very
long time.
So it's totally fine if we have that in the diaspora because what matters is orthodoxy.
And it's like, it's an important point to me that just as the members of the church
are shaped by the church, the parish is also shaped by the people.
So if let's say you want a church that's entirely English speaking, but you have a multi-generational
parish, it's going to be a problem.
It's not going to work out.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
It's going to be the same thing as saying we're praying Coptic, 100% Coptic, and then
no one's going to understand.
And people are going to say like, why are we doing this?
Like belong or participate.
And it becomes an obstacle.
So you mentioned diversity and especially in the Oriental churches, there's so much
diversity.
Like you have Eastern Orthodox churches were more or less uniform in the rights.
I mean, like you have the Greek and the Slavonic, like more or less it's standardized.
So like a lot with politics and how things developed in history, but Oriental churches,
there's just so much variety.
Like in our churches and in our Coptic church, we have three different liturgies that we
currently use.
And then some that are no longer in use, Coptic itself, we have the two main dialects, the
Bukhari and Asaidi, and you have the other ones like Fiumic is another major one, but
you have other ones as well.
And then you have the Assyrian Orthodox rights, the Armenian rights, the Ethiopian, Eritrean,
there's just so much variety.
And yet we're all Orthodox and we can all commune together.
Like that diversity did not cause a schism or did not cause a break.
And in some places, it's not very regular, but we do have con celebrations.
Like we have liturgies that multiple jurisdictions participate in.
And it's great to see how much the diversity can come together and be unified in the Eucharist.
So if we don't take the person seriously, we can quickly devolve into something as in
like the rights are set in stone, right?
They were once and for all done.
And of course, we ignore completely the history of the church and the history of the liturgy
and the history of the rights.
And we look at churches singing like currently, we sing English hymns very differently and
not very, but we do sing it differently.
And there are attempts to kind of unify how we all sing so we can all sing together and
be in harmony.
But at the same time, we can't ignore the fact that these things evolve differently
in different places.
You mentioned earlier too about translations and how these translations were done.
And these translations were done by the earliest people who migrated and they did what they
could.
But I think a challenge for younger generations is instead of saying that the translations
are no good.
And I mean, we see things in, for example, in Kiyak, some of these melodies, the words,
they just don't fit at all.
Like it sounds good in Arabic, but as soon as you translate, it's hard to translate rhythm
and rhyme and melody and keep the same flow.
And this is the challenge that's before us, like the current generation.
What is our role?
Is it just simply to take what we've been handed and do nothing with it?
Our role is to put our fingerprint on it, right?
To participate fully and bring in all of our talents in the service of the church, in the
service of the tradition.
So one thing that's coming out of the conversation, at least to me, is that currently we have
a role to play.
And it's not just a matter of taking tradition and freezing that.
And that becomes just a frozen slice of history that we've adapted and we've received.
And then we give that frozen slice onto the next generation.
Like tradition is alive.
It shapes us and we shape it as well.
Like we have a part to play.
We participate in the tradition, right?
And you mentioned in the second chapter that there are these characteristics of an authentication
process, so to speak, when youth are approaching a certain tradition or habit or a certain
cultural practice and how they decide how to dive into that, whether to accept, to reject,
to adapt.
So can you walk us through that perhaps?
Sure.
So authentication is one of the frameworks that I use in my thesis.
And I borrow it from a scholar named Laura Deeb who coined it.
And she was studying in the context of Shia Muslim educational movements among youth in
Iraq.
And she talks about how these Iraqi Shia youth are very interested in identifying what is
Arab culture and what is true Islam.
And so they approach the text, their theological texts in a particular way.
And of course, I'm sure even as I'm saying it, you're seeing the parallels here, right?
So we have the optic youth who are trying to find out where is the line between culture
and cultural influence, Egyptian cultural influence and Orthodox faith.
And so they also are doing this through education, through approaching their theological texts,
which in our case, and in this case is the protristic canon.
So maybe you can help me with the list here, but I recall going off of our conversation
that one of the crucial ones is an openness to change, is recognizing that there is flexibility
in the tradition.
The texts reveal that flexibility.
Something I really like that you mentioned is that Coptic tradition, Coptic Orthodox
tradition is not frozen.
We are not, it hasn't ended.
Like, I think sometimes when we talk about, especially when we talk about our faith as
like an ancient faith in modern times, which has become a sort of slogan that a lot of
churches use and it is accurate, but it's a living faith.
Like it's also, it didn't, we didn't pick it up, you know, 2000 years ago and then just
kind of it was frozen and it's just this relic from thousands of years ago.
No, it's lived.
It has passed through so many hands to get to us.
And it's currently in our hands and will pass to somebody else after us.
Coptic history hasn't ended.
It is still alive and existing.
And when the youth in my study approach these patristic texts, they do so with that in mind.
So to go back to the consciousness of the fact that there is a cultural context that
exists within the texts that they are reading, that there is flexibility, that tradition,
the fullness of truth is lived through like living, breathing complex people and that
it is always being renewed and renegotiated.
We cannot mistaken the cultural expression for the thing itself.
Just like you said, we need to know where the line is.
Even though we can know that in our human capacity, they will always be connected.
As human beings, we don't know how to worship without culture.
When we pray, we do so within a cultural context.
But even though we know that, knowing the difference is really, really important because
it helps us know where the flexible points are.
And knowing where the flexible points are, we can do things like innovate in our iconographic
tradition.
We can innovate in our architectural decisions.
We can think about the way we administer particular rights or the way that we administer our churches,
the way that we operate as a community, knowing where the line is is extremely crucial so
that we don't get stubborn in the wrong places.
We need to be stubborn.
There is a moment where the buck needs to stop and we need to say, no, you don't go
beyond this point.
But when we read our patristic canon, we can know that there is actually a lot of flexibility
and we can learn where to be stubborn and where stubbornness might be a stumbling block.
And speaking of the fathers, I mean, one of the hallmarks of or identifying characteristics
of heretic per se is innovation.
So the fathers took a lot of care and effort to show that whatever it is they're teaching
isn't innovation.
It's in fact walking in the footsteps of those who came before them.
But today we see innovation and creativity as this positive thing.
And in the light of our tradition, definitely we're called to be creative and in the image
of God and engage with tradition, not just simply repeat ad nauseum and just over and
over and over again, repeat the same maxims.
It's more like instead of looking back to the fathers, it's like looking with the fathers
to the future.
And the important thing is that we don't want, of course, on the one hand, to devolve into
just a theology of repetition where things are frozen and we have really no active role,
no part to play other than just to repeat.
And we don't want to devolve on the other hand to preferences because it could be just
that unguided and kind of untrained.
We can easily devolve into that and just everything becomes preference.
I prefer Western iconography.
So I'm going to have Western icons and paintings because they're, you know, and I prefer Western
music.
So I'm going to have this music and so maybe I'm not able to have them in the liturgy,
but maybe I'll have them in meetings or have them in gatherings or things like that.
And just everything becomes all about preferences.
And again, this doesn't mean active engagement.
It just means sort of like, you know, I give up, I'm just going to do whatever it is feels
good and check out, right?
As we're really called to be part of this process, like you said, like it's unfinished
and it's ongoing and we're invited to become and continue to be part of this process and
hand it over to the next generation in a way or in a shape that they themselves can understand
and see themselves as part of the process rather than just inheriting a frozen slice
of history and their task, their role is just to take it and give it to their to the following
generation.
Yes.
One of the crucial things we need to understand about the freezing, of course, as we've been
saying, the extremes are never good.
And one of the really important things we need to remember is, in my opinion, when we
think about the fact that Coptic history is alive, like it's still warm, it's in our hands,
the clay is wet.
It also exists within a relationship of taslim, like of discipleship of it has been handed
to us.
And whenever we mold that clay in our own hands, we need to know that we are accountable
to those who gave it to us.
We are not ever just, we cannot, we are not ever just doing things based on preference.
We can't.
And I know that that's the fear that a lot of people have with change.
And it's crucial to remember that we are accountable.
We are accountable to our forefathers in everything that we do.
It is a chain.
So any choice that we make needs to be part of that chain.
It cannot just come out of nowhere.
We need to, yeah, it needs like, I imagine it in a kind of scholarly way where you, if
you're 2000 years from now, looking back at the diaspora, there, you can actually go,
and then this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened
and this happened.
You're in Canada, but you can still trace everything that we're doing in a chain back
all the way back.
And that is really, really important.
That traceability, that accountability to those who have given it to us is very crucial.
And I think it can, keeping that in mind can keep the whims and the preferences in check
so that we're not just kind of going, oh, well, this, we could, okay, orthodoxy is flexible.
Let's just do whatever we want.
We can't like, that's not how it works.
And also the fact that we don't do anything.
We always do things as a community.
We do things at the highest level of our church.
It's the synod, which is a community of bishops who decide.
So everything we do, and that's by design.
That's so we keep each other in check so that we, you know, so that we don't fall so that
one person isn't just doing whatever they want.
Exactly.
The openness to change.
That's one of the central characteristics of this authentication process, right?
But it begins with a sort of skepticism, which for a lot of Westerners and younger generations,
but Westerners especially like post-enlightenment, like skepticism was, you know, your step number
one, rampant skepticism about anything and everything.
And this process of authentication goes to work for everything that we do, anything and
everything that we do, right?
To the extent that, you know, reading the Bible, reading the fathers, engaging with
tradition, with the liturgy, all of that stuff becomes subject to authentication itself.
But I see the process as well being very useful in the sense that it drives us to take that
history and that tradition seriously, not to take it for granted, as if it's something
that's been handed down to us, just kind of like parachuted down and came out of nowhere.
We do take history seriously.
We do take the fathers seriously.
And this is something that I see definitely as a positive, especially, you know, in the
newer generations, like going and spending a lot of time and a lot of energy reading
the fathers, try to understand what they said, what they said, what they taught, how they
lived, but the caveat is that we have to understand them in their context.
And we have to understand them, you know, as a whole, not just kind of take a quote
from here and from there and kind of hang an entire understanding of a concept based
on one quote from one church father.
So that authentication process is definitely critical.
But I see it sometimes going, you know, way off track.
And like in your research, did you see people thinking deeply about the process or simply
resorting to the fact that like, is there any feedback kind of on the process or is
it just kind of, I need to authenticate this, so I'm going to go off on my own and do research
and do study.
Like, is there any sort of checks and balances to keep things on track?
So I'll caveat with the fact that I call it authentication.
Like I, as in my analysis, I call it authentication and I'm the one putting all of these different
terms together to analyze it, but nobody saw it that way.
I was kind of looking at it afterwards and going, okay, this concept really works here
and these are the reasons why.
Something that's really important in keeping the process of authentication in check is
purpose.
Why, you know, skepticism towards what end is a really important question.
Am I being skeptical just for the sake of being skeptical?
Am I, you know, which is kind of, that's the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake, questioning
for questioning's sake is a very enlightenment kind of idea.
You know, we're just going to keep going.
The wheels are just going to keep turning into anywhere they take us.
But it's really important when it is, we have brains and we are capable of critical thinking
and we are important of asking questions and it, you know, this might be crazy.
I think orthodoxy is the truth.
So I'm not scared of asking questions because I know it's the truth and I'm not scared of
being skeptical because I know that orthodoxy can take it because that's what the truth
is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be able to handle questions.
Otherwise it's not the truth.
But I'm not just going to be, that skepticism has to be towards something, towards the pursuit
of truth.
And so that is a very, very important, that needs to be the umbrella that hangs over the
entire authentication process is I'm not reading the fathers just so I can grab a quote to
bonk somebody on the head with.
I'm not reading the fathers to look like the smartest person at youth group.
I'm not, you know, going to read the fathers just so I can be very high and mighty or whatever
it might be.
I don't know, whatever reason, whatever misguided reasons, whatever whoever reads the fathers
for when I approach these texts, I have to approach them with purpose.
Obviously one of the crucial checks has to be a person's father of confession.
There's really no ifs, ands or buts about that.
I mean, this isn't a spiritual talk, but like it's, it's very important because when we
start to read the patristic canon, there is the temptation to think of oneself as smarter
than other people or look what I've read and, and oh this Tant doesn't know she hasn't read
on the human condition, you know, oh, you know, so and so like it's, we start to get
into this like where we think that the pursuit of God is the pursuit of knowledge, which
isn't, you know, in the same way that tradition, it needs to lead somewhere.
Like it's not an end unto itself.
Small t tradition is not an end unto itself.
Neither is all of this reading is not, is not an end unto itself.
Like you're not, God isn't going to be there on judgment day being like, here's the citation,
like give me the quote.
It really only matters if it leads us to him.
So it's very, very important.
So the first major check on a personal level is that you have a father of confession and
you're like, so that Abuna can be like, yo kid, like it's great.
You're on like your sixth patristic book in two months, but maybe we calm it down or something.
I don't know.
Or, or, but the other thing is in the study, youth are reading it, reading these texts
often together in the context of this book club.
And, and so reading it together, I personally found it's not a guarantee.
Sometimes group think go in very, very bad places, but I've personally found that in
this book club, they keep each other in check.
There isn't that sense of, yeah, it's not just asking for, for asking sake.
I we've also started a patristic Bible study here in Ottawa and something that Abuna Anthony
Morad said in one of the sessions, somebody was asking about the tree in the garden and
we were just getting, it was like, and we were an hour in on this tree.
It was really getting exhausting, but at some point Abuna goes, this, this person says,
Abuna, this is going to be, I'm so sorry.
This is going to be a stupid question.
And Abuna goes, have you, it's not a stupid question.
It's just a useless question, which to me is like one of the most iconic things I've
ever heard.
But, but really like we need to think about if we're going to be skeptical, which is fine.
We have brains, we're able to think critically and thank God our tradition can handle it.
It stands up to scrutiny, but why, why are we asking the questions that we're asking?
Why are we going to go down this rabbit hole in the first place?
That's very important.
And on a personal level, you have to have somebody keeping you in check, which is your
father confession.
There's yeah, there's no way.
Otherwise, the way you're approaching this as a Coptic Orthodox person engaged in, in
this field of study, looking at the community from within is very much parallel to the way
we're called to engage with tradition.
Oral tradition seen from outside is mere story, but from the inside, this is the living tradition
of the church.
The Bible itself, we're told this is something that belongs to the church.
This is our book.
This is where we encounter Christ outside.
Again, it's mere story, historical critical method analysis, community, all that kind
of stuff, but from within.
And that's the key thing.
And obviously, you know, reading too much being puffed up by, by all sorts of knowledge
and can lead to dark places.
And if it's unguided, especially, and that's why generally speaking, monastic writings,
we kind of discourage people to just take up on their own and they have to be done under
guidance, you know, all that.
So process of authentication takes us to the third chapter, perhaps the most controversial
chapter of your research.
And I found this expression kind of standing out for me, authenticated feminine piety,
authenticated feminine piety.
What does that mean?
I'm going to tell you right after I put my computer in the charger.
Sounds good.
Because it cannot die while we're talking about this.
So authenticated feminine piety.
Let's break it down.
I like I'll break it down all the way to the individual word.
So piety is, to put it very simply, living a good Christian life.
We'll just keep it very simple.
Piety is living a good Christian life.
Feminine piety is living a good Christian life as a woman to be a godly woman.
That is what feminine piety is.
Godly womanhood, we'll say.
Authenticated feminine piety is an expression of godly womanhood that is based in the process
that is derived from the process of authentication, which is to say that the young women in my
study read the patristic texts and they also read the writings of the desert mothers.
And out of that, they go, okay, is everything we're doing necessary?
Is everything we're doing with regards to men and women in the church necessary?
Is some of it small t, is some of it very small t tradition?
What is essential about how we understand the roles of men and women in orthodoxy?
And what is not essential?
And where are the points where we need to be stubborn?
And where is there room for flexibility in how we understand what it means to be a godly
woman, a godly Coptic orthodox woman in Mississauga in 2024?
That is what authenticated feminine piety is.
Wow.
Very clear.
So have you found that this understanding is clear among all the participants in your
research?
Like this is how they see it?
Or again, this is how it comes through in your analysis?
Was that how people saw their participation in the church, like women especially?
Was that how they saw it?
Like authenticated, non-authenticated?
Or was this something that came in analysis?
So the women in my study did not use the word authenticated.
But they did a lot of the analytical heavy lifting for me, to be honest.
They really made a direct connection between I read and therefore I do such and such.
I read and therefore I have learned that there is flexibility here and here and here.
They really made that connection very, very clear.
I learned about these desert mothers.
And wow, my understanding of what it means to be an Orthodox woman has been totally
renewed.
They made that connection very, very clear to me.
And so analytically, it was kind of that part of the chapter was easy to write because they
were very aware of it.
My next question is, how was it received by these women?
Was it something that was seen as, aha, now we know the truth.
Now we know we see behind the veil and we see how things are really ought to be.
Or was it more like now we understand what we're doing more fully.
Like where did it lead?
So I think in order to answer this, I need to get into the context of these women in
Mississauga.
What's going on with them?
You know, what's happening here?
Which is that for a lot of these women, you know, something I say in my thesis is it's
not that women that there's this active effort in the church against women.
It's this kind of forgetfulness.
It's a sort of, oh, you're here.
I didn't notice you.
It's a sort of, there's a lot of the women expressed a sense that there's the word bystander
came up a lot in interviews with a lot of the young women felt like they were bystanders
in the life of the church.
They're there to watch things happen, to watch men, their brothers, their fathers, their
crushes, et cetera, participate.
But they weren't participating and all the stories they grew up hearing were of men and
the only ones that were of women were of, you know, a beautiful woman lived in Asia
Minor, the emperor wanted to marry her.
She said no way Jose.
And she was martyred.
And there was nothing else.
That was it.
And so that kind of environment made the women feel kind of invisible and not really knowing
where they belonged.
And I make the connection between liminality between Canada and Egypt with the church.
I say like these women feel like they also sit in a no man's land in the church.
Like where do I belong?
How do I exist in this place?
How do I belong here?
What is my role in this community?
And there are kind of the obvious roles of, you know, you're going to be a mom and you're
going to be a wife, but that's a role that exists in the home.
Well whoever I end up marrying is going to be a father and a husband, but he comes here
and he has a role.
Where do I do?
So that's the context in which a lot of these young women are speaking, which isn't a context
of like active aggression towards women.
It's more of just like an afterthought or not, you know, they just felt like bystanders
their whole lives.
And so in reading these texts of these mothers who were really active, like really, really
active like St. Sinclairica, St. Olympia, St. Macarena, like really active women, they're
like, oh my goodness, this has happened before?
There's a place for me.
There's something, there's roots, like there's historical backing for my public participation.
And that's a really important word is public, like for women to publicly participate in
the church.
And so reading that, I personally don't know of any young women who've gone to the deserts
of Mississauga after reading about St. Sinclairica.
But what it has done is it's encouraged them and it's inspired them to serve one another
and to serve the girls that are under them.
So one of the examples is that one of the young women in the study started a hymns class
that's for girls.
And she talks about how it's more than just a hymns class.
What she wants to do is cultivate a feeling of sisterhood and community among these girls.
She wants them to stand up in church and sing and really know what they're singing and have
that knowledge, which so many of them watch their brothers who are deacons, like they
know the stuff.
And some of these girls like don't know the stuff.
So she's saying your sisters together, you're going to be friends together.
You're going to know these hymns.
You're going to stand up in liturgy and you're not just going to watch.
No, you have a place.
You're going to be audible.
You're going to worship with the chorus.
You are the congregation.
You are the people.
And that's part of it.
The other thing is the women have started their own book club, which again brings together
that feeling of sisterhood to cultivate a community amongst themselves.
This isn't in the thesis.
This came afterwards at Ewa Sufian.
They're starting a young women's ministry, for example, just to get the girls together
so that they can talk about what it means to be a godly woman.
And that kind of, I mean, it really has been an incredible process to watch.
They've just been so encouraged.
The women that I spoke to have been so encouraged by what they've been reading and so inspired.
Who knows if we will see a female ascetic from Mississauga one day.
I don't know really.
But I think a lot of them have grown up watching their male friends and their brothers go on
monastery retreats and deacons conventions and have these kind of formative male experiences.
And something that's really crucial to understand about my framework and how these women understand
what they're doing is that they're not saying we want to be deacons or we want to be like
them.
They're saying, I just want to know what I am.
What does it mean for me to be a woman here?
And so reading about these great women in the history of the church has allowed them
to think about that some more and has inspired them to take on a lot of different initiatives.
So just to put things in kind of context, in Mississauga we have a Hymn School.
It's Saturday night.
It goes up to grade eight and it's boys and girls.
But there is a deeper problem with liturgical participation that we find.
Like personally I've noticed it amongst those who are not ordained.
Not just for women, but for the majority of men who are not deacons.
They say a lot of similar things to what you were saying that the hymns are for the deacons.
The prayers are for the deacons.
The readings are for the deacons.
We're just here observing.
We're not participating.
And it's really a problem.
It's almost like we need to recover what it means to be that lay vocation.
It's not just something that we ask you to be as quiet as possible while we do the work
of liturgy.
We'll take care of it and once we're done with the finished product, we'll give you
the body and blood and you go on your way.
But you really have no role in this.
And that's a really bad idea that's affecting a lot of people.
And for women especially, it's doubly so because it feels like, like you said, I do hear that
a lot from a lot of girls.
And for a lot of girls that I see in Sunday school and ask, were you in hymns class today?
It's like, no, that's just for the deacons.
That's just for the boys.
I'm like, no, you need to go and you need to learn and I want to hear your voice on
Sunday.
And it's taken a while for that kind of understanding from within to accept that it's not just like
I did something with a female servant before I challenged her.
I was reading a book by St. John Chrysostom on the priesthood and I told her that this
is for men only.
There's no point for women to read on the priesthood because you're not going to be
ordained priest.
So there's no point.
And she kind of looked at me and I was like, or is there?
So I asked her, listen, you read it and you come and tell me if there's a point for women
to read that book.
And that book was more about, she understood more about her role in that lay vocation as
a layman and it clarified more for her what is she doing and supposed to be doing and
how to participate in the liturgy.
And the idea that it's only the ordained minister, the priest, the deacons who are doing all
the work.
And today we have this kind of like I'm going to go on a little rant here, but we ordain
young boys to encourage them.
So if we're doing this for the young boys, how are we encouraging the girls?
If we're doing this just for encouragement, right?
And with the young boys, if it's just about, if this is the way to encourage them, it gives
them the idea that I only participate if I have a task to do.
If it's my turn to serve an altar, if it's my turn to hold the candle or my turn to hold
the microphone or the sensor or this or that, right?
And if I don't have a task to do, then I have nothing to do.
Then I'm a spectator.
Then we're back in square one where it doesn't matter if you're ordained or not, then you
become just a spectator and observer, right?
It's a broader misunderstanding of the role of the people in the liturgy.
And that has implications for everybody.
Everybody.
Yeah.
I just see that we have...
I don't like that these women's groups are starting because it's important to feel that
sense of community.
It's not just for the women to disappear in the background.
To have these important conversations, to support one another.
And that really was one of the main reasons.
In the early church, there were deaconesses for specifically these reasons for the ministry
of women.
And one of the main reasons there used to be deaconesses was baptism, adult baptism
of women and ministry of widows and so on.
But as baptism moved from adults to infants, their role kind of disappeared and that rank
kind of disappeared from the church.
But the point is that the rank always followed the need, the need of the parish, the need
of the people.
And it's important...
I'm not saying that all the needs are going to have necessarily ordained ranks, but there
are many needs that are going unaddressed simply because of that wrong understanding
that I have to be an ordained deacon in order to be able to do anything in the church.
Otherwise, I'm just a spectator, observing.
Yeah.
It impacts...
One of the things I didn't touch on in the thesis was in a much broader sense, like deaconal
life, I only talk about it in the context of women in that third chapter.
I don't know if I was able to do that study.
I was able to do the chapter on women and I was able to have those conversations because
I am a woman.
And so we got to talking about certain things that I really don't think they would have
talked about with a male scholar.
I would love for a male anthropologist to sink their teeth into the life of the deacon.
But yes, this very task-oriented way that we understand worship and this very ordination-focused
way that we understand service, it has implications for the way that everybody interacts within
the liturgical setting.
It's very important that we have a correct understanding of the role of laypeople, which
is literally the vast majority of the church.
So yeah.
Absolutely.
Exactly.
Which tells us that there is an issue here with the lay vocation of the church.
We're not doing our job.
We need to, for lack of a better word, re-educate, to relearn what it means to be a layman in
the church.
And now that we've talked about authenticated piety, the issue of, and you've alluded to
it already, but the issue of marginalization.
How does that play a role in terms of the way women see themselves in the church?
So one of the major points that I make is that the marginalization of women in the church
is undertaken largely, it's an internal process.
So women learn it and then they reproduce it for the rest of their life because we are
social beings.
We learn what is acceptable and unacceptable just by observing things.
And then once we learn those rules, those social rules, we start to act accordingly.
So again, it's maybe for some women, there was a moment where somebody said, no, you're
too loud or whatever.
But for most women, they just observe, right?
That's how most of us learn.
We observe our surroundings.
And if you grow up seeing that there are things that women aren't doing, they're not participating
in certain things, they're not in a certain place, then you won't.
You're going to internalize that and go, okay, this is inappropriate for me to do as a woman
in this community.
And so you will regulate yourself accordingly.
Now that doesn't mean that there aren't instances of overt marginalization.
And I include some examples of that.
So one of the issues, Abuna, as you said, with imbuing worship in a very task-oriented
way, especially in young men and boys, is that they start to see their entire identity
as being a deacon.
I'm a deacon.
That's what I am.
That's it.
And so we see the incident that I outlined in the third chapter where there's a group
singing tazbihah, and they're singing antiphonally in a north-south formation.
So that means the men take a verse and the women take a verse, and then a group of younger
high school age boys walk in, and as the women are starting, they go right in.
Okay, we're going to go.
So they go in on the English, and one of the older young men kind of turns around and lets
them know that, nope, we're doing it men and women.
And some of these young boys kind of huff and puff and end up walking out.
Why?
Because there's something about my role in this space that has been infringed upon.
If I'm not leading the singing, then who am I?
I'm a deacon.
If I can't be a deacon, then who am I?
And that's very, very harmful.
I say it.
I say, listen, I think being a deacon is a very special vocation.
It can be, I've seen it in so many of my friends.
I don't have brothers, but I've seen it play such a positive role in the lives of so many
of my male friends.
And I'm so happy that they have that.
But it becomes toxic when it stops you from worshipping in a kind of pure way.
When it becomes attached to the ego, when it becomes about, if I can't be a deacon,
then I can't, you know.
If I'm not at the mic, if I'm not the loudest guy, then it actually hinders your spiritual
growth.
Then it becomes a stumbling block.
And unfortunately, sometimes because of the visibility of that, it can become a stumbling
block to a girl who, you know, I spoke to some women about that incident and, you know,
thank God, all of them kind of laughed it off.
They were older than these young boys.
And so they were like, you know, they're going to grow out of it.
It's fine.
But you don't know if that was a young girl or a young woman who was struggling with,
you know, being a woman at church or something that might have really, you know, caused her
to stumble.
And so now we've had two people who, you know, two parties who stumbled needlessly in a situation
like that.
So sometimes it is women who look around them, see the norm and follow the norm and are very
timid about breaking the norm.
And like you said, it takes a lot of encouragement sometimes to get girls to go to hymns to sing,
to participate.
It takes a lot of encouragement.
And I think when I've spoken to some young men, this like really confuses them because
they're like, I don't understand.
The women keep saying we want to participate more and then we give them a chance and like
they're whispering in Tasbihah.
I don't understand.
But it's because you've gotten used to doing things in a particular way your whole life.
And now it like you're going to hear your own voice out loud in church.
Oh, that's new.
You know, I'm going to make a mistake.
I'm going to stumble.
I'm going to get this tune wrong or my voice is going to crack here.
And that's okay.
You know, women need to kind of unlearn that what they have seen to be the social order
for a large part of their lives.
And that's fine.
And I had a really encouraging conversation with a deacon who told me that the young men
and the young women had been talking about Tasbihah.
And he said, and now when they mess up, we let them mess up.
We don't come in.
We're not going to save the day.
We learned how to sing.
They're going to learn how to sing out loud, you know, to hear yourself and to make mistakes.
That's fine.
And so there's like that barrier that we have inside of us that we have put up because just
the way that it's been a kind of our whole childhoods and the majority of our lives and
we need to unlearn that.
That's fine.
That's part of the process.
And then there's the marginalization that comes from the outside that can come in the
sort of petty and sometimes not so petty ways, instances where somebody hasn't identified
the right place to be stubborn and has decided that this, you know, this is going to be where
the buck stops.
And unfortunately, it's not really where it needs to stop.
And it hurts somebody.
And that can come from the home.
That can come from parents who think that there's one specific way and they raise their
daughter accordingly.
It can come from anywhere, but it definitely is an internal and an external marginalization.
Some of the stories or the interviews that you relate about the relationship between
the deacon and the microphone and what the microphone represents and the symbolism behind
it, it illustrates that we do have a problem and we have to address that problem.
And of course, you know, anything that threatens the microphone, as one deacon so lovingly
put it, threatens their manhood.
It's not just the role in the church.
It's like they feel emasculated.
If the women are joining in and singing and it's all based on this wrong or unhealthy
self-perception of what you are in the church, what your role is and what the role of the
other is.
Yes.
We need to, in the same way that we don't, we have to understand what we're doing and
we have to understand what the role of the chanter is in the diaconal ranks, what the
role of the chanter is in the liturgical context, because it's not to be Mariah Carey at the
mic.
I know that 100% for sure.
The role of the chanter is to lead and I think we need to have amongst the deacons a conversation
about what it means to lead, because obviously that is so tied up with what it means to be
a man, right?
So, you know, it's very, very important that that is understood correctly.
Absolutely.
And it seems like for a large number of women or, you know, a significant number of women
that they're taking the approach of, you know, I'm participating, I'm solving this problem
or this challenge, I'm facing it by participation, whether I participate in the prayers, in the
tasbihah, whether I participate by reading, but they're taking the approach like I'm participating.
There are of course those who choose to walk away and that's unfortunate, right?
But the positive thing is that those who choose to participate, those become the St. Olympia,
become the St. Sinclair.
Those are the, like, this is the approach that produces the sins.
This is the approach that essentially addresses issues, right?
The walking away trying to, you know, to find a place where these problems don't exist only
proves futile when you meet the same problems, you know, under different guise in different
places.
You know, human beings have this natural tendency to want to, you know, rank one another and
hierarchies and so on.
And if we don't address it in the proper way, we're going to look at the other and try to
have, to find ways of putting myself ahead of the other.
Whereas we come in the liturgy and Christ is the center.
I'm not the center and neither are you, it's Christ who is the center and he's the one
that unites all of us.
And seeing the other in that light is very important to understand that lay vocation.
It's very important seeing the other as someone created in the image of God, someone that
Christ died for, someone that has an active role.
And without that role, last week we were reading the Gospel of the Samaritan woman.
Without her, like the people in the village didn't just dismiss her words and say like,
your words didn't matter.
It's only what Christ said is what attracted us to him.
They told her like, it's because of what you said that we invited him and now we believe
not because of what you said, but because of we heard it from him directly.
Right.
But her role is unmistakable and the role of women in the church is unmistakable and
irreplaceable.
Right.
And overall, I'm very happy that you were able to sit down and have these interviews
with women who care deeply for the church, with women who care deeply for their faith
and were able to trust you enough, obviously, to open up to you and invite you into their
world and their challenges, which is part of your world also because you grew up in
the same world, in the same environment and to be able to shed light on these challenges
and to pose them so eloquently as you did in your thesis and present them in a way that
now we have these things.
What do we do about them?
Right.
How do we approach or move towards a solution, move towards a place where everyone is called
to participate?
Right.
And not simply feel like second class citizen in the liturgy, some sort of spectator waiting
for the for them to come and for them to take communion and go home.
Yeah.
Part of that, what do we do with that is also refining our understanding of the priesthood
and of the ordained class.
What do we understand priesthood to be?
What is the role of the priest in our community?
Because it's not to be like a glorified manager or assistant manager.
It's not to show up and put the show on.
The priest has a very, very particular role and we don't want to fall into clericalism,
which is when we imbue the role of the priesthood with everything all the time.
All of us have a role to play.
The priesthood is one member of the body.
It is a very, very important member of the body.
All of us are a very, very important member of the body in all of the talents that we
bring and all of the capabilities that we have in all of the ways that we can serve
and worship God.
And so we need to understand our role.
We have to.
Not just for ourselves, but for each other.
And yes, when we don't understand everyone's role, we can make people feel very left out.
And that does cause people to leave.
And that will hurt that person.
That person's salvation is at risk.
But it's more than that.
We as a community have missed out on who they could be in the body of Christ.
I think about all of the holy women.
You know, there are so many holy women who pass through the doors of VMSA and in Mississauga
all the time, all the way from like tétas to like little baby girls all the time.
And if we don't change anything today, there will be many holy women who go to heaven from
Mississauga.
They will not lose anything.
Many of them will go to heaven, will gain salvation.
But if we keep them quiet, to use the big word, if we keep them marginalized, what will
we lose as a community in them staying quiet?
When we all give our gifts to the community, all of us benefit, all of us do.
And that goes also to the young boys and to the deacons.
What do we lose when the deacons are obsessed with the microphone?
What do we lose when you don't, as a deacon, become so fixated on this one way of being
who you are in the church that you forget that God has a plan for you that is so much
bigger than hitting the right note at the mic.
It's so much bigger than that.
So when we all bring the fullness of ourselves to our community, we really enrich the whole
body.
And that's very, very important.
That's crucial for, in the context of my third chapter, I say this is crucial for women,
but it's crucial for everybody all the time, regardless of what they do.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And on that note, I want to just say that your work, I hope it's not the end of something,
but the beginning and continuation of something.
Because as you mentioned, this is a snapshot that you were able to capture and present.
And there's so much more work to do and so many more questions to ask and to look into.
And these are very important questions.
These are not the kinds of questions that we brush aside as just like vain conversations.
These are questions that hit us in our very core, in our identity, who we are, not just
as Canadians or Egyptians, but as Orthodox Christians and what it means to be God fearing
men and women made in the image of God, present in the liturgy.
These questions are very important and in direct interaction and participation with
that identity.
So I hope that you continue your work and that you inspire others to get into this field
of work and to say to other people and other up and coming researchers and scholars that
this is where important questions are addressed.
This is a way to shed light on areas that we kind of long just taking for granted and
assume that we have it under control and we have everything figured out and well understood.
But when we shed light on these things, we begin to uncover challenges and potential
opportunities for growth and for engagement.
And just like Carol, if you choose to go to your parents one day and say, Mom and Dad,
I'm not going to be a lawyer or a doctor or engineer.
I want to go into Coptic studies.
You know, judging by Carol's experience, everything went well.
Her parents did not disown her, right?
Thank God.
They love you and they are proud of you, of course.
And this is a rewarding career and a rewarding research area and very stimulating and very
challenging.
Thank you so much, Abuna, for having me.
This was an incredible conversation.
I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode.
For questions, comments, feedback, or if you'd like to make a suggestion on a topic for a
future episode, please feel free to reach out to the email in the bio.
And don't forget to subscribe to get a notification when new episodes drop.
God bless you and have a great day.