Interview

Coptic Church

Creed

Egypt

Freedom of Belief

Middle East

Monastic life

S&U interviews

16 February 2024

9 min read

An Archbishop’s life: monasteries, martyrs and media

Archbishop Angaelos, the leader of the Coptic Church in the UK, is one of the most respected and recognisable Christian leaders in the UK and around the world. He shares his journey and that of the Middle East's largest church in conversation with Belle Tindall and Graham Tomlin.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

An archbishop wearing a black hat and robes stands next to a new building's plaque, while King Charles, wearing a suit stands the other side holding a mic.

The archbishop with King Charles at the opening of a Coptic Church centre.

Archbishop Angaelos, the first Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, tells Graham Tomlin and Belle Tindall what life is like as a Coptic Orthodox monk, what makes this church so distinctive, and why, despite the harrowing danger that so many Christians are in, we should not consider them to be victims.

We wanted to discover your background and what has led you to where you are today, yet also about the situation faced by the Coptic Orthodox Church, both here in Europe, but also in Egypt as well.

But I'm just going to start off the conversation by asking you about your own story. You were born in Cairo, in Egypt - did you also grow up there? And how did you become an Archbishop in the Coptic Orthodox Church?

By complete surprise to me.

I was born in Egypt and we migrated as a family to Australia when I was five. I finished my education there, completed my qualifications, worked. And then I decided to go back to Egypt to join the monastery, expecting that I would live the rest of my life in, quite literally, the desert.

How old were you when you decided that?

I was the ripe old age of twenty-two.

And what prompted it? That’s quite an unusual decision.

It is, I think, like any sort of ministry, a calling.

And no, there were no bright lights or big voices. But I do remember the exact moment in my room, I was doing some postgraduate studies, so I had my books surrounding me, and all of a sudden I felt this incredible calling, this feeling. I remember I closed my book, put it on the side, and never looked back.

And that was it – I was going to the life of the monastery. But then in retrospect, you realise that the calling has been happening over a long period. That's the wonderful benefit of the hindsight. So many things had been preparing me for that moment, but that's the moment when it became real.

And so, you moved back to Egypt, and you joined one of the monasteries, which of course goes back to the days of Antony, back in the second century, and that long tradition of Egyptian desert monasticism?

I did.

The monastery is halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. And it's said that that part of wilderness was a monastic area where there were, at one stage, 10,000 monks and nuns. There were 50 major monasteries and 500 settlements. It has been there for 1,500 years, which is quite the history.

I remember one particular instance when I was there, towards the end of my time (I was there for six years before I was sent to the UK to serve), I was walking down a tunnel, a tunnel that links the back of the church with the refectory. Because, of course, monks would come from the desert, gather for Liturgy in the church, and then after they finished, would move into the refectory to break the fast. And I just had shivers down my spine. I don't know why, but for the first time, it struck me that monks had been walking up and down this tunnel for 1,500 years, and I was the latest generation of monks to do that very thing. It was just such a beautiful feeling.

There's been quite a revival of Coptic monasticism in Egypt in recent decades.

What has stimulated that revival?

It was stimulated by the late Pope Shenouda III, who was our Pope before the current Pope Tawadros II. He was a monk from the same region, the same area. He had a great love of monasticism, and really did reinvigorate monastic life through small things, such as that he ensured that his residence was in the monastery.

He wanted the monasteries to have more of a presence in people's lives. Because, if you imagine a community that is living under persecution, they need their monasteries as a haven. I remember one particular day, it was 6th October, which is the Egyptian Day of Independence, and a public holiday. I went to the main monastery and spoke to one of the monks who looked after the guests, and he had said that on that day, 10,000 pilgrims had come through the monastery. They come in busloads from all over the country. It becomes their haven, their escape.

Monasticism is one of the three major pillars of the Coptic Orthodox Church, along with theological teaching, and martyrology. So there is still a great space for monasticism, and we have a very specific experience of it, because we have an oversubscription of people wanting to be monks and nuns. For that reason we're constantly building monastic cells in our monasteries and our convents, to keep up with the demand.

It's quite a rigorous life. We wake up at 4am for what we call midnight praises, which are preceded by the Midnight Prayers, one of the seven offices that are prayed throughout the day: a series of psalms, Scripture readings and litanies. That will go through to about 6am, at which point there will be a Eucharistic service, and then monks go back to their cells. Those who don't have to work very early will get a little bit of sleep, others will go straight into their work. All of the monks work.

They do everything from overseeing agricultural work, to construction and maintenance. There is a workforce of about, let's say, two to three hundred, just to oversee these incredible acres of agricultural farmland. We also have livestock.

There are monks who will be responsible for guests, engineering, and so on. So, everyone has a job. It's like a city. It's a complete community.

In the evening, at sunset, we meet in church again for the evening prayers, where again, we chant the Psalms, read Scripture, and then we literally go out and walk in the desert, and just greet sunset in the desert, then come back and then do our own studies.

Do you miss being there?

Well, I still have my cell there, because monks die to the world. You see, there are two parts of a monastic consecration service. The first half is a full funeral service, where you lie on the ground, are covered with an altar curtain, and there’s a full funeral service for you. Your old life has concluded. The second part is a joyous service where you get up, are given a new name, and are welcomed into monastic life. The monastery becomes your family. So, my cell will remain mine in my monastery until I die, because I have nowhere else to go to. It’s home.

Tell us a little bit about the Coptic Orthodox Church, what makes it distinct?

Well, Coptic simply means Egyptian.

Christianity has been in Egypt since the first century. In 55 AD, St Mark the Evangelist, the writer of the Gospel, went to Egypt and started preaching Christianity there.

It spread quite quickly because of the foundation of ancient Egyptian theology and mythology. In the Egyptian spirituality, you already have concepts of deities, an afterlife and of judgment. It was easy for Egyptians to absorb and accept the idea of Christ and Christianity.

Within a few centuries, Egypt became 85 per cent Christian. The church has remained there. St Mark is considered our first Pope, and we’ve had an unbroken succession of priesthood until now; so I can trace my priestly ancestry all the way back to St. Mark, and through him, to Jesus.

We are also a very scriptural church, with the Bible is core to all things. It's also a deeply sacramental church.

While Islam and Arabization in Egypt started in the seventh century in Egypt, Christianity went back to the first century. So, our roots are in ancient Egypt.

I think that's important for us because it shows not only the longevity, but the resilience of the Christians in Egypt, who have been persecuted massively. If it wasn't Rome, it was Byzantium, the Turks, and many others. And yet the church remains strong. It still remains the largest Christian gathering in the Middle East, with about 15 million Christians in the Egypt.

You began talking about the reality of persecution. This always strikes me when I meet Coptic Christians. I have a Coptic friend in Jerusalem who has the cross tattooed on his wrist, as all Coptic Christians do.

Yes. It’s a proclamation of Faith and a daily witness.

And I suppose, most people’s minds go to that horrific event in 2015 when 21 Coptic Christians were lined up on the beach and beheaded by ISIS.

I just want to offer a slight correction, there were 20 Coptic Christians and one of them was a Ghanaian whose name was Matthew.

You must remember that time. Do you remember where you were when you heard that and what your reactions were and what were your feelings around that time?

Absolutely. The Libya martyrs were pivotal in my life.

You were talking about tattooed Coptic crosses, I have one on my right wrist on the inside of the wrist, if you imagine palm facing up.

I didn't have one originally because I grew up in Australia. I had it done in 2015 after the Libya martyrs because I was so moved by their story and I was so moved by their witness. And so this was done in memory of that.

I remember it very well. I was visiting a family and over the course of the day, we were receiving lots of communications backwards and forwards that these men, who had been kidnapped and we didn't know where they were, had died. The Egyptian foreign ministry said they had died. Then they said they hadn't. There was confusion all day.

And then I finally got a call around 8pm from a news organisation to say that there was a video.

I remember jumping in my car and driving. I stopped along the way because I thought people wanted to know. I posted on my Twitter account that it had been confirmed that these men had died, and that we were praying for their families and communities.

I don't know why, but I felt compelled to write ‘father forgive’ at the end of my message. It's just what I felt. I went and did this interview, and the interviewer asked - how can you talk about forgiveness? How does a Coptic bishop, who sees this happen to his spiritual children, talk about forgiveness? Quite simply, that's really what we've been taught by our church: forgiveness, resilience, and reconciliation.

I remember, during the next 24 hours, I must have done something like 36 back-to-back interviews between television, radio and press, and the whole conversation became about forgiveness.

Even right up to today, it's remarkable how much the witness of these men has touched so many lives.

We can spend a lot of our Christian lives only pondering the hypothetical. And yet, some of the real tenets of Christianity are laser sharp for those who face persecution. They're focused and their witness is vibrant. Those of us who don't have pressure put on us for our faith have so much to learn from them about the preciousness and resilience of our faith.

This has been the story of Christianity since the beginning, since our Lord Jesus Christ himself walked on this earth. He was rejected and persecuted. He was captured, tortured, killed, and so that is our story. It's one of carrying that cross, but carrying the cross comes with grace.

One thing concerns me sometimes - when we speak of Christians who are persecuted, we speak of them as victims. The language we use is ‘survivors’, not ‘victims’. Christian communities have survived, and survived incredibly well, with great courage and grace.

Explainer

Creed

Eating

Sustainability

20 October 2023

9 min read

What wine teaches us about the big things in life

Wine connects us to the soil and each other, writes Mark Scarlata, as he unpacks what oenology – the study of wine, can teach us about ontology – the study of being.

Mark Scarlata

Mark is a lecturer and priest. He’s the author of several books and his latest, Wine, Soil and Salvation, explores the use of wine throughout the Old and New Testament.

Evening sun sets glowing light across vines in a vinyard.

Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I remember one of the first wine tastings that I went to. I happened to be placed at a table of people who really knew what they were talking about when it came to wine. I watched as they expertly swirled their glasses yet when I swirled mine the wine almost flew out all over the table. Then we all sniffed and were asked to say what smells came to mind. Dark red currants, blackberry, plum, leather, tobacco and all sorts of other things were mentioned. I kept my mouth shut because the only thing I could think of was, ‘This smells like wine to me.’ But that didn’t sound very sophisticated.

Years later, I’ve come to appreciate wine in a completely different way. Not because my palate has been refined or because I’ve taken wine courses on how to pick out scents such as truffles or crushed gravel, but because I study the Bible. Surprisingly enough, the Bible has a lot to say about wine and how it relates to our lives together, our relationship to the earth and our relationship to God.

In the ancient world, from the very earliest civilizations, wine was an important part of everyday life and religion. Whether in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece or Rome, wine was a critical fixture in worship and making offerings to the gods. Stories of wine gods such as Dionysus or Bacchus reveal a drink that was created to please both the gods and humanity. Tales are told of wild bacchanals or orgiastic feasts that likely ended with bad hangovers and much worse. In many of these ancient cultures wine was seen as a gift from the gods so that human beings could enjoy themselves and it was offered back to the gods in all types of religious rituals that often involved drunken exploits. In the Bible, however, we find a very different story. It’s a story that goes back to the very beginnings of creation in the garden of Eden.

Here, in the garden, the moral world is bound up with a material world.

The first book of the Bible, Genesis, begins with a God who creates the heavens and the earth. This is not some distant, aloof god who is separated from his creation. God is depicted as a gardener who is not afraid to get his hands dirty in the soil. God forms the first human from the dust of the earth and then breathes into him the breath of life. We usually call this person ‘Adam’, as if it’s a personal name, but it’s not. ‘Adam’ is a wordplay on the Hebrew word for soil adamah. You can see and hear the similarity between the two. The reason for the wordplay is to emphasize humanity’s connection to the soil. We, as human beings, are inextricably bound to the life of the land. Our nourishment, our sustenance and our very existence is reliant on the earth beneath our feet.

Beyond our physical connection to the land, the story of Genesis (and the rest of the Bible) also assumes our spiritual connection to the land. When the first garden dwellers disobey God’s command and eat the forbidden fruit, the land becomes cursed. We witness a breakdown in what was originally meant to be a harmonious relationship between Adam and adamah. Adam will now experience toil when he works the land and it will produce thorns and thistles. Here, in the garden, the moral world is bound up with a material world. Human disobedience to God’s command results in a broken relationship with God, with one another and with the land. So what does this have to do with wine? We’ll discover, as the story continues, that wine is a gift that comes from the renewed earth through the character of Noah to provide relief for humanity.

Most people are familiar with the story of Noah’s Ark, whether from children’s books about the ark or memories of stuffed animals packed in a boat with Noah and his wife, Mrs. Noah (we’re never told her name which seems slightly unfair considering all the work she presumably had to do taking care of the animals). What we don’t often recall, however, is the prediction made by his father, Lamech, when Noah was born. Lamech says, ‘Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands’. If the curse upon the earth and toil came through Adam, then relief from that toil would come through Noah. The key phrase here is ‘out of the ground’ because something will spring up from the soil in the renewed creation after the flood that will bring relief which is the advent of the vine.

Back to the story of the Ark. After the flood retreats, Noah leaves the ship and worships God. In very short order we’re told:

‘Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent’.

Now if you’ve ever planted grapevines (Vitis vinifera), you’ll know that it takes at least three years to get your first harvest of grapes. The biblical story, however, jumps quickly ahead to Noah finally having produced his first vintage.

He waited for the grapes to ferment after being crushed. He stored them in a cool place and when the time was right, he was able to drink his first cup of wine. It seems, however, that he probably had more than one cup since he was soon lying passed out in his tent. There’s no specific judgement of Noah here. After all that he had been through we might imagine a cup of wine was just what he needed. Drunkenness, however, is later explicitly condemned by the biblical authors. One rabbinic commentator, however, in defence of Noah, argued that because he hadn’t drunk wine previously, he only had a sip which made him pass out.

Despite Noah’s first encounters with wine, a more significant story is being told. The flood acts as a type of cleansing and renewal of creation in Genesis as part of God’s judgment so that humanity could once again live in relationship with God and the land. After the flood, the earth is in need of renewal and only Noah can achieve this. We are told that Noah found favour in the eyes of God, that he was righteous and blameless and that he walked with God. Unlike almost any other character in the Bible, Noah is distinctly set apart because of his moral purity. And it’s through his purity that humanity’s relationship to the land is restored and the gift of the vine springs forth to bring relief from our toil.

Drinking wine has often been likened to a spiritual experience. To taste a well-crafted wine is to drink in the sun, the rain, the wind, the soil and all the blessings of the earth.

When we look at other ancient myths concerning wine, we discover something far different in the biblical vision. The Bible offers a picture of a world where the material and the spiritual are bound together within the intricate web of creation. The earthly and the heavenly are united. Though we are made from the soil and tethered to the land, we are also spiritual creatures who share in the breath of God. We have the capacity to experience God’s spiritual blessings, but we also experience his gifts through our senses, through our physical engagements in the world and through the gift of wine.

This is why drinking wine has often been likened to a spiritual experience. To taste a well-crafted wine is to drink in the sun, the rain, the wind, the soil and all the blessings of the earth. When we are attentive to the wine we’re able to savour its complex flavours and aromas. We come to appreciate its multifaceted character and the reflections it offers on the land where it was grown and harvested. Wine, unlike any other food or drink, brings out the qualities and identity of a particular place.

There is a French word, terroir, that is often used to describe this connection to place that gives a wine its character and flavour. Wine experts understand that even the slightest change in weather, soil content, drainage or the lay of the land can have dramatic effects on the final product. I don’t doubt that the biblical authors understood the same. Yet they also understood that the gift of wine, the blessing of relief that came through Noah, was also connected to our moral lives, to how we love God and neighbour and to how we care for his creation.

Wine is a gift that eases our toil and makes our hearts glad. Wine reminds us of our deep connections to the soil and how we play our part within the community of creation.

The story of wine in the Bible is one that reminds us that we do not live in this world as autonomous creatures completely disconnected from the land around us. In the beginning, human beings were instructed by God to care and keep the land as an act of service and partnership with the hope of encouraging fertility, abundance and life. American conservationist, Aldo Leopold, sums this up when he writes about a having a ‘land ethic’ that should govern how we live in the world. He argues that our ethical behaviour should take into account things like soils, water, plants and animals. He goes on to say that this, ‘changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.’

We live in an age where humanity is driven by the pursuit of power and control over the environment rather than creatively working with, and caring for, the natural world. Advances in technology and the idea of limitless freedom have led to what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls an ‘economy of extraction’. This is a system that strips the land without concern as if our resources are unlimited and are ours to do with as we please. Such practices not only destroy the ecology and biodiversity of the land, but they can also deprive local economies and create greater gaps between rich and poor. Pope Francis addresses this in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato si’, where he calls for an integrated ecology that takes into consideration our use of natural resources to improve the common good and to alleviate the suffering of those who have been hurt the most by this economy of extraction.

The beginnings of wine in the Bible tell a story that involves the whole of creation. It’s a story that emphasises our relationship to the land, to God and to one another. How we care for and keep the soil is a reflection of how we care for one another. Other stories in in the Bible imagine a world full of justice and mercy where there is peace and concern for the common good. In such a world the biblical authors also see the earth respond with its own fertility—fields that produce bumper crops, trees that bear abundant fruit and a hills bursting with grapes and wine. Fertility, life and wine are all interconnected in the biblical world, but they have sadly been disconnected in the modern world.

Wine is not just a drink in the Bible. It’s a sign and symbol of salvation, of life, joy, abundance and fertility. Wine is a gift that eases our toil and makes our hearts glad. Wine reminds us of our deep connections to the soil and how we play our part within the community of creation. Wine awakens our senses and leads us to praise the God who is the giver of all good gifts. So, as we lift our glasses to celebrate in our homes, at meals, at weddings, or wherever we are, we might offer a prayer of thanks. Thanksgiving for the gift God gives that eases the toil and gladdens the heart. We might even recite the Jewish prayer which is prayed on the eve of the Sabbath and on other occasions.