After the gift of the Magi, a flight to safety

It’s the same today as it was 2006 years ago when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. To borrow that famous line from A Tale of Two Cities, a tragic romance written by Charles Dickens about the horrors of the French Revolution, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (That novel, by the way, has since been made into three movies and a tele-series).

The Baby Jesus was born into the same world of despotism and woe, of treachery and cruelty, that we see around us today. Joseph and Mary had gone to Bethlehem to register (for tax purposes) according to the decree of the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus, whose imperial Legions ruled Palestine and what is today known as the Holy Land.

Think of the Bible story!

Jesus could not have been more than a few days old when the "Three Kings" of Orient arrived bearing to the savior in his stable what are now known to legend as "The Gifts of the Magi." The tale is that they first went to King Herod seeking information about the "Child", confirming that tyrant’s alarm over the prophecy that a male child would be born who was to become "King of the Jews."

The three Wise Men finally found the Christ Child and worshipped Him in Bethlehem of Judah, guided, legend relates, by a Star shining above, but were warned by an Angel to take another route home instead of telling Herod what he wanted to know.

Seeing the birth of the Child as a threat to his throne and not knowing where to find him, Herod sent his soldiers to massacre all male infants in sight, the so-called "innocents". But the Holy Couple, forewarned by an Angel the story goes, fled with their Child across the desert of the Sinai into Cairo – in Egypt.

* * *

Of course, the place wasn’t called "Cairo" then. The present-day name of Egypt’s capital, Cairo, is a corruption of the Arabic name bestowed on the city, El Kahira (The Victorious One). The appellation was given to their encampment by the Fatimid conquerors of Egypt in the year 969 A.D.

Today, it remains an impressive but decaying city dominated by a graceful and formidable Citadel with domed cupola and soaring minarets, originally built by that great Kurdish warrior-king, Salah Al-Din Ayyubi (better known to the West and historians of the failed Crusades as Saladin). From the Citadel’s frowning walls in the 12th century, Saladin led his Saracen, i.e. Muslim armies to do battle with the Crusaders of England’s King Richard the Lionheart – whose gallant statue astride his horse stands in front of London’s Parliament today.

In 1982, when this writer first visited Cairo, we found it a city of a thousand minarets from the muezzin called the faithful to prayer (over Japanese-made loudspeakers) five times a day, proclaiming no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet.

How history turns. Islam has held sway in Egypt for so many centuries that even Christians have forgotten that long before Islam there was Christianity there. Not only was Egypt (which, after all, borders on Israel and Palestine) one of the cornerstones of the early Christian faith but – if one looks at it – Cairo could be called, almost as validly as His birthplace in Bethlehem, the "hometown" of Jesus Christ.

Only one of the four Evangelists, St. Matthew, mentions the Flight into Egypt. And yet this incident in the life of Christ has always captured the imagination of artists. There are paintings from the earliest times showing the Holy Family traveling under the protective mantle of night, or journeying under starlight beneath the shadow of the Pyramids of Giza. Then there are the words attached by the prophet, attributed to the Almighty: "Out of Egypt have I called my son . . ."

Years ago, my wife and I drove to Mataria, about six miles from downtown Cairo in the vicinity of Heliopolis. I wonder if he still resides there, but Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak used to live in that vicinity – the same area where the airport is located.

Not far from the wellknown Youssof Kamal Palace, we found a street named Shagaret Mariam (The Street of Mary’s Tree). In the neighborhood stood a sycamore tree, gnarled with age but still green, protected by a high pink wall, in the shade of which the Holy Family had rested at the end of their flight into Egypt. The little grove of sycamores (reputedly planted by Queen Cleopatra VII – the last of the line of Pharaohs descended from the Greek line of Ptolemy, a general of Alexander the Great).

Everybody who watches Hollywood movies, of course, knows Cleopatra as Elizabeth Taylor, and whoever played her in the Hallmark version. Centenarians, if still alive, saw Claudette Colbert in the old flickers. George Bernard Shaw confirmed her as the lover of Julius Caesar, to whom she gave a son, Caesarion, and everybody recalls her love affair with Mark Anthony. It was her second lover, Mark Anthony, Caesar’s buddy, who had presented her with the sycamore trees – trees not indigenous to Egypt.

Legend says that to tend her gardens of sycamore and fragrant balsam, Cleo had imported a colony of Hebrew gardeners. It was only logical, therefore, for Joseph and Mary, with their baby, to seek refuge among this settlement of fellow Jews.

The French Jesuits had, years ago, constructed a lovely little church a few meters away from this garden of herbs. This is where we went on our mini-pilgrimage. It had been pouring rain all day – a rarity and novelty in desert-rimmed Cairo, and desert sand had turned into desert mud. The streets of the city were in flood. Used to sunny days on end, the Cairenes had obviously not prepared their gutters for the possibility of a cloudburst.

When we entered the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Family, however, despite the drizzle, birds greeted us with happy snatches of song as they flitted through the branches. It was as though the noise and turmoil of the crowded streets outside had faded away and here was an oasis of peace and tranquillity.

Over the entrance of the church were inscribed the Latin words: "Sanctae Familiae in Aegypto Exsult."

Within the chapel, above the high altar, one espied the figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Hovering above them in the high nave was the familiar figure of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. On each side were charming frescoes portraying the Flight, and the Arrival in Heliopolis.

Jesus had lived here for the first year of his life – until the death of the wicked King Herod and of his son Archelaus permitted the Holy Family to return to Palestine in safety.

From the moment one enters the serene gloom of the church all doubt vanishes. Indeed here, one is struck with the confidence, is where He lived and played as an Infant.

* * *

Why does a sinner like this journalist, not pretending to be a saint, recall this story in our modern day of political bitterness and rumors of political plotting, in which murder and hijacking dominate our local headlines? (The same description, with the recent arrest by Mubarak of the country’s most prominent Opposition leader, fits Egypt today).

It is to remind us that history moves in mysterious ways, just as God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

As in our case in that visit of 1982, the traveler must learn to distinguish between the Egypt of Stone and the Egypt of Men. The Egypt of 33 Pharaonic Dynasties has long ago disappeared, even though the ancient place names and Pyramids will forever be monuments to that past.

The very name of "Heliopolis" marks it as the city sacred to the old god Ra, Lord of the Sun, and to Horus, God of the Sky – himself a falcon-headed deity, son of Osiris, God of the Underworld and Isis, Mother of the Earth.

Horus, in ancient lore, slew the evil Seth in combat but was consumed in fire only to arise again from his own ashes. Some of the sarcophagi of the ancient Pharoahs were fashioned in the shape of Horus and his falcon-head, for to them he was the symbol of resurrection and life after death. (Horus was to the Greeks the Phoenix bird rising immortal from its own ashes – and, if you’re a devotee of "Harry Potter" and his movies, you’ll know what a Phoenix bird is).

What we ought to know, as Christians, is that Egypt was converted to Christianity by the Evangelist, St. Mark.

Under the spell of his teaching, many Egyptians abandoned the old gods of the Pharaohs and embraced Christ. Concealed behind the Pyramids and mosques remain thousands of Christian churches belonging to this period – at least that’s what we found in 1982, before a wave of Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism began to engulf the Middle East.

Saints? Witness the drum-roll of great and holy names out of that "Christian" Egypt: St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, Origen, and St. Anthony, the founder of monasticism. In Europe, would not a 1,500 year old Monastery not be greatly venerated? Egypt abounds in such monasteries such as that of St. Jeremy near Memphis which was built in the Fourth century. Then there is the old Terenutis in an almond-shaped valley named the Wadi Natrun to the west of Giza.

Thousands of paintings, icons, papyrii with sacred texts, glass chalices, illustrated bibles, bear witness to this wonderful Christian heritage. The crowning proof that Egypt was a stronghold of Christianity was that when the Muslim Arabs swept over the country in the Tenth century to convert the people, mainly with the sword of Islam, they referred to the Christians as "Copts," which really means, "The Egyptians."

Thus the Coptic Church is the Church of the true Egyptians. In the 1980s, and perhaps even today, their Masses were still intoned in the dead tongue of the Pharoahs which vanished with the introduction of Arabic into the daily life of Egypt.

In the years of persecution and "teachings" (as they do in the madrassas of today), most of the Egyptians became Muslim. In 1982, we found five million Christians still there, with their own Patriarch or "Pope."

I observed this decades ago, and I can still ask the same question. Why is it that God seems to love the desert? For out of the deserts and thorn thickets, the barren wastes of the Middle East, have come three of this planet’s great religion – the Jewish faith, Christianity and Islam. (The Hajj is just beginning in Saudi Arabia, with the first wave of 1.5 million already beginning their pilgrimage to Makkah).

The Old and New Testaments and the Qu’ran, the Arabs used to maintain during my many peregrinations in the Middle East, are one continuing revelation. Thus Jews, Christians and Muslims, used to refer to each other as "The People of the Book." Sadly, they are now, to a great extent, locked in bitter confrontation. We can only pray – even hope against hope – for a return to sanity which comes from God, overcoming the vagaries of man’s wayward but free will.

When I interviewed Israel’s founding father in 1968, in Tel Aviv, the late David Ben-Gurion, he quipped that "The New Testament is a work of fiction written in very bad Greek." He then grinned and said he had only been joking. In truth, it was written in very good Greek – although Jesus’ native tongue had been Aramaic.

Whatever the language, it was the "Good News" of that time, and is the Good News whose message up to this day must inspire our own lives. Love one another. Love God.

To this, although neither evangelist nor prophet, just a kibitzer, may I presume to add: Be true to yourself, and do your best.