The Magic of St. Catherine

There was a magic to the mountain, the fortress, the olive trees when I visited St. Catherine for the first time. I trudged up a long road with my friends that leads to the monastery gate. We passed by silent mountains that the wind does not shake and the sun’s scorching heat cannot melt, until we reached the walled in burning bush, which — according to its old and living tale — has lived for thousands of years. Then, I entered one of the monastery’s chapels, sat on its steps and asked nothing of God.

But I did steal a glance at everyone who entered, bowed and prayed, and I recalled a history that had slowly distanced itself from me: a time when I myself had done the same. Entered. Bowed. Prayed.

At that time, my conversation with God was unceasing. I poured out my confusion, shared my thoughts with Him and asked for His guidance. I spoke to Him through my actions, and I heard His echo in the trace of everything I did. I defended Him against those who used His name to justify injustice or feed a sense of superiority. For the God I knew came to serve everyone, and even His miracles were not a display of grandeur but of fulfillment of the needs of those around him.

But with each defense of Him, with each frame others placed Him in and I tried to pull Him from, the chasm between us widened. I kept asking myself, do I truly know Him? Had His image been so distorted that He could no longer be recognized by his own people? Or am I speaking with another God?

On the steps of the monastery’s church, I was overcome by silence. The movements of the visitors’ bodies were all I could see: enter in reverence, bow forward, make the sign of the cross, raise your hand, pray silently, make the sign of the cross again, and depart in the same reverence. I knew all these motions by heart, but I did not take the step beyond the threshold of the church’s entrance.

Two years had passed since that day and, suddenly, on May 28, St. Catherine’s Monastery was atop the news. The Egyptian judiciary spoke: the monastery’s lands, which had been the subject of a legal dispute for the past 11 years, were declared public property.

I remembered the mountains, the fortress and the olive trees. I remembered the burning bush, the church and the silence. I remembered the magic.

But I also recalled looking out at the unfinished buildings, so organized and strange in the desert, where things should not be that organized. I recalled the colossal construction machines scattered in a sea of sand. And I recalled my friend thanking God that, at least, these machines were not running during our visit, or we would have drowned in the noise of development brought by the “Great Revelation” project to St. Catherine.

At first, I followed the news of the ruling and its consequences with little enthusiasm. In a world where the symptoms of collapse are unfolding at every turn — with war in Gaza, changes in the region’s power dynamics and the right wing firmly entrenched in every corner of the globe — I told myself there were more important things to pay attention to.

Then I spoke with a monk who had spent time at St. Catherine. He explained that the very arteries that had nourished their monastic life for years are now under threat. The Egyptian court ruling issued on May 28, he explained, would deprive the monks of the lands that had sustained the monastery and granted Sinai’s monastic life its resilience and continuity, even in the face of a pandemic that once threatened the whole world with extinction.

I asked him how many monks there are. He said: 23.

I don’t know exactly why this conversation affected me so deeply. But I do know that what the monk told me about how monastic life at St. Catherine is organized  pushed me to imagine, question and inquire: What does it mean for 23 monks to live in the glare of this harsh desert? How has life in this ancient monastery persisted for more than 14 centuries? Will it simply be reduced to stones that memorialize the life that once flourished there until 2025? Will it be just another one of the many lives we have watched become extinguished?

These questions haunted me, and I found myself thinking about a past I had believed I had outrun.

The site of the Burning Bush has been a destination for hermits since the third century, with solitary monks flocking there to settle in their cells. Following the construction of St. Catherine's Church and its towering fortress — which encompassed all the churches built through the monks' efforts before the sixth century — the South Sinai desert was home to an estimated 600 monks by the seventh century. Today, only 23 remain. Yet, between the former 600 and the current 23, the bond has stayed the same: a brotherhood forged not by kinship, lineage, or blood, but by a shared choice to lead a life of spiritual and material partnership. Despite the isolation and seclusion of the Orthodox monastic life, the brothers' responsibilities to each other, their monastery and the surrounding community remain. The simple, mundane tasks of running the kitchen and the library, farming, water management, preserving their ecclesiastical heritage and serving the local community all form the fabric of the brotherhood’s life.

Enchanted by the magic of this life, I found my usual drives suspended. I wasn't consumed by the pursuit of painting a picture of precise historical facts, nor did I seek to build an elaborate, objective analysis of the brotherhood's past and missteps. I was seized instead by an idea “that is not of this world” — a community that has not lost its existence in the quest to preserve its independence and a life that is governed by the spirit of service and the collective.

However, the court had another magic, a magic that transformed what the land is, no longer for service, no longer the thing that bonds, that forms community. The court waved its rod of authority over the monks’ ancient existence, reducing the life of service they inherited from their forebears to “prayer” and “worship,” granting them what it called “religious possession.” It ensured their stay on land of a “religious character,” not as original owners, but as mere users of it.

What I came to understand was that the court’s ruling was a way to strip back one of the most essential dimensions of monastic life: service.

Service is a way of being within a community, a pattern of living that compels you to be attentive to everything around you. Service does not require you to be perfect, only to be open to understanding the needs of your surroundings and to be prepared for trying, acting, making mistakes, and learning. It is a profound realization that you do not live in this world alone and that your individuality may actually be realized through belonging to something. It obliges you to act, to influence the motion of what you belong to. Service is a series of attempts to embody a faith that is often difficult to translate into tangible work, but that nourishes the bonds between you and others. These bonds create a mirror for you, revealing a self — not the self you imagine, but the self manifested in your actions. If your intentions are sincere, you will stay with this reflection to see and hear everything it tells you.

Service was the heartbeat of the Christian life I learned to live. Rituals did not captivate me as much as action did. I did not follow fasting times, and I never scrutinized the back of food packages to determine if what entered my stomach would break my fast. I didn't count the number of times I attended mass, nor how regular I was in doing the written prayers. I practiced the sacrament of confession only once.

At that time, I never considered my faith to be deficient. For my creed did not pay much attention to formalities, it was rather a source for practicing faith by “diving into the seas of my reality.” And faith was not merely a creed I keep in my heart and mind, but a mission I perform at every moment of everyday. The God I believed in did not look at outward appearances, but was concerned with essence. My faith then transformed into a continuing act of questioning aimed at developing my understanding of the essence of things: the essence of my intentions, the essence of what I do, the essence of what shapes me and what I shape in return.

And here I am now: abandoning the creed, but holding onto faith and action.

The monks did not abandon action either, even in their chosen isolation from the world. Their shared life pulsed with the rhythm of their service, and their latest crisis was met with the beat of their rebellion.

Throughout June and July, news circulated of bilateral talks between Egypt and Greece, with Egypt repeatedly reassuring Greece that it would preserve the monastery's unique character. Yet, over time, the monastery's name, once mentioned alone, became bundled with other topics that define the two countries’ strategic partnership — Gaza, Libya, the electrical interconnection, maritime boundaries and irregular migration. As I followed the news, a silence fell over my conversation with the monk. I thought perhaps the brotherhood was now busy reorganizing its affairs to prepare for the legal battle imposed on them by the Egyptian court’s ruling.

Then, on August 2, a headline about a "coup" against the abbot shattered the silence. The news caught my attention, and as I told some of my colleagues, I found myself repeating what I read, “the monks staged a coup against their leader.”

I followed scattered reports in the Greek press about a late-July attempt by 15 monks to depose the abbot. The attempt came after a bill was introduced in the Hellenic parliament proposing the creation of a public authority in Athens to manage the monastery’s assets and the transfer of various rights — including ownership and usufruct — from the brotherhood to this authority.

The Greek press reported that the bill was introduced “at the request of the monastery itself.”

Heavy questions consumed my thoughts: how will this affect the monks' fate in Egypt, especially as a nationalist discourse unaware of the monastery's autonomous status dominated Egyptian media discourse after the ruling? How can the monks possibly fight the legal battle here, while a deep schism has fractured their ranks? Did the security apparatuses in Egypt have a hand in creating this schism?

I took these questions to the monk, and the deep certainty of his response silenced my confusion. He explained that the brotherhood's disobedience was a solemn duty — an act of defending the three principles that define their bond: service, independence and collective authority.

Here and now, in the battle of this time, the monks have harvested what they sowed over a century and a half. This monastery does not submit to the authority of a state, nor of a patriarch, nor of a single man; its absolute authority is that of the "brotherhood," and the final word rests with the Assembly of Fathers. With this conviction, the monks moved to fulfill their destiny: to safeguard their monastery's independence. They defied their bishop who sought to push them, by his individual will, under Greek guardianship — a man who had broken the promise he made to his brothers at the dawn of his service, failing to preserve the system of partnership that binds their brotherhood. The bishop mistakenly believed that the role of service in leadership granted to him by the Council of Fathers gave him an authority that rose above the collective. The monks, however, saw it as a service like any other — like tending to the kitchen or the library — granted to him by a vote of two-thirds of the council, and could be revoked by another.

And so the brotherhood went on its path, rejecting any country's interference in its affairs, defending its independence, turning to the established instruments of its traditions to fortify their vows, relying on the monastery’s internal rules, the minutes of the Fathers’ council meetings, and the brotherhood’s own vote.

The monks saw in their traditions a path that transcended “obedience” — or perhaps a deeper understanding of it, one that bypasses submission to “leadership” if it strays from its commitments and promises. For the monks’ disobedience of their leader was an obedience to God, embodied in their commitment to what they have sworn to one another and to their monastery. And their disobedience was forged by tools derived from the spirit of service: tools built not on grand rhetoric or deeds that make its doer shine, but the accumulation of tedious, unglamorous labor that usually goes uncelebrated.

Fortifying their disobedience with these tools made me see a living testimony to a magic that tradition can offer us, especially if the present is a moment of crisis in which we need something that we know, that moves us together. Tradition itself carries its own internal contradictions and deep logic, and it is in these that tradition holds the capacity to not only be summoned, but also to be shaped. In summoning tradition, we acknowledge the reality of our extended existence between the past and the present, and in shaping it, we summon our will — our agency — within that extended existence. For tradition does not necessarily mean stagnation, rather it can mean continuity, and it earns its meaning from the timing and the way in which it is used and the interests and goals of those who shape this use.

As the monk listed the articles of the monastery's internal statute — which affirm the brotherhood’s sovereignty and independence — every tradition I had ever been a part of came to mind. I thought of the ones I was born into by circumstance, and the ones I chose to belong to of my own will. I recalled standing on the church entryway, seized by the paradox of being the fruit of this ancient plant and an intruder upon it at once. I recalled a long journey in which I claimed to have severed my roots, only to realize later that this severance was an impossible task — and one I would not choose, even if it were possible. I remembered my own internal decay and wandering until I found a new balance, through which I reassembled myself to be at peace with the truth: that I will always belong and always remain a stranger. And then I renewed my choice in my heart: not the choice to sever myself from the traditions that shaped me, but the choice to understand them, summon them and shape them in everything I have chosen to belong to now.

From the heart of the distant desert, the monks wage their battle, fighting the forces of our present days: the Egyptian state’s drive to commodify, market and sell everything, along with the opportunistic Greek quest for power, seeking to exploit the Egyptian judicial ruling to increase its influence inside the monastery. Between the former and the latter, the global order as we once knew it is disintegrating, the power of its institutions is crumbling, and the United Nations’ decades-long role in shaping power balances is diminishing. Even UNESCO, that grand agency sworn to guard the world's heritage, has watched in a deafening silence — offering no protection for the monastery and its monks.

The circumstances of the battle are far from ideal, and the monks do not cling to idealism as they fight. Between a bishop who stormed the monastery with private guards — beating the monks and forcibly removing them from their home — and the monks who decided to leak all the grave errors their bishop had committed before these events began, I see what added magic to the magic: they aren't heroes, but ordinary people unafraid to get their hands dirty in the heat of the fray. Instead, they hold fast to a magical practicality that is shaping this chapter in their monastery's long history.

The monks have managed to depose their abbot and elect a new one, and it seems that Greece did not leave them with many options.

I await what’s to come, and now I have something to ask of God: Do not let them lose their compass and grant them discernment. Let the magic live on.