As you may know, Christmas in Egypt happens on January 7^th.  But while Anglicans have chosen to celebrate Easter with the Copts on its eastern date, we still celebrate Christmas on the 25^th of December like weirdos.  Egyptian culture has even started to catch on.  I have been told that no one of the majority faith used to wear Christmas colors, but now many do and several shops do trees and lights.  That’s the city. 

Out in the country the religions are more segregated.  We took a little trip to a national park in the desert past Fayoum.  There’s an ancient sea bed where they have found many extinct species of whale: basilosoarsus and dorudon – whatever those are!  Of course the Sahara used to be a fertile grassland as recently as six thousand years ago, and scientists say that it will become a grassland again in fifteen thousand due to a cyclical wobble in the earth’s rotation.  Fayoum also has Egypt’s only lakes.  So a touristy town has developed on the shore where you can enjoy local food, art, and pottery.  Still, outside the main strip, the poverty is appalling and the sermons in the mosques are disturbing.  It is no wonder that people turn to extreme religion to try to project some sort of cosmic order under the circumstances.

The province just to the south is the homeland of many of Egypt’s Christian leaders, Coptic and Protestant.  Minya boasts a number of Christian villages, holy family pilgrimage stops, and, more recently, the shrine church of the twenty one martyrs killed by Islamic State terrorists in Libya back in 2015.  We haven’t been able to visit Minya yet, but our seminary has a satellite campus there, so it’s only a matter of time. 

People in Egypt are of course depressed this new year due to further inflation and food scarcity.  We pray to God that the government can secure a stable trade route for grain after the disruption of our Ukranian supply chain.  The stakes are high since the fertile land here can only support half the population.  There are also unresolved tensions with Ethiopia since it built a damn up the Nile.  Add the situations in Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya, and it starts to feel like the Day of the Lord is dawning.  It is quite a bit easier to get along in North America where you only have two neighbors!