He glanced back at her uneasily, his look signaling that it was something she’d soon be a part of. “Actually, he doesn’t know you’re coming. The abbot doesn’t know either.”
Gracie was about to ask him to clarify, but he beat her to it. “The abbot—he doesn’t know what to do. He didn’t want the outside world to know about it.”
“But you did,” Finch prompted.
The monk nodded. “Something miraculous is happening. We can’t keep it to ourselves. It’s not ours to keep.”
Gracie looked over at Finch. They’d been around such situations before: uninvited guests traveling into troubled spots to talk to reluctant interviewees, people whose first instinct was to shut themselves off from outside scrutiny. Sometimes, Gracie and Finch managed to get through; other times, they were locked out. In this case, they had to make it happen. They hadn’t flown halfway around the globe to leave empty-handed. Not when the whole world was waiting for an explanation.
The appearance of the tips of the pyramids at Giza told Gracie they were finally leaving the city behind. She’d seen them before, but the sight never failed to inspire awe, even in the most jaded observer. On this occasion, something else stirred inside her, the majestic, stone peaks that jutted out of the sand oddly reminiscent of the nunataks—the rocky crags that rose out of the fields of snow—that she’d looked down on only hours ago from the window of the chopper. The noisy, chaotic mess of Cairo quickly gave way to sleepier, scattered clusters of houses, and as they passed the small town of Bir Hooker, the last town before the desert and the monasteries, they lost the signals in their cell phones. The monk informed them that they’d be limited to the satphone from there on.
Ever since his first call, Gracie hadn’t been able to place his accent. “By the way, where are you from?” she asked him.
“I’m from Croatia,” he explained. “I come from a small town in the north, not far from the Italian border.”
“Then you must be Roman Catholic.”
“Of course,” the monk confirmed.
“So Ameen isn’t your real name?”
“It’s not my birth name,” he corrected with a warm smile. “I was Father Dario before I came here. We all take on Coptic names once we join the monastery. It’s the tradition.”
“But the Coptic Church is Orthodox,” she queried. Long before the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, the Christian world had already been rocked by the great schism in the eleventh century. The longstanding rivalries and theological disputes between Rome and its Eastern counterparts in Alexandria and in Antioch had been festering since the earliest days of Christendom. These petty squabbles finally came to a head in 1054 and split Christendom into two: the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The Greek word Orthodox meant, literally, “correct belief,” which pretty much summed up the Eastern church’s belief that it was the true keeper of the flame, that its adherents followed the authentic and uncorrupted traditions and teachings that had been passed down by Jesus and his apostles.
“Orthodox, yes, but not Eastern Orthodox,” the monk specified. Gracie’s confused expression was obviously no surprise, nor was it limited to her. The monk glanced at his three visitors and waved the issue away. “It’s a long story,” he told them. “The Coptic Church is the oldest of them all, it out-orthodoxes the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was actually founded by the apostle Mark in the middle of the first century, less than ten years after the death of Jesus. But it’s all nonsense, really. Ultimately, all Christians are followers of Christ. That’s all that matters. And the monasteries here don’t make those distinctions either. All Christians are welcome. Father Jerome is Catholic,” he reminded her.
Before long, they rounded the nearby monastery of Saint Bishoi, and Deir Al-Suryan appeared at the end of a dusty, unlit lane. It looked like an ark adrift in a sea of sand—an image its monks had long embraced, believing the monastery to have been modeled on Noah’s ark. Detail soon fell into focus as the people carrier drew nearer to it: the two tall bell towers; the cubical, squat, four-story keep—the qasr—guarding the entrance gate; the small domes with big crosses on them strewn irregularly around the various chapels and structures inside the walled complex; all of it surrounded by a thirty-foot fortified wall.
They filed out of the minivan, and Brother Ameen led them past the keep and across the inner courtyard, which was presently deserted.