Despite a distorted mirror: The goodness of the Filipino

Aren’t you sick and tired of reading about Mark Jimenez? Yet, we – this newspaper included – persist in bannering his sordid story on the front page in lurid headlines. One thing must be said: His circus act has literally "brought the House down".

Those MJ has accused, of course, have been wounded – perhaps mortally. The public is beginning to believe that, while MJ may be guilty, those he has tarred with his insinuations are guilty, too. Mark J’s (alias Mario Crespo’s) greatest "crime", however, is not those scatter-gun accusations, nor even the charges that await him in the United States – if he ever gets brought back to a jail cell beside, let’s say General Noriega, the Failed Tailor from Panama. Jimenez’s crime was that he held up a distorted mirror to the Filipino’s collective face, and convinced this nation, already wallowing in self-doubt, that Filipinos are corrupt, weak, readily seduced by money and other sinful goodies, easily conned by promises and swindled by sweet-talk.

But this is untrue. The Filipino is good, even though, too often, he (or she) must be reminded of it.

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We do not live in a safe and secure world. Neither did Joseph and Mary when they went to Bethlehem for Jesus, the Son of God, to be born. This is an important part of the Christmas story that we tend to forget – but it poses a lesson for us in these troubled times. Troubles, mind you, which are worldwide, and not confined to us in the Philippines.

Think of the Bible story! Jesus could not have been more than a few days old before Mary and Joseph, with their Holy Babe in arms, had to flee into Egypt to escape the wrath of the king, the cruel and paranoid Herod. The king had been told that a male child had been born in Bethlehem of Judah, who was to become "King of the Jews"! What? A rival. A source of danger to his monarchy!

Seeing the advent of such a child as a threat to his throne, Herod massacred all male infants in sight, the so-called "Innocents". But the Holy Couple, forewarned by an Angel, fled with their child across the desert of the Sinai into Cairo.

Of course, the place wasn’t called "Cairo" in those days, and only one of the four Evangelists, St. Matthew (the tax-collector), 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 Gizah. Then there are the words of the prophet attributed to Almighty God: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son…"

* * *

Years ago, when we were in the Middle East, my wife and I drove to Mataria (about six miles from downtown Cairo) in the vicinity of Heliopolis where Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak lived. I wonder if he still lives there. In any event, Heliopolis is the "city" sacred to the ancient Egyptian god Ra, Lord of the Sun, and to Horus, god of the Sky – the falcon-headed god (son of Osiris, god of the Underworld and Isis, Mother of the Earth).

If you’ll recall those colorful archaelogical photographs, or those artifacts from excavated toms in the museum, some of the sarcophagi of the Pharoahs were fashioned in the shape of Horus and his falcon-head – for he is the symbol of resurrection and life after death in which the Egyptians of antiquity had devoutly believed. (Horus was, to the Greeks, in turn, the Phoenix bird, rising immortal from its own ashes – geez, just check it out with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.) Perhaps this is even why today’s Egyptians, ever conscious of their past, had located their airport at Heliopolis.

But Heliopolis has even greater Christian connotation. not far from the famed Youssof Kamal Palace is tob e found a street named Shagaret Mariam (The Street of Mary’s Tree). In his area – I trust is still stands – one found a sycamore tree, gnarled witha ge but still green, protected by a high pink wall, in the shade of which the Holy Family is said to have rested at the end of their flight into Egypt.

The little grove of sycamores, reputedly, was planted by Queen Cleopatra VII – the last of the line of Pharoahs descended from Ptolemy, a general of Alexander te Great. Cleopatra (whom everyone remembers in the guise of Elizabeth Taylor despite the more recent Hallmark version) was actually not Egyptian but Greek, and was, indeed, the lover of Julius Caesar with whom she had a son, Caesarion. Her second lover as every novelist and movie-buff know, was Mark Anthony. It was Mark Anthony, the Cairenes told me, who had presented those sycamores – trees not indigenous to Egypt – to her.

Legend says that to tend her gardens of sycamore and fragrant balsam, Cleopatra had "imported" a colony of Hebrew gardeners. It was only logical, therefore, for Joseph, Mary and their new-born child to have sought refuge with this settlement of fellow Jews.

* * *

The French Jesuits many years ago built a lovely little church a few meters away from this garden of herbs.

There is where we went on our pilgrimage.

It had been pouring rain all day, a novelty for desert-rimmed Cairo where it seldom rains, and desert sand had been churned into desert mud. The streets of the city were in flood since, used to sunny days without end, the Cairenes obviously had not prepared enough gutters to accommodate 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 tranquility. Over the entrance to the church were inscribed the words: Sanctae Familiae in Aegypto Exsult.

Within the chapel, above the high altar, one saw the figures of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Hovering above them in the upper nave flies the Holy Spirit in His usual Shape of the Dove. On each side are charming frescoes portraying the Flight into Egypt and the Arrival in Heliopolis. Jesus lived here for the first years of his life – until the death of the wicked Herod and of his son Archelaus permitted the Holy Family to return to Palestine in safety. From the moment one entered the serene gloom of this church, all doubt vanished. Here was, truly, the place where He had lived and played.

The traveller must learn to distinguish between the Egypt of Stone and the Egypt of Men. The Egypt of XXXIII (33) Pharonic Dynasties disappeared. The conversion of Egypt to Christianity was the achievement of St. Mark, the Evangelist. Under the spell of his teaching, Egyptians abandoned the gods of the Pharoahs and embraced Christ. Concealed behind the Pyramids and mosques are thousands of Christian churches belonging to this period. Within the drum-roll of great and holy names were those of St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, Origen, and St. Anthony, the founder of monasticism.

In Europe, would not a 1,500-year-old monastery be greatly venerated? Egypt abounds in such monasteries, like the monastery of St. Jeremy near Memphis (not to be confused with Memphis, Tennessee, the home of Graceland and Elvis, after which it is named). That monastery was built in the Fourth Century A.D.! Then there is the old Terenutis in an almond-shaped valley named the Wadi Natrun, to the west of Gizah.

Thousands of paintings, icons, papyrii with sacred texts, glass chalices, illustrated bibles, bear witness to this wonderful Christian heritage. The crowning proof of the fact that Egypt was the first stronghold of Christianity was that when the Muslim Arabs swept over the country to convert the people with the Qu’ran of Allah and the sword of Islam, they referred to the Christians as "Copts" which only means "The Egyptians".

Thus the Coptic Church is the church of the Egyptians. Their Masses today are still intoned in the dead tongue of the Pharoahs which vanished with the introduction of Arabic into the daily life of Egypt. Most of the Copts, in the intervening centuries, became Muslim, but a few million remain with their old rituals and their own Patriarch or "Pope".

The name "Cairo", of course, is Arabic. It is a corruption of the appellation, El Kahira (The Victorious One) given to their Arab encampment by the Fatimid conquerors of Egypt in the year 969 AD.

It is today a capital dominated by a graceful but formidable Citadel, with domed cupola and soaring minarets, erected by that great Kurdish warrior, Salah Al-Din Ayyubi (known to the West as the great Saladin). From the Citadel’s frowning walls, in the 12th century, Saladin led his Saracen armies to do battle with the Crusaders of England’s Richard the Lionhearted. Cairo is now the city of a thousand minarets from which the muezzin call the faithful to prayer five times a day – proclaiming there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.

Yet, behind the echoing call of the muezzin, waft the Christian prayers of those who remain true to the faith of the Copts, and of St. Mark the Evangelist. And the memory of the Child Jesus who once lived and laughed among them, in the Land of Egypt.

Religion is what inspires and unites mankind in the worship of God. It also divides mankind – with the sword. This is something, sadly, which may deplorably persist until the Last Gasp of Mankind.

Yet hope springs eternal, as they always say. Who knows? There may yet come a day, unglimpsed in the dim future, when there will be reconciliation and peace. Inshallah, or as God commands it. For the same kind of faith – that sometimes whips men to battle – can also melt their hearts and blend them into one.

One thing hasn’t changed: The meaning of Christmas.

I wish you the best of everything, this holy and happy season!