John's Story

There is a part of our Middle East journey we never set down at the time. It was too close, and too much John's own. But it belongs in this story, and now that we are home we can tell it. It is the one moment of the whole trip that we can explain only as the hand of God, and we have never found another explanation.

It happened at the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, on the ninth of November, near the start of our days in Egypt. We had climbed the twenty-nine steps up into the church, and a few minutes inside, John went suddenly faint and had to sit, dazed, in what he afterward called an out-of-body feeling. We moved him to a quiet pew away from the other visitors and waited for it to pass, but it would not. We were never so grateful for Sam. Within ten minutes he had a man from a nearby pharmacy checking John's blood pressure; his sugar was fine; nothing added up.

The thing to do was to get John out and decide what came next, and here, as so often on our travels, the Lord left room for a little comedy. Sam found a wheelchair, but its front wheels would not turn. Two strong men from the church carried John, chair and all, to an elevator and down to the entrance, where a flight of steep steps still stood between us and the street. Then a man simply stepped up, lifted John and the chair together, and carried him down to the sidewalk.

As they wheeled John across the courtyard, a priest came to Janice and gave her a blessing in the name of Saint Mark, who had brought the faith to Egypt in the first century.

Father John. At street level another priest came up and introduced himself as Father John. He asked where we were from, and when John said North Carolina, the priest said he himself was from Boston, and the priest with him from New Hampshire. He spoke of how important the name John is, and asked if he might pray over him. John wished afterward that he could remember all the words; he was in tears by then, and part of the prayer was that God had heard it through those tears. The priest anointed John with oil and gave him his blessing. Sam, who has been a Coptic Christian all his life, said quietly that he had never seen anything like it in that church.

And that is not the end of it.

The return. After the cruise, on the fourth of December, we came back to Cairo and asked Sam to take us once more to the Hanging Church. One reason above all drew us back: we wanted to find Father John and thank him. We climbed the twenty-nine steps again, and at the top, to the right, sat Father Jacob, who we learned was the head priest of the church. John told him we were looking for Father John, from Boston. Father Jacob smiled, and listened to the whole story, and then told us there was no Father John at this church. Father John had been only a visitor that day. At the very moment John was being carried from the church, an American Coptic priest happened to be leaving it too, and had stopped to pray over a stranger and bless him. There is no ordinary way to account for that.

Father Jacob asked if he might bless us, which he did, and gave us some of the Holy Communion bread.

We went in and sat in a front pew, and as Sam began to tell us the church's history, two people came up behind us, beaming. They were the pharmacist who had checked John's blood pressure and the man who had found the wheelchair and helped carry him out. They told Sam how glad they were that John was well, and came and hugged us. It was early December, and we wished them a Merry Christmas, and they wished us a Happy Christmas.

We have come to think of the whole of it as a gift from God. John has never felt such a connection, and cannot tell the story even now, to our children or to anyone, without it moving him to tears. We are not the first to be given a moment like this, and we will not be the last. But it was given to us, and we will carry it the rest of our days.