by 
This article was orginally published at:
Many years ago, I was very active in ministry in London. I would have mentioned this in earlier posts as it was a defining feature of my life and identity for a long time. This post is the first official and explicit piece about it all.
It started in April 2001 at the Resurrectional procession on a Sunday during Pentecost. I had stumbled into church, partly hungover and partly thirsty for meaning, and stood in the middle pews by the end, in case I wanted to rush out in a moment of defiance. I knew a few people but I didn’t really maintain any of the relationships at that time. So, that liturgy in 2001 was the first time in a long time I’d been in church. I remember one deacon’s face as he slightly motioned hello and smiled; I had met him a few times before.
After the liturgy, I met up with those I knew and they invited me to come and sit with them. That meeting would be the first time I discover myself in church. I started telling them about my background, my studies, living in Oxford, and my artistic interests. It was in the lower room of St. Mark’s, next to the baptismal font, a room littered with books and memories for many that sat in that room. They started telling me about the services and activities. My eyes widened and my mind lit up with ideas. As they spoke and I spoke, we realized that there was a space for my ideas. Someone suggested at that time that they had been wanting to do a professional and high-quality concert. I, being the Peter that I was, rushed forward and said, “Let’s do it!”. They were hesitant and offered all sorts of sensible reasons for it not working. I remember insisting and saying,”I can help you with that.” At that point, the idea of the annual concert was born.
And also at that point, Midiane the Servant had been born although it would take many months until it became official in ways. I went to church a lot more. I stayed at church a lot more. I made friends. I spoke more Arabic. I learned more Arabic. A very gracious and loving father figure taught me Coptic and the Midnight Praises. I started developing my then modest knowledge of hymns and rites through the man’s lessons and effort. I got involved in a lot of activities very quickly. I drank less in Oxford. I tried to pray more and read the Bible more. I became aware of my dire situation and started repenting, as best I knew how.
One day, I was going to the downstairs rooms in the St. Mark’s house to take part in the choir practices. My dad called me to say hello and to see how I was doing. I remember that day: a dark winter evening in Kensington, the bright yellow lights bursting from the bottom building window. Excited and animated, I told my dad that I had been invited to serve in official capacities in the choirs and preparation for the concert. My dad told me, “May God give you grace, my son.”
A whole string of defining moments, like this last one, followed. As much as this will undoubtedly involve a narrative of what happened from my memory and perspective, this is more aimed to be a commentary on the things I learned and observed in church.
The concert idea had been borne and I had started holding meetings to organize the pre-production, to conceptualize, and to mobilize the force that will make this happen. People found these meetings strange as this disheveled, scruffy guy could have such a clear vision and unabated passion. Soon, the concert was taking shape and we were discussing theme and content. I had told them that I had a concept for a play and I had written a first draft. I printed out a copy and I handed a copy to the father figure I mentioned before. We’ll call him Man.
The play was not approved because of one scene where it’s suggested that a young couple were about to fornicate. The main point of the scene was the ironic line the Satan character delivers, this is my trinity, but to get the people involved, especially Man, to understand this proved futile. It was my first experience of censorship and dealing with the conservative mindset of Egyptians in church and arts. No matter how hard I tried to explain the point of the scene and that the suggestion of sin is coincidental, it made no difference. Man decreed no. And no one else really objected at the time, although they could see my side. I learned later on that I had to fight a lot of my battles on my own and that when people would come up later to tell me that they agreed with me, it meant little. I still lost the battle on my own with no support.
That play incident was also the first stone in the memorial of disappointment. The reasons given to me weren’t satisfactory and I took their disagreement as cowardice. So what if people read the wrong message or understood that sex is suggested? Sex happens in young couples and it’s delusional to try not to deal with it on stage or in writing. No, they said. Sex does happen but we don’t have to announce it. I really was disappointed. I spent many hours and nights working on that script. I decided to flirt with diplomacy and came back with an edited script. Still, it didn’t pass. The memory from the first draft stuck and I increasingly felt that I was labeled the ‘rebel’, the ’subversive writer’. This play or any revision thereof wouldn’t see light of stage.
But I kept on writing. For upon me flowed the most fruitful and rich time of renewal in terms of my writing. I wrote poems, translated songs from Arabic to English, and filled notebooks and pads with thoughts, lyrics, and ideas. My mind had woken up after drowning in drinking, loneliness, and futility. I wrote more sketches and songs, all the things I wanted to incorporate into the concert. I didn’t realize at the time that although the concert was being driven and shaped by me, it wasn’t my call. It wasn’t my concert. It was the Man’s concert and ultimately, St. Mark’s concert. I felt a deep sense of ownership towards the concert but it wasn’t mine. I was just a surrogate mother. The concert couldn’t call my womb home.
I was involved in the Friday meeting, youth meetings here and there, and other services with a nearby bishop. I had developed a routine where I go to London on Friday, attend and serve at the youth meeting, stay for Midnight Praises, sleep over in church, wake up in the morning for the liturgy, spend the day milling around, come back in the evening for Vespers, mill around, have Coptic and hymns lessons, and then crown the day with Midnight Praises. Sunday, sleeping in church again, was the liturgy and then service until 3 or 4pm. This was every Sunday for a very long time.
The 1st concert happened. I was MC and performer in multiple spheres. No one really knew whom I was, but they liked me. They laughed at my jokes and I connected with the crowd. I ran around between choirs and segments and the front stage. It was manic but it was surreal. I felt at home, affirmed for a change.
We started planning the 2nd concert afterward and then things took a relaxed approach. I was still my passionate, driven self, but things lagged. We still had the theme discussion and conceptualization meetings, but they weren’t like before. I made suggestions to write this or that, and I was told to write. I brought what I wrote. Sorry, not this time, next time. In hindsight, I realized that I didn’t know how to read people at the time. I was young, naive, and passionate, all the characteristics that set you up for crushing disappointment in that environment. I didn’t understand and started getting angry. I still pushed things along and we got ready for the 2nd concert. By that time, new faces appeared and they were taken in, much like I was. I had written a few funny sketches, in Arabic of all languages, and they weren’t accepted. But the new faces had ideas and those ideas passed. Why? I don’t know. I never got a convincing answer from anyone involved, including Man. A young man appeared and wanted to rap. I wrote sanitized Christian lyrics that he would have performed, but both Man and Bishop felt that it was best to avoid it. I believed them and agreed with them, although deep down I didn’t. But I wasn’t prepared to let go now and have nothing again. The guy was also disappointed and promised with better opportunities. I don’t remember anymore what happened with him in that respect. Anyhow, 2nd concert happened and passed. I started feeling my place and position diminish and fade. My baby was being taken away from me, you know, the one meant for another mother.
My writing started to wane, but it wasn’t dead. But it spoke more of my frustration and anger than my excitement and optimism. With the 3rd concert on the horizon, I saw new, even more influential players enter the ring. And these would usher in a new era for the arts ministry, let alone the church. They represented a new force sweeping the church, a force that many older servants felt that they had to placate and absorb back into the mainstream. They were energised by more Protestant theologies and thinking, and they represented a very real threat to the church in many ways. One of the main players however, as much as he was involved in the movement, had no plans to rebel against the church nor change things. He just wanted to find God through his art and service. And that he did. And as he represented this movement in many ways, he was taken in by Man. Let’s call this main player Boy. So, Boy was taken in and Boy was given basic free reign. Definitely, he found his place and was given solo spots in the concert. And that drove me crazy. I became so jealous of him and resented him. For everything I suggested, it was turned down, at this point, with little explanation from Man. And Boy came forward and his ideas were, in my mind, implemented immediately. I really can’t think of a time when Boy wanted to do something and it wasn’t granted.
I fell away after the 3rd concert. And I went through a long period of hating Boy and resenting him so badly that if I even heard his name in connection with something I was involved in, I would pull away. The Boy branched out with the Bishop and that bishop gave him free reign too. It was bound to happen that we would end up ‘competing’ in a sense. One year, maybe the final year I attended a youth conference because I wanted to, I was invited to conceptualize and take part in the conference song, then a fairly new idea. I went away with some ideas after a meeting with the bishop and other servants. I came back and just as I was about to pitch them or mention them, Boy had been commissioned to come up with it.
The song by Better Life goes, ‘gaz fe nafsi seif…’. In English, it translates to, a sword went through me. Far from the feeling of sorrow felt by the Virgin at the Cross, it was the sword slaying me. I felt so useless and so incomparable when Boy was around.
I didn’t attend the 4th concert. I bailed on them after I had said that I would attend as a main vocalist for the Arabic choir. It was November and it was dark. And I was crying and screaming into the phone with a close friend of mine, one whom was involved in the arts council. I had had enough. After that point, I never took part in another concert or arts event or service. I did end up going to apologize to Man for how I left things with the 4th concert, but I remember going because a very close friend advised me to. I didn’t want to, but I did it, feeling guilty, pressured, and too weak to argue with him. So, I apologized to Man and saw my overall relationship with him and his family cool for a while. It is now polite and phatic, but every time I look into his eyes, I remember the eyes of the father figure whom really took care of me when I was new to St. Mark’s. But I also remember the eyes which looked back at me, telling me, no, next time, next concert.
At the pinnacle of my ministry, at the time I was most active, I was in Basingstoke in Hampshire, doing my placement year and still traveling to London every weekend for my grueling routine. I remember being asked to write a piece for a small-circulation publication, run by a friend, aimed at young Christians in London called the Grapevine. The piece was never published: another example of the phenomenon that I’ve explained above. Here it is:
It is a very common thing to hear someone say when approached about joining the arts’ services at churches,”… But I’m not artistic.”
Like only a few are. In fact, we all are.
And if some are more than others, it is solely because of a gift that God has granted them. Also, it is because that person chooses to keep that gift alive in them by practicing it and honing it for the glory of Christ.
But what about everybody else, those perhaps who are not given a talent in the arts?
Well, I am one who believes that everybody can act, sing, and paint. Yes, everybody. If this were not the case, then we are being deceived by all those academies of art, drama, dance, and singing. Those academies were instituted to turn the desire of being an artist into a reality.
Everybody can act, sing, and create masterpieces of iconography or any kind of art. That which stops people is something called inhibition. Basically, another word for fear. No confidence. Stage fright. Fear of failure. Well, call it whatever you want.
In the end, when we consciously avoid trying to explore ourselves to see if we have an artistic gift within us, we are in a way denying the unlimited power of God the Father who is the Source of All Gifts. Just if we give up ourselves to Him, the Spirit of Gifts then will turn even a small seed of desire to sing or act and turn it into ability unmatched by any humanly developed skill.
The arts make up such a limitless medium to spread the gospel of our Lord Christ. Through spiritual songs, hymns, plays, icons, pictures, poetry, stories, sayings – you name it Р, we as the members in the body of Christ serve each other and glorify Him. The mouth will sing love to the ailing foot. The hands will paint new colors in the tired eyes.
In conclusion, anyone can become an instrument of the Holy Spirit like St. Ephraim the Syrian. Anyone can develop a voice that will make God in heaven hush up His Angels. Anyone can get on stage and make us a character so well we forget where that person ends and the character starts.
It’s a matter of letting go of our inhibitions and allowing God to mould us into the creatures of praise He made us to be in the first place.
The arts are such a fundamental part of us.
Let us all then make it fundamental in our church as well. And please, let us enjoy it at the same time.
It’s naive, clunky, and stylistic, but I wrote it from the most honest and sincere part of me. I believed every word I wrote and I tried to live every sentence. And how it hurt when I would revisit these words and realise that I put in so much of myself to see me come out with nothing. Now, I see the progress of St. Mark’s and the Bishop’s work documented and advertised in Facebook, and the nights will come when I get so angry, seeing an idea I suggested back then implemented now. And the feelings of inferiority and inadequacy creep up as I remember their weak and empty reasons for not implementing them. I felt humored and placated like a child then.
The following is a collection of excerpts from an e-mail I wrote to the former fiancee-to-be as part of our long e-mail exchanges in getting to know each other:
…
I realized St. Mark’s and the Bishop didn’t want people like me. They wanted the players from the sweeping movement. Like in high school, I couldn’t be Danny in Grease, I couldn’t be Tom in Look Back in Anger, a play by John Osborne I did in uni, I couldn’t be a servant truly respected, empowered, supported, and pushed forward like the others. I was a weak, childlike, naive young man who just wanted to serve God. And I was quietly patted on the head and brushed aside on my many occasions so others could shine. I was never deemed important enough to shine.
I tried to rationalize and justify this by saying, perhaps I’m the seed that must die in order for others to grow. Then, I was swept in some people’s bitter, twisted pastoral theology about how God orchestrated all this pain to teach me a lesson. What lesson? What have I done wrong to be taught a lesson? I later rejected this theology outright. In and out of church, I saw Boy and others rise and do what I wanted to do, even proposed to do, as if the priest took it out of my mind and mouth and empowered others to do it. No one ever took me seriously. I struggle every day to be taken seriously.
Recently, when I met up with Greg [my high school English teacher] for dinner, he told me something very powerful and poignant. He quoted Dr. Johnson, as he always did during high school as my English and Philosophy Teacher. (Dr. Johnson is a famed writer and critic). He said that Dr. Johnson taught the two main forces writers struggle against: to be misunderstood and to be ignored.
Right now, as back then during ministry, I was constantly and systematically ignored. No matter how much I grew up or changed or tried to be less child-like, and I was became more belligerent towards clergy and servants, people still would ignore me. Like many at church, they’d crack a fake smile and let me think that I actually matter. Those morbid, transparent fucks.
…
I wanted to pursue the arts in the church like one does in the world: free, unfettered, and given space to explore. I was naive as I really didn’t understand the breadth and depth of the Egyptian culture that drives every Coptic church. But the kind of arts I want to pursue is not possible. I would even hazard to say that even with the most free-thinking or unconventional priest, it is not possible. There will always be a social more or common sensibility offended at some point, and when that happens, priests and servant shrink and take the path to least resistance. They will spout all sorts of mangled verses and theological justifications for their reasoning. If you’re an artist in the Coptic church, please be careful. Please. It’s very probable that if you don’t tow the party line and wish to explore an alternative path that you will be ostracised or sidelined. It’s only evitable in the environment most churches are in. If you want to do nice, staid plays about the love of Christ and the saints, you’re game. If you want to do funny but pointless skits about young guys in tunics and galabiyas, wow, you’re game. But most likely, you want to do a thought-provoking play or piece of music that talks about the very real struggle of young Christians, please be ready to be shot down with the precision of a sharpshooter. Arts in the church is possible as long as your definition doesn’t fundamentally collide with servants or priests. It is possible if your art is something you could perform or exhibit in front of a socially and intellectually conservative monk, priest, bishop or patriarch.
I end this post with a short anecdote. Back then, I translated an Arabic song Ad’oo el Elah into English, I Call on the Lord. It’s really my most favorite and my most personal song, both in arabic and english. Each language strikes me in a different way. The Arabic is nostalgic, reminds me of my innocence and simplicity in service and in prayer. And the English reminds me of how dedicated and driven i was as a servant, and how i ended up being on the fringes after all that hard work. Friends of mine still make fun of me with this song because how they thought i used to sing it at youth meetings and at conferences. No one knew or would understand how personal it was every time i sang it. It got to the point where the bishop would ask me to sing it in prayer meetings. Once I was asked to sing it at a conference. I did it in front of bishops n the Patriarch. It was very embarrassing, given i was sweaty from running around earlier; I was so nervous. I shudder at the memory. I was such a child-like person back then… I did anything to serve.
I really did anything to serve and create art, to make sense of those things God seems to have impressed upon me. Now, I do it far away from the approval and awareness of the church. The time may come when my art will collide with them. Remember that play from before? It’s now being rediscovered as a short film that will pave way for a feature film adaptation of the original stage play.¬† C for Conquer will see the light, any light, soon.
Will I ever serve again in that capacity? I don’t know. What do you guys think?
And if you’re interested in hearing I Call on the Lord, drop me a mail on midiane at lymone dot com or a comment below.
… I did anything to serve.
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