Why I Am Writing This
By Sam Metry
I was born into the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, from the first day of my life. I now live in the United States and practice my Christian faith as Greek Orthodox. I have stood in both Churches. I have confessed in both. I have received the Body and Blood of Christ in both.
That is not a boast and it is not a theological position. It is simply the fact that put this question in front of me and would not let it go.
How I was formed
Church every Sunday. Most of the seminars. A close relationship with Jesus Christ built through prayer, through fasting, and through what life did to me. I never sat in a room with Pope Shenouda, but I received discipleship from him through his teaching, and I count myself one of the many he formed at a distance.
And I have experienced God directly: not as an idea, but as answered prayer, twice, in the most important thing that ever happened to me.
What St Marina did for my family
My first wife and I tried to have children for more than ten years. We went to the doctors. Everything was checked. There was no clear reason. The only thing they found was that she needed a surgical correction to improve her chances, and we did it, and still there was nothing but miscarriage, or a false pregnancy, or an empty sac at two months. After ten years we had lost hope.
Then I watched a film about the life of St Marina. She was a teenage girl. She was tortured for her faith in Jesus Christ, repeatedly, over many days, and the tradition of her life says that each night, after they had finished with her, Christ came and healed her.
In the end the governor ordered her beheaded. The guard sent to kill her asked whether she wanted anything first. She asked for time to pray and to give thanks to our Lord. And in that prayer she made her petitions for everyone who would ask for her intercession after her, and among them, by name, the barren who have no children. The voice of our Lord answered her out of a wondrous light and granted her everything she had asked.
That is how it is written in the book of her life. The film I watched told it in a shorter form, as words spoken directly to her by Christ, and that is the form I carried in my heart when I prayed.
When I heard that, I prayed. I asked God, for the sake of St Marina, to let me have children.
He answered immediately. Two sons. They are twenty-one and twenty-three now, strong in the faith and doing well in life, and I love them beyond what I can write here.
Years later, in my second marriage, the same thing began again, miscarriage, empty sac, false pregnancy. This time I did not wait ten years. I prayed the same prayer, for the sake of St Marina. He answered immediately again. Two more sons, and then a daughter.
Five children. That is what I have instead of an argument.
And there is something in this that belongs to the whole purpose of this website. St Marina is honored in the Coptic Church and in the Greek Church alike. The saint who gave me my family is not on one side of our division. She never was. She is ours, together.
Where this account comes from. The promise is written in the Coptic booklet Excerpts from the Life of the Princess of Martyrs, Saint Marina, page 7, published by the Library and Spiritual Culture Committee of the ancient Church of the Virgin Mary al Mughitha and Saint George at Haret El Roum in Cairo, the church that holds her relics.
The short Synaxarium reading kept for her feast does not carry this part, which is why many people have never heard it. The Greek and Latin lives of the same saint also record a final prayer for those who would call on her, and it is the reason she has been asked for children and for safe childbirth in East and West for sixteen centuries. Her feast is kept on 23 Abib, 30 July, in the Coptic Orthodox Church, and on 17 July in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
I am almost sixty years old. What I know, I did not read. I lived it. That is the only qualification I claim, and it is why I think I am now permitted to teach what I have learned.
Why this became an obligation
When you get close to Christ, learning Him, obeying Him, you arrive at something He said that you cannot walk past:
“Go therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”
Matthew 28:19-20
That is not advice given to the eleven men who heard it. It was given to the Church, and the Church is us. It is an obligation, and I am under it.
Two things stand in the way of obeying it, and this website exists to attack both.
The first thing in the way: we are divided
I kept asking why we are not in communion. The answer is always one word (Chalcedon, monophysite, Cyril, Leo), delivered with enough weight that you do not ask again.
But read what the Coptic Church actually confesses about Christ, then read what the Greek Church actually confesses, then read what each has accused the other of confessing. The accusations do not match the confessions. Each family has spent sixteen centuries condemning a position the other also condemns.
And over that, the Cup is withheld.
Both are great Churches. Both are rich with miracles and with the presence of God. I have seen it in both. It is shameful that they are divided, and the thing dividing them is language.
The second thing in the way: we are not preaching
This is harder to say, and I am saying it about my own house, both halves of it.
Neither of our Churches is doing what Christ commanded about spreading the faith. We guard it beautifully. We hand it down within our own families and our own languages. We do not carry it outward. We are not growing our congregations by bringing in people who were not born into us, and we are barely trying.
And we are doing this in America: a country made of every nation on earth, with freedom of religion still standing. The nations Christ told us to go to have come to us. They live on our streets. We have been given the easiest version of the Great Commission in Christian history and we are not taking it.
That window will not stay open forever. We should move before it is too late.
Has a priest approved this?
No. And I want to say why, plainly, rather than let anyone guess.
I did not seek approval because I did not expect it to be given, and because I did not want what asking would turn this into. Laymen who have built websites teaching the faith have generally not been received as legitimate sources by the Church, whatever the quality of what they published. I did not want to spend this work fighting for a status I do not need and cannot be given.
But notice what that means, and I say it without accusation. The instinct that would refuse a project like this is the same instinct this site is asking about: the reluctance to speak outward, to explain ourselves in plain language, to let the faith be carried by anyone who has not been ordained to carry it. That reluctance was once wisdom, formed under persecution. In a free country it costs us the harvest.
So this is where I stand. I claim no approval, no blessing and no authority, and I say so on every page. I obey my own bishop and I am not building anything outside the Church. If a priest or a bishop of either family reads this and tells me I am wrong about something, I will examine it publicly and correct it if he is right, and I will publish the correction with his objection beside it.
That is not the same as approval, and I will not pretend it is. It is the most a layman can honestly offer.
Why I am not qualified, and why I am writing anyway
I am not a priest, a bishop, a monk or a scholar. I have no authority and I claim none. Everything on this site is submitted to the judgment of the Church, and if a bishop of either family corrects me I will examine it publicly and correct it if I am wrong.
But the Lord did not restrict His commands to the ordained. He told me to be reconciled with my brother before I bring my gift to the altar (Matthew 5:23-24). He told me that if I do not forgive, I am not forgiven (Matthew 6:15). He told me that the world would believe when we are one (John 17:21). He told me to go and make disciples (Matthew 28:19). Those commands were given to me, and I will answer for them.
And Scripture is not shy about who God tends to use:
“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty… that no flesh should glory in His presence.”
1 Corinthians 1:27-29
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). And: unless you become as a little child, you will not enter at all (Matthew 18:3).
God chooses the humble to shame the pride of men. That has always been His method, and it is the whole reason a layman is permitted to say any of this.
What I am not saying
I am not contradicting the Orthodox faith. The Orthodox faith is correct. I hold it entire.
I am disagreeing with one thing only: the point of disagreement between the Oriental and the Eastern Orthodox, which is a disagreement about language, not about God. The essence is the same in both. And I am insisting on one more thing: that where Christ has spoken clearly, His will settles the matter, whatever else has been built on top of it.
What I want
Not a movement, not a following, not an institution. A group of true believers, from both families, who will do three things:
- Pray every day for the unity of the Church of Christ.
- Fast for it, together, as the Church has always fasted when it needed mercy.
- And then go and make disciples, as He told us to, in the country He has put us in.
That is all. If God gives that, He can give the rest.