Hypothesis #1: We tend to notice most those faults in others from which we ourselves suffer.

This thought first struck me in High School, when a teacher pointed out that when you point the finger at someone else, you are simultaneously pointing your other three fingers at yourself (try it now if you don’t believe me. Just be careful who you pointing at, though). The message being, of course, that I am likely to be three times as guilty as the person I criticise, but am blissfully unaware of the fact. Oddly enough, I have found this principle to run pretty true, for myself at least. Yes, I am most frustrated by people who cut me off in the middle of a sentence. It really bugs me. Then one day I noticed that I do it all the time. Hmmm. Then I began noticing the principle in action in others. Being a priest, I get to hear people complain about lots of things. Such as, “I can’t believe how my wife goes around complaining about me to everyone!” Or this beauty: “I’m not wasting my time with Bill anymore and I’m not going to lower myself to his level. He’s impatient, and he’s a snob”. Yep. Even the best of us do it. Which brings me to another lesson I’ve learned:

Hypothesis #2: No one is infallible (with apologies to Roman Catholic readers )

I used to think otherwise. I clearly recall a sort of yearning, an innocent childhood fantasy that one day I would meet someone who was perfect. I don’t mean Miss Right, I mean someone on whom I could model my own personality, an ideal character, one who knew the right thing to say and do in every situation and always acted with sagacity and grace. Needless to say, potential candidates sooner or later disqualified themselves by revealing the selfish / cruel / stupid side of their nature. I still recall the deep and coldly bitter pain of these disappointments. Eventually of course I realised, as we all do, that no one is in fact perfect.

Then there was the period where I was going to be the first one to attain perfection. After all, I had the blueprint for perfection in my head, right? I knew how a perfect person should act. How hard could it really be? Those guys just didn’t try hard enough, or didn’t know enough. Well, I’m still trying, but I have to tell you that the older I get, the further I feel from perfection. And the more I fail, the more regard I feel for those fallen heroes of my youth who did, after all, quite a lot better than I have ended up doing, personality-wise. Maybe I was wrong to criticise them in my disappointment?

Hypothesis #3: People who are less critical of others tend to be a bit happier in life than people who are very critical of others.

Then again I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t wasting my time searching for the perfect person. Better to just do my best with what I’ve got and enjoy life. Again, experience would seem to bear this out. If you can keep your smile when all around you are angry, then you’re probably not critical. There are people who prove the adage “ignorance is bliss” daily by going about their affairs peacefully, apparently blind to the faults of others. It’s not that they can’t see those faults, mind you. More that they choose not to let them bother them.

Sometimes I have suffered from the delusion that as soon as I point out to this other person their fault, they will immediately raise a finger in the air and declare, “Why that’s it! That’s the very thing that has been making my life miserable all these years. How could I have missed it? And thank you, O thank you so much for pointing it out to me! I am eternally in your debt!” Needless to say, this has never happened to me in real life. So why waste my time, my breath and my blood pressure?

Of course, this principle has its limits. A bit of healthy criticism might well be well placed for a thug who’s mugging a little old lady as you walk by. Perhaps, one may even be justified in giving one’s criticisms a somewhat physical expression by way of intervening. But by and large, most people’s failings really have very little effect on me or on anyone else. If anything, it is the failings-owner him/herself that suffers most from their own failings, which is no business of mine. So why bother? Why get myself tied up in knots over something I can’t change anyway?

Hypothesis #4: Those who are most critical of others tend to be those who are least accepting of criticism, and contrariwise.

I think of this as a sort of litmus test for how critical a person is. Tell a person they are too critical of others, sit back, and watch their reaction. If they start criticising you for criticising them, that sort of proves your case. If they sit back and carefully consider if you are right, you can probably jump in and apologise for saying something about them that is so obviously not the case. It’s not foolproof, but it illustrates this hypothesis. Being overly critical is a kind of self-perpetuating condition. The one who suffers from it maintains their mindset by excessively criticising anyone who criticises their excessive criticism.

Or am I being too critical?

Fr Ant

Last Night’s CCP Meeting was on the question of evolution. An intriguing and often highly emotional topic, it is one of those areas where, supposedly, science and fatih clash.

I’ve been doing a little bit of reading on the topic lately, and I have found there are a few conclusions that I think one is safe to draw about the current state of affairs. Please allow me to share them with you.

1. Evolution as a scientific theory is elegant, relatively simple, and in many ways quite a beautiful concept, if you look at it from a purely scientific point of view.

2. Looked at against the wider background of our existence, it can be a very ugly concept. I have no doubt whatsoever that some of the worst atrocities committed by humans in the past century were justified, whether consciously or subconsciously, by an evolutionary world view. Hitler’s purification of the German race is an attempt to take control of evolution. What gave him the right to do so? Because he was the “Fittest” and it is the fittest who should survive. The deaths of millions in the gas chambers is no more than the necessary by product of this law of nature, and we should not weep over it. Or so he thought.

3. Evolution still has many gaping holes. We started to look at some last night but time constraints meant we had to leave the rest for another session. Chief among the unresolved issues are the incredible probabilities against putting together DNA in the right sequence merely by chance, the vexed question of how the first life could possibly have arisen, and the lack of any sensible mechanism for the introduction of new genes into an organism’s genome. There are more, but these are my favorites.

4. Even if one day it should become apparent that evolution is the true cause of life on Earth beyond a shadow of a doubt, I cannot see how this would affect our faith. The Bible is interested in telling us what God did. How He did it is really His concern, and although we get a glimpse, we must not expect to be able to understand His ways. I still can’t understand how my mechanic diagnoses and fixes problems in my car, much less the mechanism of the Creation of the whole Cosmos! But to me, if the universe really can produce life all by itself, naturally and without any supernatural input, that would be an even greater miracle. I might be able to get some wood together and build a chair. Sure it would take some time, and it would probably wobble, but I think I could do it. What I don’t think I could do is build a machine that builds chairs without any help from me. Now that’s hard! So if God built a universe that can produce life without any supernatural input from Him, that would be a far greater miracle than if He had built each species individually.

5. There is, however, the case of microevolution as opposed to macroevolution. Macroevolution involves one species evolving into another species, and as such requires whole new genes to be inserted into the organism’s genetic code. There simply is no known mechanism for this to happen in most cases, and there does not seem to be any possibility for us finding one. But Microevolution involves the slightest fiddling with the existing genetic code, such as that which produces a tall or a short person, the colour of your eyes, or the resistance of bacteria against an antibiotic. Microevolution is implied in the Bible since all the different races of humans in the world are descended from just one family of eight people (Noah’s family). Clearly, all the variations between races must have arisen by a mechanism such as microevolution. But there is no evidence that I can see that can overcome the need for whole new genes in macroevolution.

6. Many people accept or reject evolution for reasons other than the actual science. If you want there not to be a God, you can use evolution as way of supporting your case that He didn’t have to be around to make us. And equally, if you want there to be a God, you can find the many, many holes there are in the theory of evolution. So how can one come to a genuinely objective Truth? I’m not sure anyone can. I admit freely that I am biased. I believe in God, for many other reason, and so I come to the evolution question expecting God to be a part of the true answer. And I find more than enough evidence to fulfil that expectation. But the fact is that the jury still out. Evolution is not fact, not macroevolution, anyway. So until we find unavoidably compelling evidence one way or the other, I suppose people will continue to choose their side on the basis of other factors.

7. I don’t think we should be ‘afraid’ of evolution. Sometimes Christians speak as though there was a demon called evolution, and we must not dabble with evil spirits, so stay right away! But evolution is not a demon, it is an idea, and ideas have no personalities or motivations. They can be right or wrong, they can tend towards causing evil or good, but in the end, they are just ideas. I think it is good for a Christian to understand the concept of evolution well, and to also be aware of all its shortcomings.

In the final analysis, our understanding of our universe is constantly changing, constantly being updated as new information becomes available. Personally, I suspect that in a few hundred years’ time the theory of evolution will have been replaced by some other explanation that we cannot even imagine today, much as Gallileo could not possibly have anticipated quantum physics.

But I don’t think I’ll be around to see it. Then again, by then I will be occupied with far more important things…

Fr Ant

www.stbishoy.org.au

Helping my son in Year 10 with his Science homework can be a bit of a brain strain for an ageing parent! But he recently pointed something out to me I thought was quite beautiful. It has to do with the way our skin protects us from the dangerous radiation of the sun.

The pigment that gives your skin its colour is a chemical called melanin. The cells in your skin that make melanin are called melanocytes or pigment cells. Built in to this system is a parable of our salvation…

You see, when you are exposed to ultraviolet light, when you spend a day at the beach without sunscreen for example, the ultraviolet radiation damages your skin cells. Especially, it breaks down the DNA inside them, the genetic “machinery” that runs every cell in our bodies. Now DNA is made up of number of smaller molecules, the ‘bricks’ as it were from which it is constructed. When the UV radiation breaks it down, the bricks get scattered about. One of those bricks is a chemical called Thymine (this is different to the vitamin called Thiamine).

There are many things that can stimulate a pigment cell to make more melanin, and guess what? One of them is Thymine! So when the scattered Thymine meets the pigment cell, it switches on the melanin factory, and melanin production is speeded up. This melanin is transported up nearer the surface of the skin where it acts as a shield against UV light (that’s why dark skinned people hardly ever get sunburnt – they have heaps of melanin in their skin). The skin gets darker, you get a suntan, and the rest of the skin cells are protected from the lethal UV radiation.

So in essence, the dying skin cell, the one destroyed by the UV radiation, gave its life in order to save the rest of its fellows from suffering the same fate.

Isn’t that a beautiful parable of the love that Jesus showed us in dying for us that we might not suffer eternal death? Isn’t it a beautiful illustration of the kind of love that the Christian should live every day, sacrificing him/herself for others? And it’s built right into us.

Dare I say … it is a message that really gets under your skin …

(sorry)

Fr Ant

I have been granted a privilege in being invited to take part in a series of interviews on Aghape TV. But I wonder if I may have gotten myself into trouble last night … you be the judge.

The topic of discussion was the challenges of the next 50 years for the Coptic Church in the Western world. Among many other challenges, I suggested to my genial and longsuffering interviewer that one of the challanges was going to be the clash between cultures in the area of how we do things in the Church.

In Egypt or Sudan, Christians are forced into certain practices just to survive. These practices might include bargaining a price down vehemently, negotiating ruthlessly to gain some sort of advantage in a contract, using contacts and influential friends to get things done, misrepresenting the truth in order to achieve a worthy goal, or the ever popular “koussa” (zucchini), a popular euphemism for a small bribe paid to attain a certain goal. People are driven to these practices, often just to survive, or to maintain their sanity.

I recall the true story of a relative in Egypt who was shuffled from government department to government department for the better part of an afternoon, trying to get some document signed and stamped. At the last office, a minor functionary told him that the office that was authorised to stamp his document was in fact not in Cairo, but in Alexandria, and that he would have to take it there. With some frustration he travelled to Alexandria the next day, only to endure another day of being shuffled from office to office, and finally be told that he had actually come to the wrong place. The right place was definitely the department he had started in in Cairo!

I don’t think I could survive in such a climate. The men in white coats would certainly be called on to deal with my reactions! So I have a great deal of sympathy for those who resort to a little ‘greasing of the palm’ to maintain their sanity, so long as they are simply getting what any sane society would normally take for granted, rather than trying to get some unfair or undeserved advantage or causing loss to another person.

The problem for us stems from any attempts to apply these strategies to how we do things in Church, and especially in Church in the Western world. I can see no place whatsoever for such practices within the Church, whether in Egypt, Sudan or Australia. Within the Church the love, compassion and trust of Christ should and must prevail, or else we are no different to those who without Christ. This is a very serious issue, and cuts to the very heart of who we are as Christians. Keep in mind that the Lord Christ reserved His harshest condemnation for those who were hypocrites, the Pharisees and scribes, for example, for although they possessed the knowledge of the truth, they practiced a lie by not being faithful to it.

What compounds the problem for us is that young Copts who have grown up with the Western sense of right and wrong are often seriously offended when they see their elders employing Egyptian-style tactics to get things done. Who of us with first generation parents has not at some time or other cringed when the parent they went shopping with insisted on bargaining down the fruitshop man to get a discount on the mangoes? Who of us has not been infuriated when the Coptic tradesman promised solemnly on his mother’s grave that he would be there first thing on Monday morning … two weeks ago?

But when it comes to employing these methods within the Church, that is something altogether more serious. The work of God must be done in accordance to the laws of God, and young Copts know this: they are not stupid. What is more, they see other Aussies, non-Copts and even non-Christians who are quite capable of living their lives happily without the need for lying or seeking unfair advantage or using contacts to gain advantage over others. So when they see people within the Church, even servants within the Church doing such things, they begin to question the Church that produced such people. If those people are respected within the Church community, that makes things even worse, for that means that their way of doing things is accepted and even honoured.

This creates a conflict in the mind of the youth that is very difficult to resolve. Does she stick to her principles, or to her Church?

To me it seems horrendous that our Church should ever subject its youth to such a dilemma. I recall with anxiety the words of Christ:

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble , it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42)

All of us who serve in any capacity whatsoever in the Church have a very serious responsibility to ensure that what we do is not just the right thing, but also done in the right way. If we in the Church are unable to adhere to the most basic ideals of honesty and integrity, how can we expect our congregation to do so in their own personal affairs, as is compulsory for the authentic Christian?

As Copts in Australia, we have the opportunity to pick out the best of both our cultures, Egyptian and Australian, and discard the worst of both cultures. There are many beautiful aspects of Egyptian culture that can enrich our lives, such as the warm and generous tradition of hospitality to others, the closeness and mutual support within the family unit, among many others. But the practices listed above seem to me to be quite clearly in the ‘worst’ category, and certainly, they are not in harmony with the words of the Bible that we all revere.

So what do you think. Am I going to get in hot water?

Fr Ant

Change dominates our lives. I wonder sometimes if it was always so, or whether we happen to live in an age in which change has particularly accelerated? More likely, the latter.

As a child, water was never in your thoughts – it was something to be used when needed, and wasted happily – how could we ever run out of water??? There was no need to worry about switching off unused lights. It was cheap, and it didn’t do anyone any harm. Big cars were all the rage, never mind the amount of petrol you burned up, or the tons of fumes you spouted out – the earth was big enough to deal with them. No need to lock your doors or close your windows when you went out. Toys and bicycles left on the front lawn for days would still be there when you needed them. And you could pick up a hitch hiker by the road without fear for your life. Kids roamed the suburban streets alone, played in public parks and went to public toilets on their own.

It sounds like another planet.

Today, out lives are taken up far more with technology, which makes wonder too. Technology is a good thing to have, but when you have something, do you really have to use it? Just because it’s there? Someone was joking recently about being addicted to their navigator. Sure, it’s a novelty at first, and then the convenience of it makes it quite useful, but at what price? What price do we pay for our technology addictions?

1. The brain loses skills. Why work out a sum in your head when a calculator can do it for you?
2. The body loses health. Why walk when you can hop in a car to get there?
3. The spirit loses life. Why think of the unseen world when there is so much to interest you in the seen one?

That is certainly a change I have noticed over the years, not least in myself. It can take quite a degree of will power to say, “Stop! I know the technology can do it faster / cheaper / easier, but it isn’t just a matter of getting it done. It’s also a matter of doing. And it is in the doing that I as a human being grow and develop, whether in mind, body or spirit.

I recall HH Pope Shenouda III commenting once on the criticism that today’s Coptic monks live a life of luxury compared to the days of the ancient desert Fathers. Today, they have a nice bed in their cells, a sink with running water (hot and cold). glass windows, and so on.

His response was, yes, that’s true, for this is the way of life from which they have come. But that doesn’t stop the individual monk from choosing to live an ascetic life. He can fill up one jug of water in the morning and make that his ration for the whole day, just as an ancient Father would fill up his jug from the spring in the morning and have to make do with it for the whole day. He can desert his bed and sleep on the floor. He can leave his windows open.

Our life isn’t only the environment we live in, but what we make of that environment, how we use it. Yes, our environment has changed. It has become more crowded, more insecure, more complicated. But that doesn’t mean that our lives have to follow the same trend.

Think about it…

GBU

Fr Ant