On this feast of St Melangell and of the Holy Wonderworker St John the Russian, we ask your prayers for Joseff as he journeys to Egypt, where he will be trekking down the Nile – continuing to Ethiopia and Addis Ababa.
We pray for God’s blessing and protection for Joseff and his companions, and hope that he will have the opportunity to visit some of the holy sites of Egypt, whose monasteries treasure the relics of the great ascetic fathers and mothers of the Church, and whose churches preserve the memory of the Holy Family in their Egyptian exile.
The greatest treasures of Egypt are not tombs, archaeological wonders and pharaonic artifacts, but the sites connected with Holy Family, its shrines and saints, and the Christian inheritance with which the land is still blessed, however threatened and tenuous Christianity may be in the shadow of Islamism.
May the great Abba Anthony, the Father of Monks, the fathers and mothers of the desert, the sainted patriarchs and hierarchs, St Minas, St Demiana and St Catherine and all the holy martyrs, and the myriad saints of Egypt, and of Ethiopia, bless and protect this journey and fill it with grace.
We pray that Joseff may travel in the knowledge of the great Josephs who sojourned in Egypt, after travelling there – Joseph, the son of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob, and Joseph the Betrothed, the guardain of the Infant-Saviour.