![with my voice to the lord i cried coptic reader with my voice to the lord i cried coptic reader](https://0.academia-photos.com/attachment_thumbnails/66191697/mini_magick20210406-23550-3zfjvo.png)
It never occurred to me until then that the believers of faiths outside of Christianity had the same reasons for believing in their faith as I did for believing in mine. When I entered university, I took a class called Faith and Critical Reasoning. I began asking myself questions about every concept I knew. The same faith that had remained so vibrant and unshaken throughout my years of Egyptian Orthodoxy showed signs of crumbling in a matter of months.
#WITH MY VOICE TO THE LORD I CRIED COPTIC READER FREE#
Issues of heaven, free will, politics, religious pluralism and exclusivism all had a name: Maspero. “They have their reward in heaven.” A fellow Sunday-school teacher said, “They should have rallied in front of the Lord instead of in front of people.” My mother simply said, “This was God’s plan.” Their answers, however, did not do justice to the nature of this injustice. Worst of all, 18 years of Christian education told me I had to love the men who drove the army tanks that flattened and crushed the bodies of those innocent youths. It was God who, at God’s disposal, could have prevented such a thing from happening. It was God who allowed these people to be born under an oppressive regime. It was God who ordained that these people be born in a developing country that recognized them as sub-par citizens. It was God who had formed these people in their mothers’ wombs. Each time I saw it I became angrier and angrier with God. National news networks aired the footage until they tired of it. Fourteen of them were crushed by military armored vehicles. The massacre resulted in the death of 27 Copts. Their crime: demonstrating against the government’s failure to provide protection and against the church attacks. The peace did not last long.Īs a senior in high school, I watched with my fellow church volunteers as Egyptian state forces ran over peaceful Coptic protestors with military vehicles. Proceeding past hostile Islamist crowds, a group of Copts had gathered to peacefully protest the destruction of a church in Aswan. It was October 2011 when the media released brutal footage of the Copt-led protests at the Maspero building, which houses the state-run Egyptian Radio and Television Union in the Egyptian capital. Months after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, then the president of Egypt, the air of the January 25 Revolution, as it is known locally, still hung thick in Cairo. Things changed after the Maspero attacks. I told myself I was going to become a deaconess. That was all I knew and that was all I needed and I was content.
![with my voice to the lord i cried coptic reader with my voice to the lord i cried coptic reader](https://www.themumblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kipper.jpg)
I believed in God and the four walls of my room and my parents and my friends. Our parish priest was a great inspiration of mine. My mother was an unswerving volunteer at the Coptic Orthodox church, and I was a Sunday-school teacher throughout my teen years.