On Sunday afternoon we visited an icon artist’s studio.  We saw some beautiful images, two of them in the old style (I bought one of these which he called Axum style).  Micah loved this small cross-shaped icon that opens on one side to an image of the holy family going to Bethlehem and to the other which has the crucifixion.  I bought another icon too and we ordered a stone icon that we received a few days later.

    That night we went out for supper and traditional dancing.  The dancing started at 9:00 p.m.  It turned out to be a modern dance about chewing chat, a popular drug in East Africa, which we see all around us.

    Yesterday we went to the travel office to order tickets for flights within Ethiopia.  We went out for coffee after that and then we set off on a very long drive to Debre Libanos, a monastery established centuries ago below a hermit’s cave in a dark canyon that seems to be part of Africa’s massive system of rift valleys.  Teklahiminot (?) monk stood praying on one foot for years and years, even the image in the cave depicts him standing on one foot.

    Our family scampered quickly up the stone path through the cool shade trees up to the cave.  Fountains from the ceiling of the cave and nearby provide water that is collected to help heal people down the hill at the monastery.  Pilgrims come up to that cave to pray and to receive the priest’s blessing and to be splashed with holy water.  We did all of this.

    We wouldn’t spend as much time in the church down below as we wanted to.  Church worship was about to begin.  General Grazziani, Mussolini’s henchman, after an assassination attempt on his life killed something like 400 monks and then something like 200 deacons.  They then destroyed this church and monastery that had been at the center of Ethiopian piety for centuries.  The Italians killed four hundred lay people later who were worshipping at a special feast day and then buried them in a mass grave.

 

 

Leman, Ethiopia    2:00 p.m.

 

    We are sitting on a rooftop playing Crazy 8’s and watching a funeral liturgy off in the middle distance.  Rick Fabian, Scott, Donald, etc. are watching the groups of men and women as they dance in separate circles.  The women are beating their breasts and carrying a photograph of the departed.  The men carry a heavy coffin.  From this distance all of them seem so quick on their feet.  I think about the life they lost and they way this ritual expresses truth about their relation to each other and to God.

 

    But back to the monastery.  No women are allowed in, so Micah and I with the other men walked up from the road through the gate.  Imagine a dusty dry place with rusted tin buildings broken down (from Grazziani’s time probably).  There are 600 monks at a number of compounds around the church.  We saw one priest in probably the most glorious vestments I’ve ever seen and all the other monks pretty much were dressed in tattered clothing.  This is the compound where monks make the bread.  Usually in Ethiopia this is women’s work but here everything must be done by men.  Perhaps because this is such a low status job, we met tons of younger boys working in the smoke-filled shack.