Borrowed Identity
It was our first humid day in Suva. We made the short energy sapping bus ride to the little church that we had so frequently seen on the DVD and in photographs. Our jovial camaraderie scorned the heat's best attempts to dampen the energy of our collective mood; this was after all our first trip to the church and we were eager to become a bigger part of what we were witnessing. Apart from the group and in my own modest way, I participated in our vibrant communal accord. A childhood spent alone on bus trips alone had left me accustomed to sitting quietly by myself. This maybe in some way modulated or even perhaps encouraged my introverted nature. I meditated within myself about what would be awaiting us upon arrival.
Sincere smiles of lowly locals greeted us at the church as we disembarked and began to soak in the surroundings. The church was located on the top of a small block of shops, one of which was the church’s second hand clothing store run by some of the locals. The church was very simple, made up from two or three small rooms adjoining the main worship area. As I entered the church, I was immediately struck by the minimalism of it all; the plywood iconostasis was mostly bare and undecorated but for a few mandatory icons painted in the Coptic style that had been fixed on to it. The church itself was also painted white; the only other feature that stood out in the church was the obligatory ostrich egg hanging from the main entry of the iconostasis.
The first thought that entered my mind was that overall this church was a blank canvas space waiting for its parishioners to fashion an image of Christ in it after their own lives and struggle just as the their benefactors had been fortunate enough to inherit.
If there was one thing that always confused me, it was what that funny looking egg thing. I know if that its an oddity to me, someone from a country like Australia whose national symbol is the Emu and sports a massive ostrich farming industry. But, it must look pretty out of place in a small church in the South Pacific where the biggest bird they had ever seen might be some kind of weird parrot. It might be something to do with modern life but symbols from nature don’t seem to mean a great deal to me as a city dweller like my forefathers who spent their lives working with the land in more simple and communal work. Spending with time with the Fijians I am however left with a strong sense that this is a people who are very much in touch with the environment that they live in.
I looked at the Coptic icons and I wondered what would happen if these icons were repainted in a style more akin to Fijian life. There is such a vibrant national devotion to preserving their native way of life on the part of the native locals, as well as the migrant lifestyle of the migrant Indians and Chinese. Each ethnic group has its own cultural life. On the part of the indigenous people, they have all kinds of symbols in nature that appear in artwork and national symbolism.
The Synexarion of the Coptic Church has in it the proudest tradition of possibly any church with regards to martyrdom and the church was obviously a huge hub for the development of monasticism. But as I look at the native people of Fiji, I feel a little bit like there is a different kind of focus that the natives have. The Celtic church, as an example of one has had clear influence from Coptic Christianity, are a people that have a strong love for nature and living with the land, their lives often based by the sea. And when they formed monastic communities inspired by the feats of the Egyptians before them, they did so in small island communities. The mission ethic of the Celtic Christians was huge as they evangelised not only the British isles but the greater nations that raided them from Nordic countries, encouraging them to leave their false gods for Christ.
I think that having grown up as a Copt and witnessing the identity that we’ve been handed, the lessons for this are more pertinent for us in Australia and establishing our own local identity than for the mission abroad. I think that it’s too easy for us to hide within the enclosures set up by multiculturalism rather than trying to grow your own Orthodox consciousness of the new country we’ve so rightly embraced. The ironic but most poignant point I can make on this is the case to people who feel most strongly attached to their own Orthodox identities because of the native language our fathers struggled for, the rich hymn tradition that is associated with it, and all of its great saints. It is certainly the right of Australians, Americans, Fijians and anyone to have a native tradition that they can be proud of like we are of our own.
