This past Saturday, the Coptic Orthodox Church celebrated the Feast of the Nayrouz—Coptic New Year. The Coptic calendar is based on one of the oldest calendars in civilization. My dear friend Maria Andrawis, who has worked with refugees and IDPs fleeing persecution, shares this beautiful piece reflecting on how different communities address persecution, and how this shapes who they are.

By Maria Andrawis

Here’s the thing about red dates, the quintessential symbol of Nayrouz – you can almost never find them outside of Egypt. So in order to celebrate Nayrouz today, in a country with virtually no other Copts, I decided to make something of the brown/yellow dates I had in the house. As I stood in my warm kitchen, clumsily sifting through and pitting dates that looked like the ones I’d learned about in my upbringing in the Coptic Orthodox Church, but were still quite different, they reminded me of the churches and communities such symbols represent, and the uniqueness of the Church I called home.

The story of Nayrouz and the Coptic Orthodox Church is a story of persecution. Having lived the past few years among persecuted communities, both Christian and non-Christian, that are not my own Coptic community, has taught me the (perhaps obvious) truth that not every persecution story is the same. Each community’s tale of hardship and resistance is different, and that has formed her children in different ways.

Some communities met persecution with violent resistance, taking up arms to stand up to their oppressors and seek out a better world for themselves in the land they inhabit. They may have succeeded in carving out their own homeland, but often at the cost of much death, destruction, and compromise that has perhaps clouded the initial cause. For others, their response was migration and displacement, moving every few generations to a new place and to another community where they would feel safe, and where they could live with their own as a majority in peace. In this instance, while the faith has remained, a people’s history and connection to its saints and heroes is often lost. Still more have held onto their sense of identity through the defiant carrying on of the language they speak, the clothes they wear, the foods they eat that distinguish them from those around them that would try to harm them.

As we celebrate the Coptic New Year today, I consider the path our ancestors have chosen. Our stories of violent resistance are scant, if any; migration and displacement are a relatively new phenomenon of the late 20^th century. We don’t have traditional ‘Coptic clothing’ or foods or language that distinguish us ethnically from those around us. Even the name, ‘Nayrouz’ is a cognate of an old Egyptian word and the Persian word for ‘new day,’ “Nawrouz.” It seems to me that, rather than fighting or fleeing, in response to persecution, we chose to stay where we were, giving up everything else – language, land, customs – except our faith, even if that meant death. Stranger still, we chose to not just commemorate those deaths, but celebrate them as something more – as the testimony to the eternal life we have in Christ, and the love we have for His Church that would make such a sacrifice worth the cost. We have looked at our persecution not as a tragedy, but as a source of joy for the eternal hope, and the identity we have here on earth.

In fact, our only inheritance as Copts is our faith, our Church and the saints who carried it with their blood throughout the millennia. We no longer speak our own language regularly, we don’t have a homeland where we are the majority anywhere. Very few of us know our history or culture that is not tied to our Church. It is those things that tie us to our Church that we have chosen to keep and pass on through the years, from one generation to the next, from one place to the next. I believe this has had a profound impact on who we are as believers.

As Copts, we have a strange love for our Church that is personal in a way I haven’t really seen in other communities, that makes us very protective of it and protected by it. There’s a familial bond that ties to us to our Church and faith that is stronger than any family or tribe to whom we may belong. And it is a tie that calls us to holiness and life with God above all else, even at the cost of our lives.

I do wonder as our Church has moved into this new phase of migration, and we have new generations who have never known persecution or discrimination, what will Nayrouz mean to them? What will such stories hold for them? I think that very much depends on those of us who have witnessed both worlds – who are familiar with, and perhaps even experienced, the cost that was paid to keep the faith and pass it on. How we use our inheritance will affect what inheritance there is for the next generation.

Now when we are no longer in a context of persecution, where such sacrifice is thrust upon us, I believe the best way we can keep our inheritance is to choose the sacrifice ourselves. Much like the monks and nuns who chose martyrdom in a different way after the time of persecution in Egypt by fleeing to the desert to die to the world, what would our lives looked like if we centered them around seeking sacrifice rather than lives of comfort and advancement?

I’m sure this sacrifice will look different for each person in person, and I’m not suggesting what it should be. But perhaps a way to discern it is whether it transforms us into those dates that we sing about and eat on this feast day: with an inner strength of faith that is steadfast in changing times, with a purity of heart and mind that is like our Father in Heaven, and fearlessness to give up something that is public, costly, and painful, as the martyrs did, recognizing it is this sacrifice that is our crown of glory.

So as I eat my date-flavored brownies on this Nayrouz, I thank God for all that He is, my Church that has brought me into a love with my Bridegroom, and the saints and generations before who have left us the inheritance of knowing where our true treasure lies.

Happy Nayrouz.