But if I had known what was happening in Zeitoun in 1968, I believe even those six months would have felt long.
Not because love should be rushed, but because some moments in history are unmistakably time-bound. The reports from Zeitoun describe something that did not happen once and disappear, but returned again and again—beginning in the spring of 1968 and continuing, on and off, for several years. Night after night, sometimes multiple times a week, people gathered simply to wait. And what they waited for was not a message, not a demand, not a program—just presence.
In that other life, I imagine Kathy and me recognizing that clarity for what it was. We would have married simply, without delay, and gone to Zeitoun together. Not forever. Not dramatically. But deliberately. We would have stayed until the apparitions subsided, which would have meant quite a while. Long enough that the beginning of our marriage would be shaped not by hurry or ambition, but by patience, shared attention, and reverence.
What holds my imagination there is that Zeitoun was not experienced as a spectacle. It was experienced as something quietly real. People didn’t only come to look; many came burdened, tired, hurting. Alongside the widespread reports of the apparition itself, there were also reports of healings—physical and interior—spoken of almost incidentally, without fanfare. Some people claimed relief from long illnesses or disabilities after being present or after praying there. There was no system built to catalogue these things, no medical tribunal, no encouragement to advertise them. They seemed to occur the way grace often does: quietly, unexpectedly, without instruction.
That detail matters to me. It suggests that Zeitoun wasn’t about chasing miracles. It was about standing near something holy and letting whatever might happen, happen—or not. In that atmosphere, I can see Kathy and me learning early what marriage really asks of two people: to wait together, to hope without demanding, to receive without trying to control outcomes.
The scale of what happened there only deepens the seriousness of the choice. The crowds were not small. Tens of thousands gathered on ordinary nights; on peak evenings, estimates ran into the hundreds of thousands. Christians and Muslims stood side by side. Skeptics came. Journalists came. The events were photographed and filmed, and images were shown on Egyptian television, meaning the circle of witnesses extended far beyond those physically present. Even Egypt’s president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is widely reported to have taken an interest and to have witnessed the phenomenon himself, or at least to have investigated it closely. Whether every detail can be nailed down with documentation isn’t the point. What matters is that this was not hidden, not private, not marginal. It unfolded in full public view.
So when I imagine quitting college in that moment, I don’t imagine irresponsibility. I imagine choosing a different responsibility first. College is valuable, but it is not sacred. A career can be rebuilt, rerouted, delayed. But the chance to begin a marriage while grace was visibly at work in the world—shared, unforced, freely given—that is not something you can return to later by reading about it.
If I had known then what was happening at Zeitoun, I believe the wiser course would have been to shorten an already short engagement, marry the woman I loved, and place the first chapter of our life together where faith was not an abstraction, but something people gathered to witness in silence. We could have stayed as long as Mary stayed, and let that season quietly set the direction for everything that followed.
I don’t say this to diminish the life I lived. I say it because some opportunities are not about advancement, but about orientation. And if I had recognized that in 1968, I think I would have chosen Kathy, our marriage, and a season at Zeitoun—while the door was still open.
No comments:
Post a Comment