Ms. Elissa Bjeletich: And welcome to Everyday Orthodox! It is November 15, 2020, and we are live on Ancient Faith Radio! I’m Elissa Bjeletich, and I’m so excited that you are here with us tonight. You know, we get together here every Sunday night just to build community through conversation. The Orthodox Church is huge; it’s massive. There are so many Orthodox people, and Orthodox people are so interesting. Many of us here in the new world came over from faraway lands, or our parents or grandparents did, and there are always interesting stories associated with that; and of course a lot of us converted from other faiths, so we found some paths to Orthodoxy, and all of our paths are a little bit different; all of our life stories are a little bit different.

What’s more, we Orthodox people, we worship in different languages, we worship in different jurisdictions, we answer to different bishops, and so sometimes there could be Orthodox people right next door to you, and you don’t even know it, because they go to a different Orthodox church and you’ve never had a chance to meet them. So I just think it’s so great that we can get together here on Ancient Faith Radio every Sunday night and get to know another Orthodox person. It’s going to be people who are in different jurisdictions or different parts of Orthodoxy, and they live in different parts of the country or whatever. Whatever it is, you’re going to meet someone new and exciting every week. I’m excited, because that means I get to meet someone new and exciting every week, so for me it is a special joy.

But you are welcome to join us. You’re welcome to join the conversation and call in with questions, as we are live here tonight. The number is 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi is here tonight engineering the program, and she’ll be taking your calls. We are just so excited to have you, and we’re very excited about tonight’s guest, because anyone who has followed any of my work, the Raising Saints blog, there was a time when this book came out when I was just constantly talking about it because I was totally obsessed with it. It is so cool! Our guest wrote this book called Anastasis: The Harrowing of Hades, and we’ll be talking about it later. He’s written other books as well.

His name is Michael Elgamal, and he is a Canadian-Egyptian artist. He has this company, Creative Orthodox—website’s creativeorthodox.com—and he digs for examples of virtue in the lives of ancient Christian saints, the lives of the Desert Fathers, all kinds of beautiful, beautiful old stories, and he just brings them back to life in ink and color. He’s an illustrator and a writer, so they’re graphic novels. For those of us who have maybe teenage kids or preteens who really respond so much more to graphic novels, Michael’s work is going to be pretty valuable to you, but really for all of us. I mean, I can read real books, but gosh these are good. They are real books, and they are illustrated, and they’re beautiful, and they’re so simple and elegant, and I just love it.

He actually has a blog online where he shares all kinds of his really cool—as he says they hang in an awkward balance between ancient Christian art and childish scribbles. [Laughter] It is true, though; there is something between the ancient and the modern and all of it coming together in Michael’s work that is very exciting. So without any further ado, I’m very excited to introduce Michael Elgamal. Welcome to the program, Michael.

Mr. Michael Elgamal: Thank you so much, Elissa. I’m really excited for our conversation tonight.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, I’m so excited, and I know that you and I have emailed here and there, back and forth, but I’m really glad to get a chance to sit down and talk to you and get to know you a little bit more, because truly I absolutely love your work and I’m just always so blown away by it and I’m so excited about it. Okay, let’s get started at the beginning. Now, I just said that you were Canadian-Egyptian, which is a phrase that I have hardly ever heard before. Maybe that phrase has never once come out of my mouth before, I’m going to admit. Tell me a little bit about your background.

Mr. Elgamal: It’s a unique combination.

Ms. Bjeletich: It is! It is. You’re in Canada now, but you started in Egypt, right? Were you born in Egypt?

Mr. Elgamal: Mm-hmm, yeah, I was born in Egypt and actually moved to Canada when I was 15 years old, so I was born Coptic Orthodox in Egypt in Cairo in the quieter part of the city—yes, there is a quite part of Cairo—but it was still an hour away from the pyramids. So, yes, I spent the first 15 years of my life in Egypt and then came here to a small town called Kitchener in Canada.

Ms. Bjeletich: Wow. Now, I mean, that’s a huge shift, so we’ll have to get to that in a minute, but tell me about the time in Egypt. I know that now in Egypt there is so much persecution of the Coptic Orthodox Christians there. You see in the news in Cairo, we’ll see priests being slaughtered—may their memory be eternal, and may they pray for us—and of course, famously, we had the 21 who were killed on the beach a few years ago. There are a lot of martyrs coming out of Egypt right now, which actually in some ways is interesting, I think, an interesting thing for us here, far away in the new world, that it really makes us, I think, Eastern Orthodox Christians, feel a real affinity and love for the Coptic Christians, which maybe is a blessing coming out of that, this brotherhood that comes out of it as we see that suffering and both pray to the martyrs for their assistance for us, and also we pray for everyone in Egypt.

Tell me, when you were growing up in Egypt, was it like that? Is that new? How has it been there?

Mr. Elgamal: It’s definitely worse in some areas, like in southern Egypt, or upper Egypt actually. Persecution is a lot, a lot worse. But where I was, it was felt on a very subtle level, so like when we were in school, for example, for religious class, we wouldn’t sit in class; we, all the Orthodox and Christian children from all the classes, would sort of leave all the different classes, go together, and we would sort of go and try to find a room; if we can’t, we’d just sit in a field and have our class. Like, there are very subtle examples that made it salient. Another one is if we’re in a taxi, for example, like we wouldn’t use our Christian names; we would use neutral names, so it wouldn’t give it away, so we wouldn’t get overcharged. There are a couple of subtle things, and almost when you see someone else who’s Christian, you feel like you’ve found a friend and it suddenly becomes something really cool.

For me as a child, from my perspective, I didn’t… I mean, there were moments in my life where that persecution was obvious, but even as a child it didn’t register as something outrageous. I remember in school, at some point, I was spat on for being Christian, but again, for a child, it was just that was someone being mean. It didn’t register as an injustice or something out of the ordinary. But honestly, now that I’m living in Canada, I’m looking back, and it almost feels like a positive, because we had a very strong sense of identity. We knew that we are different. We knew that we have to behave differently because we are different. We are a different people, we have different names, different traditions. We have our saints to look up to. So it really helped us know that Christians should be something different, should behave differently. I’m almost missing that here in Canada and here at this time, because everything is sort of melding together, and finding our identity in Christ has become sort of difficult.

Ms. Bjeletich: I think it’s an interesting thing to think about because certainly here in the States there’s a lot of, I don’t know, thinking about whether Christians will be persecuted here. Some of it—do we say, “Merry Christmas” at Target?—it’s like, well, whatever. But of course you look at a culture where people really are persecuted, and it is sobering and it is calming. But I think that it’s also a really interesting thing that you point out, that there is a way that when you have that contrast between your community and the community around you, that it solidifies that Orthodox identity in a way that maybe… There are pluses and minuses to everything, aren’t there? It’s kind of fascinating. It’s interesting.

Mr. Elgamal: Absolutely.

Ms. Bjeletich: So you’re living in a quiet part of Cairo, and you’re going to school obviously at a mixed school. What was it like in your neighborhood, what was it like growing up—what does it look like to grow up in Cairo? It’s a hard question, because I don’t know enough about Cairo to be more specific! [Laughter] But I guess that would be the question: What do you think is the difference between growing up there and growing up in Canada?

Mr. Elgamal: These are hard questions, and here’s why, and I think is actually going to… Like, this answer is not going to answer the question, but it’s going to give you insight on why it’s a hard question for me to answer. We moved when I was 15 years old. At that point I had a group of friends from church, the same friends I was with at school, so it was the same church group: again, this strong identity. It was a Christian group who… We all went to the same church, we all went to the same school, and I grew up with them for 14 years.

After we moved to Canada and sort of after losing all of that, I feel like the emotional burden of it on little teenage Michael caused me to actually, in a way, bury these memories, or sort of not engage with them often, because it was this sort of thing that’s behind me that I can’t connect with as easily. So that’s why it’s hard for me to remember concrete examples from my childhood, because to cope after moving, for me, it was sort of easier to not think about it.

Ms. Bjeletich: And I think that’s probably not a universal immigrant experience, but I think there are certain personalities that do that. I mean, in a smaller sense I’ve moved around the United States, and whenever I move I sort of embrace the new place and kind of dislike the old place for no reason. [Laughter] It’s that protection, right? You’ve got to protect your heart and maybe not dwell on the pain of what you’ve lost. That makes sense. That very much makes sense. Was it a big culture shock, at 15, to come to Canada? What’s Kitchener like? Is it… it’s not as busy as Cairo, I imagine, but was it as quiet as your neighborhood?

Mr. Elgamal: Well, no… but actually, yeah, Kitchener’s pretty quiet. Toronto, to me, is more like Cairo, and it’s an hour away, so it’s almost the same set-up as my childhood. But actually, culture shock-wise, it wasn’t the case. Throughout my life, God in one way or another always prepared me for the next step, almost like years before. So, for example, as a child, I loved stories, I loved superheroes. I was the typical little boy. I loved superhero stories, Batman, Superman. And I feel like, as a kid, I was sort of Westernized to a point where I didn’t feel like I completely fit in with my friends in Egypt. When I was young I used to listen to rap music, and that’s why I don’t have the heaviest accent. When I came here it wasn’t the biggest shock, because I had all these experiences before that prepared me for that move. Culturally, I actually think if I were here as a child I would have fit in more than I did in Cairo.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh wow. That is really interesting. You know what? I’ve known a lot of people who’ve moved around that age, and I’ve never heard anybody say that. I think that’s kind of handy. I mean, that means it was probably a lot less traumatic for you than it so often is for people. How about the rest of your family? Did they pretty easily adjust and adapt to Canada? Do your parents speak good English and they have no problem getting jobs and stuff like that, or was it really difficult?

Mr. Elgamal: Yeah, they speak really good English, and they’re both pharmacists, so they didn’t… They had to and they still work really hard to this day and especially during the pandemic. Like every day it’s a scare, I’m expecting to get a call saying my father, God forbid, came in contact with COVID. But I think for them—and I have a sister who is four years older than I am—I think the move was harder on them and her, her for the same reason for losing friends, but even more, I think. I was in a place… To give you an idea of where I was mentally at the time: I was a teenager, but for the first month that we were here, we stayed at our cousin, and I didn’t realize that we had moved. I just thought we were visiting Canada like we did before and we were going to go back after a month.

For me, my mind was dealing with it in this twisted way that it shielded me, but in a way that I didn’t just refuse to understand or wrap my head around what was happening. For my sister, she was older so it hit harder, and it took a little while for her to actually emotionally come around and see it as a blessing. For my parents—and I think this is universal for all immigrant families—they sacrificed so much for us to be here. They sacrificed their friends, their lifestyle, life-long friendships. There’s nothing I think that can compare to that sacrifice. It’s a lot.

Ms. Bjeletich: Absolutely. So you came over to Kitchener. You had family there. Was there a Coptic church there already? Was there a built-in Egyptian community to fit into?

Mr. Elgamal: Yes, and that’s again part of what—going back to God’s plan—Kitchener was perfect. There is a big, relatively big, Coptic community in Kitchener, and God had prepared, again, a group of friends who with no sort of prerequisites sort of accepted me, and those are the friends that I’ve known since then, sort of accepted me among them. Honestly, throughout my life, I think, the most impressive thing is that God kept me in the faith despite my best efforts to not be. Like, I did not make it easy. Every step of the way I think I would just try to find a way to get distracted, but God sort of put these place-holders or these pieces in place to keep me in the faith, and I believe that the community in Kitchener and my friend group in Kitchener were one of those pieces that kept me close to church.

Something that actually melds both questions that we had talked about is when I was in Egypt, I… My family is, I would say for lack of a better word, religious. So my father’s grandfather was a priest, my grandmother’s brother was a monk, my father and my mother both served very regularly at church. That’s the environment that we grew up in. For me, as a child, I sort of did it because that was the culture, that was the norm, that’s where my family was, always at church. My dad was presenting something or teaching something, so I’m just on the sidelines watching it happen. It was never… I feel like that’s the case with a lot of cradle Orthodox, is that it was never my choice; it was never something that I grew into out of my own effort. It was sort of: this is given and this is my environment, and it was just happening.

So I did everything, but when I moved to Canada and I lost my friends, it became very obvious to me that I actually had just gone to church for that reason, for the friends, because it was the thing to do, because it was the routine. So I remember—and this was actually a very hard time, I guess, in my parents’ life, not in mine—but every Sunday I wouldn’t want to go to church. I felt that loss. I lost the… I guess again a little kid dealing with the grief of losing their previous life or whatever, so I just refused to go to church. And every Sunday, again with tears, they would argue with me and say, “You have to go to church. Just go to Liturgy and come back. If you want to go to Sunday school after that, if you don’t want to go, it’s fine.” Every Sunday, and I don’t know for how long it stayed, but it was a huge issue for them, obviously, trying to deal with me.

It’s funny, when I said God finds, always puts pieces in place to bring me back. I had started receiving texts, and I think they were from Egypt, because they were dated, like, tomorrow, so I would receive the texts and the day would be from the day after, and it would be verses… And, again, I was at a point in my time when I wasn’t reading the Bible. I refused to go to church every Sunday; I was sort of done with what was. And the verses would be encouraging; the verses would have a lot to do with what I’m going to deal with the day that they’re dated, and it kept happening, and I don’t know… the number was never… It was an unknown number. But it was just a fun little way… Like after it happened I looked… I didn’t think anything when it was happening; I was like, “Oh, verse of the day. That’s cool.”

Ms. Bjeletich: [Laughter] It didn’t… Yeah, stranger in Egypt… A mysterious, unnamed Egyptian…

Mr. Elgamal: Absolutely.

Ms. Bjeletich: It was probably someone you knew, right?

Mr. Elgamal: And picking the best verses.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s kind of neat. That’s amazing.

Mr. Elgamal: And then it kept me, again, engaged, and at some point the group of friends here in Kitchener started to embrace me and I started falling in love with the Church once more. It was actually through midnight praise, because I love music as well, and so that’s what… Again, praise and song is what got me excited again about church, and then it just spiraled from there.

Ms. Bjeletich: When you say “midnight praise,” is that a specific service that you do in the Coptic Church that I don’t know about? Because I want to do that. What is that?

Mr. Elgamal: Yes, yes. It’s a group of… It’s just like that. It’s a group of hymns or praises, ancient praises, that we sing, and they are so beautiful. There is such deep theology in them. I’m really terrible at explaining the rites of specifically midnight praise or the order of things, but it’s so beautiful. Google it. Look it up. It is incredible.

Ms. Bjeletich: I am going to have to do that, because that sounds really neat.

Mr. Elgamal: There are daily hymns. Some are on the name of Christ, some are for the Theotokos, some are specifically for the different saints. It’s incredible.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that’s beautiful. I’m going to have to find a recording of that and play it for myself in the middle of the night. I like that.

Mr. Elgamal: I’ll send you one.

Ms. Bjeletich: Please do! Please do, send me a good one. But that’s really neat. I love that, too. It’s so encouraging: I’m a parent; I have five kids. And at different times, different ones don’t want to go to church, and it’s difficult. It’s not just you. It happens with a lot of kids, and as parents you kind of hang in there and you struggle with it. I don’t want to be… You don’t exactly want to force them, because you don’t want them to associate church with force, but on the other hand, they’re going to go. [Laughter]

So it’s all very difficult, so it’s encouraging to hear that, over time, everything fell back into place for you. In fact, it’s interesting, too, that your rejection of church wasn’t necessarily really a rejection of church; it was more about Egyptian culture and now being in Canada and what that meant to you and what you could keep and what you could not keep. I think that’s very interesting. I think that it’s very often more complicated than that. So that’s helpful for all the parents listening. Note to self: just keep them coming, try to find someone in Egypt to send them some good texts, and it will all be fine. [Laughter] That is amazing.

Okay, so you grew up, then… When was it that you came back to the faith? Was that later in high school, was that in college? When was it with the midnight services and the excitement coming back for you?

Mr. Elgamal: It was gradual, and it was very organic. Again, the group of friends, the friends whom I would hang out with—and we did go to the same school, again—the friends I would hang out with, do all the fun stuff with, are the same ones who, for example, every January when it’s the feast of the great St. Antony, they are the ones who would come together, read his entire Life, do midnight praise, and keep that feast year to year. They are the ones who go on retreats at church. They are the ones whenever we get together we talk about the fun stuff, we talk about all the crazy stuff, and then we talk about Christ. So for me it wasn’t almost like a Sunday school lesson. That’s not the way that I started getting engaged. It was just because people that I loved loved Christ, people that I loved loved St. Antony, so I naturally started loving Christ, I naturally started loving St. Antony.

Ms. Bjeletich: Isn’t that beautiful? We’re saved in community, one more time. We all carry each other in the body of Christ. That is really profound and very beautiful.

So then you’re slowly falling back into loving the Church, you’re developing these beautiful relationships that’ll be ongoing in your life. What did you end up doing when you finished high school? Were you able to stay in the same place? Did you move somewhere else? What ends up? Where’d you go?

Mr. Elgamal: I’m naturally a homebody, and again I think… I’m so lucky to be in this community, have this group of friends, and so thankfully stay in the same place. I graduated with a marketing degree, and now I work in marketing. It’s sort of like story-telling, so it’s all still in the same place.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s neat. So whom do you do marketing for? Are you working in-house at a company or a marketing firm, or what are you doing?

Mr. Elgamal: No, I do marketing for Sun Life, the insurance company.

Ms. Bjeletich: Ah, excellent. Very nice, very nice. Do you like it?

Mr. Elgamal: Yeah. Again, it’s so much like story-telling, and with so many things in my life, it’s like whenever I get to do one thing, it’s because later on it helps me do something else. For example, this job that I have right now, the only reason why I got it was because of the Creative Orthodox work that I was doing.

Ms. Bjeletich: Really?

Mr. Elgamal: Yeah, because it’s along the same lines. Everything, everything that I was doing sort of fed back into work, and whatever I experiment with at work, whatever new method that we release something with, or whatever new social media campaign or something like that, I go back and I apply it to Creative Orthodox. It’s this sort of give-and-take relationship, and it makes me love my hobby, love my service, and love my work.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that’s nice. That is really very beautiful. With Creative Orthodox, obviously you’ve got the visual arts and the story-telling together. Do you literally mean that someone at Sun Life saw your work at Creative Orthodox and was like: “Hey, come on over”? Or do you just mean that the skills you honed at Creative Orthodox informed your work at Sun Life so much?

Mr. Elgamal: The latter, the skills I honed. Again, building a community, telling a story from one platform to the other—all these things I wouldn’t have learned in my… It was nowhere close to what I was doing previously. So literally the only reason why I have the job I have now is because of the skills I honed in Creative Orthodox.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s really neat. That’s very cool. And it is! It’s a big learning curve, and it’s a great way to learn it, right? You create your own website, you learn all about that, and then you start publishing books, and you’ve got to sell them, and you’ve got to figure out how to have an Instagram page that looks a lot like your webpage. That’s neat, actually; that’s very neat. Again, for any parents who are concerned that their kids are doing goofy things on their own, guess what? It’ll train them for something really important later! Don’t worry about it.

Mr. Elgamal: I am the poster child for doing goofy things that end up useful in life. Again, I was so obsessed with stories as a child, and I would want to watch movies, like cartoons, all the time; I would want to play with action figures all the time. When I was young, I actually was distracted at school. I was daydreaming too much, thinking out… I would make very elaborate stories with my action figures that spanned weeks, like a saga with the different figures, and some would actually die permanently. It was very involved. As a child, obviously this didn’t help me at school, and it drove my parents crazy, but later on it’s what I do now; it’s how I serve. So it definitely comes full circle.

Ms. Bjeletich: Absolutely. And did your parents like the idea of you studying marketing and doing all of the art and the writing? Did they think it would be better if you were a doctor or something? How did they react to all of that?

Mr. Elgamal: You know, my parents were always so supportive of doing whatever I’m passionate about, and I honestly think it’s because they gave up on trying to get me to do specific things when I was young, and just were like: Okay, when he likes what he’s doing, he does it, he does it well. So they just encouraged me, through and through, in whatever I was doing: in marketing, in Creative Orthodox stuff. They just are at the sidelines, cheering.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that is fantastic. Excellent. So we are here tonight with Michael Elgamal. You’re welcome to call us. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. We’re going to take a short break, just a minute or two, and we’ll be right back with Michael. And we’re going to find out how he met his wife, and we’re going to talk about all these cool books he’s doing. We’ll be right back.

Ms. Bjeletich: And welcome back to Everyday Orthodox. This is Elissa Bjeletich, and you’re welcome to call us if you have any questions for our guest tonight. It’s Michael Elgamal, and he is the artist behind Creative Orthodox, and he does such cool work, and I can’t wait to tell you guys a little bit more about it. If you have a question for Michael, you can call in at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346.

All right. So, Michael, here you are. You grow up in Canada after being in Egypt, and you become a marketing guy. At what point did you meet your wife, and where did you meet her?

Mr. Elgamal: The answer to this is also simple. It’s the same group, the same local parish in Kitchener, and that’s where I met Margie. We were friends for a long while, and then we got married. That’s the thing. I think God swaddled me with all these blessings, because the work… Publishing something and creating something, and I’m sure you know this, comes at such a heavy cost: a cost of time, a cost of attention, a cost of all of that. And Margie has such a unique, incredible heart, an incredible ability to help me do the things I do, all the late nights, all the craziness that comes with releasing and publishing something, or finishing a project.

Some of my earlier stuff before Creative Orthodox, we would create feature-length films for our kids’ summer camp. These are productions that would take nine months to make, and nine months of really intense work, and that would come after work. And she has the ability to not only let me do these things, but also jump in there with me. For Anastasis she was helping me. She was doing the lettering for a book. I feel like that’s such a burden that not a lot of people can bear, to have your husband or have your wife so overtaken by a project for such a long time, and not only let them do that but jump in there and help them with it. I think it takes a special heart.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s excellent. So when you were working on these movies, these short films that you’re making for camp. What were those like, and do they still exist. I’ll tell you, I worked at a summer camp for quite a while, and there was one—we had two different camps—and one of the ones where my whole family would go, we would sort of do that. We’d be this sort of… We’d be working so hard to prepare all this cool stuff for the kids well in advance. It is really fun and it is rewarding and it’s neat, and the kids love it, and then it disappears and all that work is gone. Do you still have those movies, and what were they like?

Mr. Elgamal: We have, yeah, I still have the links. I’m not sure if they stood the test of time. Again, it was just a group of friends acting. The movies, they were actually more than what you would expect at church camp in terms of the production, because that’s what we were really passionate about: story-telling. For Sun Life, when I first started in marketing I was actually working in video editing. It all just came naturally.

One of them, for example… And actually I want to start and make a novel for this, because it’s just a story that excites me. It’s called The Keepers, and it’s a mirror of the early Christians, but it’s in the future. So in the future, the world became one government, called it the United World Republic, and all the big tech companies—Google, Facebook, Apple—all of these companies came together and became that government. And then they decide what information, only judged by what’s scientific, what’s proven, what’s fact, and they decide the information that goes out in the world. So there’s no Christianity, there’s no Bible, and our story starts with the protagonist, and she finds the last remaining data-pack of the Bible. That’s sort of where it picks up. It was a sci-fi dystopian future kind of movie, and it had special effects, all the cool stuff, except it followed the story of early… like the apostles and early Christianity. It brings up the Fathers; it brings up the core of the faith. It was just such a really cool way to tell our kids, the kids at camp, that you are now the keepers of the Word, that you may feel like you know nothing, but at some point this is up to you, to keep the word going, and it’s not going to continue if you didn’t take up that mantle.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that’s neat. That’s really neat. Now you know what’s going to happen; I’m going to get a bunch of emails saying, “How do I see that? How do I see that movie?” Would you consider fixing it up and putting it out there? What do you think?

Mr. Elgamal: I might consider it. But it is embarrassing at times. I’m telling you, we’re not actors; we’re just a group of friends getting together to make something.

Ms. Bjeletich: [Laughter] Summer camp movies!

Mr. Elgamal: Yeah, exactly.

Ms. Bjeletich: As much as it’s so difficult, of course, it’s also fun and it’s amateur—but think about it, because I think that might actually be kind of really neat. I think that would be really cool, and I think other camps might want to check it out.

Mr. Elgamal: Again, I want to make it into a graphic novel as well, because the story I think is gripping.

Ms. Bjeletich: It is. It’s really a good story, and it’s important, too, to pass on to our kids and to think about ourselves: How do we carry on Christianity? What are we doing to carry it on? It’s not like all those generations before us carried it on and we can just drop it. We’re supposed to be doing it. Oh, that’s very cool.

You mentioned that your wife helped you with the lettering for Anastasis. Let’s talk about that, because that is one of my all-time favorite works. I love it so much. The background, as you already know, but to tell the audience: I grew up outside the Church, and there’s so much conversation about why is it that we were saved in the way that we were saved, and why does God have to kill his Son in order for us to live forever, and couldn’t he just be like “I forgive you” and we’d go to heaven, and it all… it is hard to make sense of when you try to make sense of it outside of Tradition. When you come into the Church and you see the Tradition and you understand the full story of Pascha and you understand that Christ actually went into Hades and broke open the gates, suddenly it makes perfect sense why he had to die, because you die so you can get invited into Hades, and once you get there you can’t be held and you explode it, and then—voila!—we all come out of Hades!

It makes perfect sense, but it’s a story that certainly people outside of Orthodoxy don’t know well, and even inside of Orthodoxy I don’t know how good we’ve been at communicating it. So you took that story, and you absolutely brought it to life, and then some. Tell me a little bit about Anastasis and what it’s like.

Mr. Elgamal: I feel like that story, the story of Christ’s conquering death and Hades, is just Orthodoxy’s best-kept secret. I could not believe that we don’t talk about it more often. It bridges so many different stories. I think I told you earlier it was almost like the Avengers. It’s the story where all the superheroes come together. It’s the story where all their narratives connect down there. The one prophet, like Prophet David, Prophet David is sitting down there. He hears of someone saying something and says, “Wait, I wrote about this once!” St. John the Forerunner goes down there and starts preaching about Christ. It’s the story of all stories, and you can actually see remnants of this story in culture, throughout the ages, even in Greek mythology, where someone goes to the underworld to bring back souls. It’s in our very core, even in Superman and Batman. Superman dies to come back. The story is woven into the fabric of human history and human culture, and it’s so important to our faith.

Ms. Bjeletich: Absolutely, and it’s so cool. I just can’t say how cool it is to look at it that way, to have all of these Old Testament figures, people who had just passed away in the New Testament. You mentioned John the Baptist. We have Lazarus who’s down there. Oh, and we have the child—I forget whose—is it Jairus’s daughter maybe who is down in Hades but just for a minute, because she rises up again. It’s so neat to think about all of these people: King David and Abraham. They’ve been down there for a long time, and they know that this is coming. They understand that; they’ve preached about it. So you kind of watch them see it happen and see the signs coming: here’s Jairus’s daughter, here’s Lazarus rising up. And then Christ coming and breaking open Hades. It is such a beautiful and vivid and cool way to explore that story.

I think one of the things that really strikes me about your art, about the graphic novel, is that you can tell the story without so many words. You can just use the words that matter. You know what I mean? You don’t need the “setting the scene” words, because you can set the scene with drawings. So you can just put the really, really meaningful, pregnant sentences in there. I noticed that in A Forest in the Desert as well. You wrote A Forest in the Desert about the life of St. John the Short, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about him, but it’s based on a manuscript about his life. I’m sure that if I were to take that manuscript and read it to my kids, there would be so many extra words that would get in the way of them loving the story. But in the graphic novel, you’ve got the pictures, and they convey the actions, so then the words can just sort of convey philosophical meaning. It’s so neat. Tell us who is St. John the Short, and why did you end up writing this book for him, or about him?

Mr. Elgamal: This is a funny story, because you know already how important St. Antony is for my life. [We] as a group of friends were all so close and we love St. Antony. And then there came a point in my life—it was right after my first job—I was let go out of my very first job, straight out of university. So it was a big blow to my self-worth. It took almost a year and a half to find work. During that time, I felt… Unemployment—I don’t know if you’ve experienced it or not, but unemployment really hits the person’s self-worth. It’s like you don’t deserve to eat because you haven’t earned it. At that point is when I started drawing. At some point I was starting to play video games too much and not have a routine and stay up too late. So I thought to myself, I need to start working at something daily and keep a routine and just put something together. That’s when I decided to draw something.

I’ve drawn most of my life for fun, so at that point I decided to make a little comic book. I wanted to make the story of St. Antony, and then I started drawing and I was like: I don’t know if I know how to draw well. So I decided, I said, let me do another book first and then do the life of St. Antony when I’m good at it. So I was like, what’s the next best thing? Then I found the Life of St. John the Short, and it was detailed, it was dense. His story is very well documented, so I was like: Okay, I’m going to do this.

Again, throughout my life, there are these little cues that make me, especially when I’m creating something—it happened even with the films—where I make a decision for one reason or another, and then I hear it from another place or I hear a verse about the same thing. So for St. John the Short, I decided to start writing and illustrating the book, and normally when you start a graphic novel, you do it in the order that makes sense. You start with an outline, you do thumbnails of the book, and then you write a script, and then you start sketching it, and you continue with the process. But for me, and this speaks to how chaotic my process is, I just started drawing while I’m reading the book.

I thought to myself, I need some sort of… To what you were saying earlier, manuscripts… Manuscripts don’t read like stories that you read today, and that’s what makes it so difficult. That’s actually why I’m so excited about translating stories for Creative Orthodox, because it was so hard for me at one point to get into, that I want my own children, I want children, Orthodox children all over the world, to have an easier bridge into Orthodoxy. So for St. John the Short, I took the manuscript and it’s written like: “St. John the Short was born at this date. He did this, he did this, he did this. And then he passed away.” It’s written in a very fragmented way.

I tried really hard to find a narrative and tried to weave it, and tried to find character progression, the basic things of story-telling that help a reader stay engaged. For me, it was like: the tree! He’s really well-known for the tree of obedience. What if we make that the visual tie throughout the entire book? So I did that. I drew: the first page was Christ the True Vine. I was like, okay, this needs to start with Christ. I don’t want to just make a life about a saint and focus on the saint and not really show the reason for the whole thing.

So I started with Christ and drew Christ the True Vine with the saints like the apostles, St. Mary, around, and then it branches out with St. Antony and all the other formative Desert Fathers, and then it gets to St. John, and that’s where I start. Then I start with the saints of God are like trees. Then I just keep going. Later on, when I get to the middle of the book or the middle of the manuscript, I learned that St. John himself said that the saints of God are like trees, each watered from the same water, like the Spirit, but they give different fruits. So it was one of his sayings. That, to me, was a clear message that I’m on the right path, that I made a good decision. I kept going.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that’s great. Isn’t it wonderful when you get that reassurance, like from him himself? He’s sending it down, like: You’ve done well. You’ve done well.

Michael, we have a caller, actually. We have a caller calling in from Toronto, Canada, in fact. Josie! Josie, can you hear us? Are you there?

Josie: Yeah, I’m here. Hi!

Ms. Bjeletich: Welcome, welcome! Welcome to the show, Josie! Do you have a question for Michael?

Josie: Thank you. Yeah, first of all I want to say I’m a big fan of your work, and God bless you and all of your service and endeavors. You’ve made stories come to life for the young and the old. Even my parents love reading the book Anastasis. So God bless you. My question is: What’s coming next? What is Creative Orthodox releasing next?

Mr. Elgamal: What’s coming next, Josie… I was telling Elissa earlier, Margie and I are expecting.

Ms. Bjeletich: This is a good question to ask him!

Mr. Elgamal: It’s a good question. ...are expecting a little boy in February, so what’s coming next is board books, a whole lot of board books, because I need to tell my kid about the saints. One of the stories I’m excited for is a story related to St. Antony. It is the story of a group of palm leaves arguing amongst themselves: which one gives St. Antony the most shade. As the story goes, we learn that the one that had nothing to brag about, the one that fell off the palm frond and fell to the ground and withered is the one that St. Antony grabs and forms a basket out of and says, “This is the exact leaf that I needed.” I would expect a lot of board books. Then I’m guess I’m going to start switching my age groups as my own kid grows up.

Ms. Bjeletich: That is so great, though!

Josie: That’s great.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s perfect. So we’ll see an evolution of Creative Orthodox, where it’ll go babies to toddlers to preschoolers all the way up through, and by the time your kid’s an adult, we’re going to have quite a collection from you, I hope, Michael. Well, Trudi, thank you so much for calling in. I agree with you. Michael, your work is amazing, and it really brings things to life with children and with adults. Trudi, thank you so much. Trudi—Josie! I’m sorry. Trudi’s producing. Pardon me.

Josie: That’s all right.

Ms. Bjeletich: Josie, thank you so much for calling.

So, Michael, that really is exciting. That’s some pretty exciting news there: you’re having a baby boy! This is wonderful. So will you be able to raise your child there in the same community where you grew up with the same support structure?

Mr. Elgamal: Thankfully, because I don’t think alone I could have done a decent job, but I’m confident again: the community is incredible. As they say, it takes a village. I’m just going to pass my child to the village and hope that the village does the raising. But you actually asked quite a loaded question for me, because when I think of my upbringing, I had a family that gave me really… that set a really high bar in what it means to live a Christ-centered life, and when I look at myself, the first thing that I think is I’m just not good enough. I’m not living the same life that I see my grandparents lived.

And looking at the world right now and how overwhelming it is to go against the norm, basically, and everyone around us and what other people are teaching children, and sort of show them the way and sort of show them the faith. I don’t know, and that’s why I think I’m doing what I can in the way that I can: drawing the lives of the saints. I think that’s the way where I would be able to pass that on to my child, but, yeah, one of the thoughts that are very clear in my head is that I am nowhere near where my parents are, where my sister is, where my grandparents are—nowhere near that life that they live.

Ms. Bjeletich: I mean, that’s where… I have a friend who would say: You are not far from the kingdom. As soon as you realize that you’re not able to do it, that’s a good beginning! [Laughter] Humility is so important. It’s such a big part of it. Thank God that you’ve had such a beautiful family as an example. Sometimes some of us are just trying to figure out what a good family would look like in the first place, and thank God you know. You know what it would be. And isn’t it interesting, though: your worries about—and I think it’s shared by all of us—that this Western, modern world where we are right now, where we’re raising our kids, it’s a tough place to raise an Orthodox kid. And we’re kind of looking at it going: Augh! How does this work?

Isn’t it interesting that, growing up in Egypt where Christians were a persecuted minority, almost solidified this identity. What do you think is different about modern Canada than Egypt? If we say both are not really embracing your Coptic Orthodox Christianity. What is it? Do you think it’s more challenging perhaps in a way in modern Canada to forge an Orthodox identity for a kid?

Mr. Elgamal: I think so, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m going to butcher the saying, but there’s a saying that says there’s a foundation of the Church is sown by the seeds of the martyrs or something like that. It means that when the Church is going through very obvious martyrdom, it becomes easy to know who we are, what we should do, how important our faith is. And that’s even something that St. Athanasius wrote about in On the Incarnation. He says that when people started seeing these men and women proclaim their faith and die for it, that’s when others started looking and started converting into Christianity. I think being in Canada and almost living under the guise of freedom, being liberal, and having everyone be able to do all these things, it almost feels like it’s harder to see your identity. It’s harder to see where the line is because it’s become so blurred. I don’t want to get too much into politics, but reading the recent publication, Live Not By Lies, and what soft utilitarianism is like, having, again, people choose their pronouns. All of these things I feel is going to make it so difficult for our children to know who they are.

And then the other thing that I’m starting to notice is, with social media, especially during the pandemic it’s become so obvious to me—it’s become so hard to, for lack of a better word, segregate or discern between Orthodoxy, truth, the absolute truth, and goodness, from whatever otherwise. So the most obvious example for that is your newsfeed. You can scroll down, down, down. You’re going to see saying by the saints, saying by the saints, and then it’s just something completely unrelated, something completely opposing to the Church, opposing to the spirit of Christ. And it’s become so muddled. It’s not like you know that this thought is good and this thought is bad. Within the same minute, you’re traveling between this thought and that thought. I think it’s going to get really hard to see that line and be able to know the direction to go towards.

Ms. Bjeletich: It is complex. It really is complex, because you can’t say that everything that’s not Orthodox is bad; there’s plenty of good out there. So then this becomes this sifting process and this difficulty. It is ironic, I think, that “choose your own pronouns” or whatever, there’s this way that the world is saying to our kids, “It’s up to you to figure out what your identity is,” which in some ways is like, that’s a huge burden to put on a nine-year-old! They’re thinking, “I have to figure out do I feel male? Do I feel female? Do I feel this? Do I feel that?” Oh my goodness! The questions go all the way down to the root of who you are. So as we look at it, it’s interesting that with identity, ostensibly so open—you can have whatever identity you want—it should be so easy to raise your kid with a specific identity, and yet, somehow it’s not. Somehow it makes it harder and it makes it complicated and strange. So there is. There’s a lot of sorting to do. But of course, God is with us in this age, and he’s with everyone in Egypt where there’s persecution, and he’s with everyone here where there’s not persecution but there’s some other thing. There’s some other thing that we’re watching. But, thanks be to God, he doesn’t leave us; in any dark places, he never leaves.

Mr. Elgamal: And if all else fails, I know this guy in Egypt. He’ll text you verses. It’ll be incredible: you’ll come back to Christ.

Ms. Bjeletich: [Laughter] If only you did know this guy in Egypt, because you don’t know who it was!

Mr. Elgamal: I have no idea who it was!

Ms. Bjeletich: [Laughter] It’s a great idea, though. I would just like to say, quietly, for all those people. We’ve all got godparents for our kids. Your godparents could get burner phones and send messages. Or get a Google Voice number and send them from there or something, so the kids don’t know who’s sending them, but they’re just sending really uplifting messages. And probably Mom and Dad could be like, “Hey, he’s really struggling with this this week,” and you could get a verse that matches that. I don’t know. I’m just saying, that’s something we could orchestrate if we needed to.

I do want to let everybody know that on the Everyday Orthodox Facebook page, I’ve gone ahead and I’ve put up links to your books on Amazon, first to the website, CreativeOrthodox.com, also to the book, A Forest in the Desert, which is about the life of St. John the Short, and Anastasis: The Harrowing of Hades. And also I’ve put up links to my blog, because, Michael, as you remember, a few years ago when you first came out with that book, I did a whole retreat based on it, so I’ve got notes about it if anybody wants to do that, you can buy a couple cases and do it there.

Your books are all for sale on Amazon. They’re self-published, right? What’s your experience with self-publishing? How do you like it?

Mr. Elgamal: I think it’s incredible that… Because I mean, when it comes to writing, when it comes to art, I am not great at either, but self-publishing allows me to—

Ms. Bjeletich: This is not true. This is not true. To the audience, it is totally not true. But go on.

Mr. Elgamal: You look at it, it’s like a child that got too much clearance.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s your style! That’s just your style! It’s on purpose. Don’t worry about it! [Laughter]

Mr. Elgamal: On purpose or not, it’s the best I can do! So, self-publishing allowed me to put these stories out. The only thing I sort of regret is obviously the cost of the books and the quality of the books, for example. Again, wishing the paper would be thicker, the colors would be more vivid, all of these things. But I’m even pushing the self-publishing printers beyond what they’re used to. They’re used to printing novels, not graphic novels and such. It has its limitations, but it’s just so incredible that something can go from, again, my desktop at home to the world in a couple of days. Yeah, that’s powerful.

Ms. Bjeletich: Absolutely. It is neat. We live in a world where anybody can publish anything, and that means you’ve kind of got to watch out, because there’s a lot of nonsense out there, but it also means that someone like you—you have such an unconventional vision. There aren’t a lot of Orthodox graphic novels out there, and you were able to just sort of step in and do it, and it’s beautiful and it’s amazing and I’m so delighted that you have done that.

So now you and your wife are expecting a son. That’s very exciting. So you mentioned, is the first board book on St. Antony?

Mr. Elgamal: Mm-hmm. I’m working on two. The beautiful thing about board books is that they are relatively short—18 pages or so—but it’s been really hard to write something. It’s such a blessing and a curse, because they don’t take a long time to make, but also every single word has to be the right word, every single image has to be the right image. So I’m working on two currently. The St. Antony one is for my future son, and I’m working on a book on the life of Pope Kyrillos. Actually, I think there is a publication by Ancient Faith, if I’m not wrong: The Silent Patriarch? I can’t remember if it was Ancient Faith or St. Vlad’s. I think it might have been St. Vlad’s.

Ms. Bjeletich: I think it might have been St. Vlad’s. I’ve seen that one, yeah.

Mr. Elgamal: On the life of Pope Kyrillos and his life of prayer. So, again, they’re simple books to get children used to the Fathers, prayer, all these simple concepts. It’s just a way to get them used to that.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s awesome, and, frankly, for those of us who don’t have time or inclination to read a lot of long, dusty books—it’s not bad for adults either! [Laughter] But, Michael, thank you so much for coming on the program. Guys, this is Michael Elgamal from Creative Orthodox. Go find him online. Michael, it has been an absolute joy to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

Mr. Elgamal: Thank you so much for having me.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, it was great. And thank you to our audience for joining us tonight. Come back next Sunday night, and we will meet another everyday Orthodox person right here on Ancient Faith Radio. Again, Michael, we absolutely enjoyed it. Thank everyone so much. Good night!