Everyday Saints

A mechanic who never spoke a cruel word in his life. A woman who put her affairs in order three days before she died, because she knew exactly when it would happen. A soldier who lived peacefully with a snake in his trench for a year. A widow whose empty oil jars filled overnight. Everyday Saints gathers true stories of extraordinary faith in ordinary people, recorded by Fr Luke Sidarous over five decades as a Coptic Orthodox priest.Fr Luke (also known as Hegumen Loka Sidaros) served in Alexandria, Egypt, and later in Los Angeles, California. Along the way he wrote down what he saw. He knew most of these people personally: he prayed with them, heard their confessions and buried them. What he recorded is not legend. It is witness.These are not monks in caves, but mechanics, doctors, deacons, widows, soldiers, teachers and engineers of the twentieth century. They worked ordinary jobs, raised children, stood in church on Sundays, and carried their crosses in quietly remarkable ways, loving Christ with a practical, daily love that bore clear witness to His presence.The accounts were first written in Arabic and published as a series of small booklets called The Sweet Fragrance of Christ. For decades they were passed from hand to hand among Coptic communities, read aloud in homes and churches. An earlier English translation was known by titles such as The Fragrance of Christ in the Lives of Contemporary Saints. This is the same beloved series, now gathered complete in one English volume.For anyone drawn to Coptic Orthodox spirituality, the lives of the saints, or simply real accounts of holy lives, Everyday Saints answers the question of whether the age of saints is over.