Pentecost and Me

Most Christians have heard of the Holy Spirit. Few feel like they actually know him. That gap, between knowing about the Spirit and living in his presence, is what this book is about. Pentecost and Me gathers the Pentecost sermons of Fr. Bishoy Kamel, one of the most beloved priests in the history of the Coptic Orthodox Church, translated into English for the first time and arranged into a single sustained journey from human weakness to genuine spiritual transformation. Fr. Bishoy Kamel preached these sermons in the 1970s to ordinary congregations in Egypt. He was not a theologian writing for scholars. He was a pastor who had sat with enough human struggle to have stopped being careful, and his directness is one of the things that has kept his words circulating in the Coptic diaspora for more than four decades. He died in 1979 at the age of forty-seven. This book is a preservation of his voice. What This Book Is About The book moves through four parts. It begins with an honest account of the human problem: we try to change ourselves, we fail, we try again, and we fail again. Not because we are not serious, but because willpower was never designed to do what only the Spirit can do. Fr. Bishoy is clear and unsentimental about this from the first pages. It then turns to the person of the Holy Spirit himself, not as a doctrine to be understood but as a living presence to be encountered. Fr. Bishoy draws on the great images of Scripture and the Coptic Orthodox tradition: fire that purifies rather than destroys, living water that flows from within rather than being drawn from outside, the dove that tends its young with fierce gentleness. These are not decorative images. In his hands they become precise descriptions of how the Spirit actually moves in a human life. The third part is practical and honest in a way that is rare in Orthodox spiritual writing. What opens the channel and what blocks it. What grieves the Spirit and what quenches him. What repentance actually is, as distinct from simply listing your failures. What it means to be led by the Spirit in ordinary life, at home, at work, in a marriage, in a parish. Fr. Bishoy addresses all of it without flinching. The book ends with vision. The saints were not exceptional people. They were surrendered ones. The Spirit took from what belongs to Christ and gave it to them, and the result was lives that continued to bear fruit long after those lives had ended. That same movement, the Spirit taking from Christ and giving to us, is available to every baptized Christian. The feast of Pentecost, in the Orthodox understanding, is not a historical commemoration. The Spirit came and stayed. That is where the book ends, and it is an ending that is difficult to receive as anything other than a direct personal invitation. For Readers New to the Orthodox Church The Coptic Orthodox Church is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, founded by the apostle Mark in Egypt in the first century. Its spiritual tradition, rooted in the desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity, has shaped Christian prayer and theology everywhere. Pentecost and Me requires no prior knowledge of that tradition. It asks only one thing of the reader: that they come with an honest hunger for more of God than they currently have. If you have grown up in the Coptic Orthodox Church and found its feasts feeling distant or routine, this book will remind you what the feast of Pentecost is actually for. If you are encountering Orthodox Christianity for the first time, this book is one of the finest entry points into the depth of its spiritual life. rrp $12 Author: Fr Bishoy Kamel ISBN: 978-1-7645805-5-7 Publisher Name: St Shenouda Press Publisher URL: www.stshenoudapress.com Publication Year: 2026