St Mary's

……….and let us remember all those who have gone before us.

We hear this bidding at every Eucharistic celebration.  For Paul they were the Cloud of Witnesses, the men and women of the Old and NT who have gone before us and given testimony to faith. I wonder what cloud of witnesses pass through your mind at that time- family, friends, godparents, teachers, priests or those in religious orders.

Often for me, in the first instance, they are not the important people who have passed through my life and who have left an indelible impression because of how they illumined my spiritual path by the example they set or the awareness they raised or the encouragement they gave.

But when I hear this sentence, in my mind’s eye there appears a picture of the map of Turkey and I would think about the early Christian communities, people never seen but who have formed the basis of the Christian Church.  They were icons of faithfulness who “sought to live “faithfully, steadfast in purpose or devotion or affection, constant in adherence to ideals” as the dictionary describes.  So it was my dream to see the landscape and the remnants.

Joan Mooney and I travelled to Turkey and Cyprus to figuratively walk in the footsteps of St Paul to reflect on the life, letters and theology of Paul the Apostle in the context of some of the places through which he travelled and to explore the development of the early Christian Communities.  Much of the exploration will be ongoing as it remains to me a source of endless fascination.

Our Turkish journey of 2000 km was luxury indeed compared to the 20,000 km Paul traveled over the extended network of Roman roads that covered southern Anatolia as far as Syria. Paul probably covered some 20 to 30 km a day on foot, carrying his belongings on the back of a donkey or pack horse, sleeping at inns or the homes of friends (according to Paul’s own letters).  Reports on conditions in the inns of the period are not palatable.  St John reports bedbugs!

On his 3 missionary journeys over a period of 20 years Paul suffered stoning, 7 imprisonments (1 Clem 5.6), 5 times the Jewish punishment of 39 lashes , was scourged 3 times by the Romans with rods, and suffered 3 shipwrecks.

There is not much left in the ruins of Turkey and Cyprus to remind us of Paul except for much later iconic images that are pretty unified in their depiction of him. One such place was the underground city of Kaymakli in Cappadocia, one amongst 40 such cave cities, dug out of a pretty amazing landscape. They were not only used by Christians as hiding places but many other folk in previous centuries hid there from marauding armies.

The city consists of 8 floors of stables, storage places, wineries, living areas, kitchens and churches. It is thought that here alone up to 3 ½ thousand people resided. Many of the walls of the churches are adorned with frescoes of biblical figures and saints of the early church.  Interestingly many of the figures are disfigured through the gouging out of the eyes by superstitious locals who believed that by removing the eyes one removed the souls.  Another interpretation is that the scraped powder from the blue eyes had some kind of healing power.

Colossae is but a memory.  The town was destroyed by earthquakes and the site has never been excavated for lack of funds. However, the correspondence from Paul to the Colossians is valuable to consider.  Paul’s greatest bugbear was legalism.  He had to deal with dissent and distortion of beliefs, “obligatory beliefs” such as food laws and circumcision that were imposed on the predominantly gentile church in order to allow them to belong. Even then, belonging was conditional! Christian Communities do much better these days.  Consider John Bell of the Iona Community holding up the host and saying: The gifts of God for the People of God and for those who are curious.  I marvel at the impact such an invitation has on a person’s spiritual seeking.

The Colossians also had cultivated their own angel cult, which was based on some Hellenistic and Jewish elements. So there existed a rich variety of theological views but the idea of heresy was not a concept known at the time.  That came much later when creed and dogmas appeared.

Ephesus was a city on a grand scale and worldly.  Paul spent a couple of years there and made himself rather unpopular.  He posed a threat to the livelihood of businesses such as those of the silversmiths when it became apparent that the Christian converts had no need of idols and altars fashioned out of silver.

In Paphos, Cyprus, I hugged the smooth, much touched pillar of St Paul, to which Paul, on order of the pro-consul, allegedly was tied when he received 39 lashes as punishment for preaching Christianity.  However Paul redeemed himself in the eyes of the pro-consul who was won over to the faith when he saw how Paul had the power to temporarily blind his friend and adviser, Elymas, the Jewish soothsayer. According to tradition, Elymas did not forget the humiliation. And his resentment cost St Barnabas, who had been Paul’s companion, his life.

Barnabas was a native of Cyprus and we visited his tomb near Salamis which was miraculously found through a dream in 477 AD by Bp Anthemios.

In the Troudos Mountains of Cyprus we visited the monastic church dedicated to St Heraclidios who led the Apostles Paul and Barnabas through the “snowy mountains” to Paphos and who was later anointed by Barnabas as the first bishop of Cyprus.  According to local tradition the apostles baptized St Heraclidios in the river only a few meters from the monastery.

The church built there centuries later, at the site of the monastery is dedicated to Lampadistis, a much venerated saint, whose skull is kept in the church, encased in silver with just the top of the cranium exposed.  I felt most profoundly moved when I touched this deeply browned skull, realizing this person had been one of the throng of Christians who have gone before us and, keeping their eyes fixed on Jesus, persevered and ran the race.

There are few things that especially stood out for me during those 5 weeks:

1. The importance of remembering.  It takes a few generations for all personal memory to fade away.  Therefore it is good to find tangible traces of people who struggled, loved, dreamed and hurt.  The lives of those gone before us illumen our path, they show us the pitfalls and they show us what is essential.
2. How in the space of a few hundred years perceptions can ossify into immovable opinions and beliefs

The circumstances of the early communities are not ours today.  We are not likely to have the same disputes.  But the future of our Faith can easily be subject to the same tortuous path as before if we don’t examine history.

So let us keep living the simplicity of the message of Jesus in all humility, let’s aim for open, respectful dialogue and for peacefulness as a core desire for a faithful community, faithful to the ideals of the Gospel and faithful to each other.