Joan Mooney, Joint Homilist, August 14-15, 2010
Near the town of Aksaray, in Cappadocia, we came upon a Caravanserai, an enormous stone structure dating from C12 AD. Here travellers found hospitality, could rest their animals, trade, and exchange travellers’ tales. By contrast, our modern hotels are often impersonal and lonely, though I was never lonely with Ingerid as travelling companion. The Magi would have stayed at such a place on their way to Bethlehem, Paul probably sought hospitality in the Caravanserais.
The Turks, like the Magi, came from the East, from central Asia, driven out by the Mongols. They came in successive waves – first the Seljuk Turks, then the Ottoman Turks. In what is today Turkey they found a land flowing with milk and honey, magnificent and fertile, bounded by three great seas – the Black sea, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, occupying a unique position on the cusp of the East and the West. They assimilated, and were assimilated by, the people already there – the Hittites and earlier indigenous peoples, as well as remnants of the Greeks and the Romans.
In this short talk I would like to make a few comments on what I observed of the religious phenomenon in Turkey.
Recently I was having coffee with a friend, who was asking me about St Mary’s ie us. I was just beginning to answer when she abruptly asked me, “Do you think there is life after this life?”
I was amazed, because I had been considering this very question in the context of our recent trip. In Cyprus, at a site called Choirokoita, we visited a Neolithic village, dating from C12000 BC. This is the earliest site we saw. Here, in their perfectly round stone houses, the people buried their dead beneath the dirt floor on which they lived their daily lives. Whether this was to offer companionship to the dead, or to receive blessing and protection from them, noone can say. But the practice indicated to me a belief in an existence beyond this life. In Istanbul we visited the tomb of the great Ottoman emperor and patriot, Sulieman the Magnificent, and there, beside the tomb, a man was crying and praying aloud to his dead protector.
In the archeological museum in Istanbul is the huge sarcophagus – coffin- of Alexander the Great, magnificently decorated with scenes of battle, the combatants carried to victory by their gods. In another museum there were scores of tiny, intricately carved, war gods, their role being to secure victory for their devotees. In our C20 and C21wars the gods, or God, has to be on both sides of every combat.
We’re all familiar with the concept of God the protector. Today we heard sung that beautiful psalm, ‘Our God has done great things for us, we are filled with joy’. We saw small statues of goddesses, totally naked, with arms raised and palms facing forward in blessing, and in a gesture of promoting fertility,
Of Christianity in practice today there was virtually no evidence.
But the Christianity of former times was all around us – in archeological sites , in architecture, in art. What was most fascinating was the progression of history and antiquity before our eyes, like a series of stills – old structures becoming the foundation for new ones, and in their turn giving way to others, but usually with something of the former remaining, and the process continuing to this day. One needs to be both a sleuth and a scholar to work it all out.
T S Eliot puts it
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Tradition never dies, and it never stands still, but feeds into the next layer and level
The Aya Sofya – Church of Holy Wisdom – we stayed a 10 minute walk away -is one of the architectural jewels of all time. First a Christian Basilica, it was later seconded by and adapted for Islam. Today it is a museum. Fortunately, the Muslims covered over, but did not destroy, its magnificent mosaics, depicting Jesus and Mary, saints, emperors and empresses. Islam allows no images of any kind in its places of worship. Apart from their great beauty, the spiritual sentiment expressed in the paintings is interesting. An outstanding one – from late C12 – shows the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist imploring Jesus Christ for the salvation of humanity. I was wondering why Jesus would not have had the salvation of humanity at heart as well as Mary and John the Baptist. The various representations of angels, especially of their wings, I found charming and endlessly imaginative. An entry from my trip diary for May 5 2010 reads, ‘I have a feeling of serenity and joy, almost of ecstasy, in that Divine space of immense beauty.’
The modern city of Iznik is built on the site of the ancient city of Nicaea, made famous by its promulgation of the Nicene creed in 325AD. Only a tiny outcrop, by the side of a lake, is all that remains of the palace where the great Council took place. Like its dogmas, it has all but disappeared into the lake.
Islam today, as well as its past, is, on the other hand, very visible. No matter how small a village, the minaret of its mosque dominates the landscape, the five times daily call to prayer fills the atmosphere. Our hotel in Istanbul was beside the Blue Mosque, and we listened to the Imam intoning the prayer late and early. It was beautiful and moving. Outside every Mosque is a stone bench and a row of taps. At the call to prayer we would see people, chiefly men, washing their feet prior to entering for prayer.
In Konya, in central Turkey, is the Rumi museum. Here, C13, the great poet and mystic Jelalluddin Rumi lived and worked and founded a community later known as the Dervishes, which exists to this day. We attended a Dervish ceremony, a combination of meditation, ritual, music and dance. We were enthralled and uplifted. Through silence, meditation, music, dance and poetry the Dervishes seek to understand the soul and understand life. At the same time their lives are strongly rooted in the practicalities of everyday, in helping members of the community as well as those beyond their community.
If you like history, antiquity and good food, then Turkey is the place for you. Its people, its beauty, its art, its vitality, have ensnared me – I will be going back.
20/08/2010 at 7:49 am Permalink
We miss your piano playing Joan since you went down the road to the naughty St Mary’s. You had such an influence on our music not just in the 90s and 2000s at masses and bringing events like Brisbane Biennial concerts to St Mary’s but going back many years to the good loft choir of your youth. You are one of my inspirations along with Dean Hamilton in working hard to rebuild and expand our music department under brilliant young choral conductor Suellen Cusack now at St Mary’s.
24/08/2010 at 10:45 pm Permalink
What a wonderful picture you painted for us , Joan, conjuring the sights, sounds and meditative atmosphere that you encounted in the Turkey of today. As both scholar and sleuth, you set it in the framework of the transformation wrought over centuries. You enabled us to sense the prayer that ‘rises like incense’ – expressed in Islam in the moving intensity of the call to prayer, the whirling Dervish dance and music, and the wonderful architecture of mosques, and in ancient Christianity in the stillness of icons, mosaics and paintings.
Your wondering aloud about the the painting in the church of Aya Sofya, Holy Wisdom, depicting the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist pleading with Jesus for the salvation of humanity set me thinking about interpretations other than those Christianity has traditionally applied. I began to see the imploring figures as symbolic of the inner call to the development of those aspects of ourselves that are central to transformation and fullness of life.
The complete psychological and spiritual integration, that affords total integrity and inner authority is symbolized by the figure of Jesus. He is ‘all in all’, so nourished by ‘ the Spirit’, the fully developed dimension of the divine in his life, that he lives freely and fully for others as ‘servant’ to all. Personified in the figure of the Virgin Mary is the inner freedom and simplicity that allows serenity and true joy, remaining unwavering no matter what the circumstances. In the figure of John the Baptist is symbolized the means to attaining and maintaining those qualities – the making straight of crooked paths, the ‘refining of silver’ that necessarily entails sojourns in the desert of spiritual desolation, and requires the camel’s hair and leather belt of perseverance and consistency, courage and trust.
It occurred to me also that it was not co-incidental that you gave your homily on the feast of the Assumption, which, when similarly interpreted, can be understood as Mary’s complete integration of psyche and spirit, enabling led her to live fully in the same way as Jesus did, but as a woman and a mother. Her description as Virgin and Mother, indicates that she attained this state, symbolized as ‘virginal’, before she gave birth to Jesus. The many implications that flow from this interpretation are best explored elsewhere.
Thank you Joan for providing the opportunity for me to explore these questions.
26/08/2010 at 8:39 pm Permalink
‘..the site of the ancient city of Nicaea, made famous by its promulgation of the Nicene creed in 325AD … Like its dogmas, it has all but disappeared into the lake.’
What is it that seems to compel all speakers here, no matter what the ostensible topic, to throw in some disparaging remark about other people’s beliefs?
As a matter of objective fact, the Nicene Creed is proclaimed around the world every week by hundreds of millions of Christians – Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. Some disappearance!
29/08/2010 at 7:17 pm Permalink
Well Perry maybe we are saying the creed afresh, with renewed insight into who God is, in light of modern science and other fields of knowledge. Thus the Nicene creed is even more beautiful in a way.
30/08/2010 at 2:54 pm Permalink
Tim, I’d be interested to learn what you think ‘modern science’ has to say on ‘who God is’. I would concede that 16 centuries of theology, philosophy, prayer or revelation may have given new insights into the teachings of the Nicene Council, but not that they have ‘disappeared into the lake’.
I wonder whether such comments are made deliberately or unthinkingly. A useful discipline might be for speakers to imagine themselves making similar comments about religions other than Christianity. For example, would the speaker here have felt comfortable saying something like ‘the dogmas of Mohammed have all but disappeared under the sands of the Arabian Desert’? (A comment which would have about the same factual content, i.e none at all, as the same comment directed at Christianity.)
04/09/2010 at 1:51 pm Permalink
Perry
If you haven’t no knowledge about how contemporary science can enhance and increase our understanding of the orthodox Catholic faith then I’m sorry that your science and theology are out of date, all I can suggest is perhaps find a good priest and go to mass in a good Catholic church more? (there are plenty around).
But in any case I’ve made this point before, but you will never, never, never, never, never, never acknowledge it – even a single word – the blog site on which you contribute here, there there is a theological discussion, yes.. BUT, this blog thread (and St Mary’s) is not JUST about theological and intellectual debate as important as that is – St Mary’s is about PEOPLE (yep, you may need to pause for a second to say that slowly “PE…O… PLE”.. human beings… remember them Perry? Not just the priests, or the paid church workers, but the very good PEOPLE who make up the 2 St Mary’s communities now – who come along and arrange the flowers, help prepare the music, and make people feel welcome. Good people Perry.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love,
I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.
And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing…..”
- an so on and so on.. (Corianthians chapter 13).
That bible passage sums up your contribution to this website, there is absolutely zero attempt on your part in your purely intellectual arguments here to in any way grasp the human dimension and hardship of what St Mary’s has been through in recent years.
What I humbly suggest is you Perry is whatever your disparaging thoughts about Peter Kennedy (and they are pretty irrelevant because the guy is mid 70s and retiring soon anyway absolute, but I know you like attacking old men, given what a fine character you are)) that you humble yourself and go meet some of the SMX people – particularly the older ones, retirees, in their 60s, 70s, and try to listen to them and see what their story is in regards to their many years of contributing to their local church. Maybe then you’ll have the wisdom to contribute to this site.
Of course, there will be a reply to this message from you below in several hours, or days, that will entirely discredit me, proove me wrong, show me what an evil person I am for caring about the human story – about people (not just the priests or church workers but the entire community), and having discredited me, you’ll advance your theological arguments, and prove to us all you are the wiser, more learned theologian among us.
04/09/2010 at 6:00 pm Permalink
Tim, as I’ve said more than once before, I’m sure the people at SMX are all good, sincere people. I just don’t see their need to constantly, publicly trash Catholic beliefs – beliefs held by faithful Catholics, who in fact are also people, often also good, sincere people, and sometimes with their own hardships to contend with.
Anyway, it’s probably time for me to turn myself in and go back to the Asylum. I wish you well.
30/10/2010 at 5:20 pm Permalink
Hi Perry
They might intone the words, but can you peep into their minds and watch the mental gymnastics or over-glazing of the brain while doing so? Christianity will be doing itself a huge favour when it revisits these words and, while acknowledging their history, comes up with credal statements that don’t pretzel the mind.
01/11/2010 at 9:40 pm Permalink
Hello louis
I can’t peep into people’s minds any more than you, but, unlike you, I would not be prepared to airily write off millions of people as hypocrites just because I didn’t share their openly professed beliefs.