don't eat alone

Yesterday was a day of familiar and friendly faces, even in a foreign land. Cam, Rachel, Adam, and Joel were all on our bus today, as were Keith and Sandra, an Australian couple staying in our hotel. We all signed up for the tour to Pamukkale and Hieropolis, just as we had gone to Ephesus together the day before, so we were looking forward to seeing one another. The biggest contingent of the rest of the people on our bus was made up of three generations of an Indian family with whom we had shared a boat ride on our tour along the Bosphorus in Istanbul a couple of days ago. We recognized each other as well. Here, in a country foreign to us all, we, who came from four different countries, traveled as companions. By the end of the trip, we knew we would all be headed in different directions. But we were together for the day.

Hieropolis and Pamukkale are a three hour drive from Selcuk, so we had plenty of time to talk, read, and sleep a little, too. We wound through the Anatolian countryside, through the heart of the agricultural area, past olive trees, citrus groves, and strawberry fields. Turkey is still a land of family farmers, rather than giant corporate farms. As we drove, Aysha (who was also with us yesterday) filled out heads with historical, geographical, and cultural information. We also stopped for tea along the way, of course.

Our first stop was the largest necropolis – “city of the dead” or cemetery – in Turkey. Only a small portion of it has been excavated; much of it has been broken and looted by shepherds in the area over the years. The graves stood as markers to more than the people who had been buried there. They were scattered across what is now a beautiful hillside, stones that have lasted far longer than the people who stacked them. Though there are some inscriptions in ancient Greek and Latin, most of the graves are anonymous monuments, pointing to little more than the fact that a dead person was laid to rest there. In the cracks of the stones, life is breaking through in the form of wild flowers and lush green grass. The cemetery next to our church in Marshfield tells the same story with newer graves that still bear the names. If life is a sentence, these stones are the final punctuation.

We moved on up the hill to Hieropolis where the stones were stacked a bit differently. The path up to the arena let us enter at the top of it, which gave us an incredible view of the valley below. Farther up the path stood two walls that were all that was left of a church built to honor Phillip, one of the disciples, who was said to have been martyred on that hill. From there we could see stacks of stones in various places all down the mountainside that have yet to tell their stories; only three percent of the site has been excavated.

Back down near where we got off the bus was a thermal pool, fed by the hot springs in the area, that the citizens of Hieropolis even used. Cleopatra was said to have swum in the pool; we didn’t because they wanted fifteen dollars for the privilege. Even though it was raining lightly – it rained all day, we walked farther down to the terraces for which Parmukkale is famous. We didn’t come all this way to miss the sights because we didn’t want to get wet. As the hot water cascaded down the hillside and evaporated over the years, it left calcium deposits that created terraces and pools. Most of them are dry because of earlier mismanagement by the Turkish tourism industry, but the ones that are left are incredible. It’s a landscape unlike any other I have seen.

Adam and Joel headed down the hill into the village to catch the bus to take them on the next leg of their journey before we got to tell them goodbye. I was sad about that. We dropped Cam and Rachel off in the town of Pamukkale where they are going to hang out for a few days – and got to wish them well — and then we started back to Selcuk. In conversations around the terraces, we talked with the Indian family about our mutual connection to Kenya. Keith, Sandra, and I talked most of the way home about all sorts of things. We said goodbye to Aysha when we got to our hotel, went up to the room to change into some dry clothes, and then went back down for dinner.

I haven’t gotten to talk about food as much as I would like so far. (I’m afraid you’ll have to wait on recipes until I get home.) The food here at the Hotel Kalehan is worth talking about. So is our server, Mehmet. He has waited on us both nights and he has been great, especially because of his knowledge of what’s on the plate and how it has been prepared. He is a gentle and kind man who is thoughtful and unassuming and full of knowledge and conversation. He has also been willing to endure my questions about everything he has brought to our table. Last night the menu was vegetable soup, cheese rolls, beef with eggplant puree, and chocolate cake with ice cream (all for $16). With every course I made some sort of inquiry and he answered everything.

I need to back up a step. The first thing that has greeted us each night is fresh bread with a side of herbed olive oil. Aysha told us this is the olive oil producing region of Turkey, so we expected the oil to be good, but the stuff last night was amazing. We asked Mehmet and found out that he is an olive grower and presses the oil the hotel uses himself. (Needless to say, some of it is coming home with us.) He told us his family has grown olives for years, but he just bought an olive farm – 220 trees – and is now doing it himself. He went on to tell of the restaurant’s commitment to buy only fresh organic produce (you should taste the tomatoes) and make everything fresh everyday. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen here in Selcuk, but I’m going to tell you to come here mostly to have dinner.

When we got up from the table, Mehmet asked, “Are you here tomorrow night?”

Yes was our answer. We will be the last of our impromptu band to leave this little town for our next adventure. But we have one more night for one more great dinner, for a couple of hundred questions about Turkish food, and for one last encounter with a friendly face who has made our meals richer by being there.

Peace,
Milton

I never thought I would start a blog entry by quoting the Jackon Five, but “one bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl.” Aysha, our guide for our tour of the ruins at Ephesus, or Efes to the Turks, was wonderful. So was our tour group. This time the whole group was English speaking, but just as diverse coming from Australia, England, Malaysia, and the US (us). We were a smaller group, too – only ten. Our trip today included Ephesus, the Temple of Artemis, and the site of the house where Mary, Jesus’ mother, lived out the last years of her life.

Diversity comes in many packages. Our tour group in Greece was all from North America, yet covered a wide theological spectrum. Our first group in Istanbul was twenty-two people from ten or eleven countries; we hardly shared language in common, which made it difficult to find out if we shared much else. Our group yesterday was all English speaking and incredibly diverse in age, outlook, and world view. Somehow we seemed to get along with each other best of all. The fun part is eight of us are on the same tour today, as is Aisha. We all seemed quite pleased to find that out.

I didn’t expect what we found when we got to Ephesus. Of all the sights we have visited, this was by far the largest and the one that fed our imaginations the most. We wandered through the ruins for over two hours as Aisha told us about the different incarnations of the city dating back for several centuries BCE. Most of the ruins that have been excavated are Greek and Roman. Several of the main streets have been restored. The site was crawling with visitors, so walking down the marble roads left me feeling as though I had a taste of what it might have been like when Paul walked the same streets, bumping shoulders with others traveling the same path.

The city was a cultural crossroads for as long as it existed, drawing visitors, merchants, and conquering armies from every direction. There were temples to various gods, both Greek and Roman, the biggest of which was the Temple of Artemis, the goddess of fertility, which was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. During the two or three years that Paul lived and worked in the city, it was vibrantly pagan. In fact, the silver merchants who made most of their income because of the worship of Artemis, were the ones who ran him out of town as a fledgling church began to take hold. Some time later, he wrote back to the young congregation with words that are some of my favorite in his letters:

I wonder what it felt to know the dimensions of the Temple of Artemis, with its multiple rows of columns, each one ninety feet tall, and then to read Paul’s prayer that they might have some sense of the unfathomable dimensions of Jesus’ love for them. However tall the buildings, however deep the wounds of persecution, however wide the Roman Empire, however long the wait for the pain of life to ease, Christ’s love exceeded those measurements. I can only imagine they read the letter over and over again.

As the first century turned into the second, and Christianity took a strong hold on the city despite everyone else’s efforts, John, the apostle, and Mary, Jesus’ mother, lived in Ephesus. Some of the materials we have suggest John might have written his gospel from here. He returned to the city after his exile from Patmos and died here. We are going to see his tomb in the next couple of days. We did go to the site where Mary’s house was to have been. It was a wonderfully peaceful place on the top of a hill overlooking the old city. There is now a small chapel built on the ruins of the foundation of what is believed to have been her home. We learned that Pope Paul visited the site in 1967 and declared it holy so that Catholic pilgrims come here every August 15. No one seemed to know why the Pope picked August 15. On the May 3, the area was sparsely populated, which gave us time to walk, reflect, and enjoy the beautiful serenity we found there.

The “us” I’m talking about was Ginger, me, and two guys from England, Adam and Joel. The others chose to go to the museum. The two guys left England several weeks ago with a plan to travel, some money in their pockets, and a promise to their girlfriends to be back by the end of the year. They have tromped through Europe, are headed from here around the Black Sea to Russia, and then across Mongolia to China. They have a skeleton itinerary as they are making things up as they go. They already have more stories than they will ever be able to tell. Another pair, Cam and Rachel, are from Australia and are doing much the same thing. Part of the way they are financing their trip is to get jobs when they start to run out of money. They don’t have anyone expecting them back anytime soon, so they have no idea how long they are going to be gone. They told us today they had gotten jobs at the hostel here in Selcuk and are going to hang around a couple of months.

I imagine Paul traveled with much the same kind of itinerary; he never planned to live in Ephesus for three years. He got here and there was stuff to do and he could make a living while he was here. Then he was off to the next place, so he could discover where he would go after that. The ruins and the stories of our temporary traveling companions made Paul more real. I can see where he walked. I can see what he wrote. I can see how he traveled. All together, it makes for quite a view.

Peace,
Milton

We knew we had a tour today, we just didn’t know where we were going.

When I planned the trip with the help of Tovi from Kirkit Travel, he made some suggestions about tours and, after checking out the links he sent, I signed us up. That was several weeks ago. All I knew, looking our voucher, was we were going on the “Cosmopolitan Istanbul” half day tour. When we got downstairs to meet whomever was going to pick us up, we had two pleasant surprises: we had signed up for a private tour and we were going to visit Greek, Jewish, and Turkish neighborhoods and points of interest. We climbed in the van and off we went.

Our first stop was the Eyup Sultan Camii, or the Mosque of the Great Sultan, who was the standard bearer for the Prophet Mohammed. Across the courtyard from the mosque is the tomb of the Sultan; both sites are significant to Turkish Muslims. Our guide, Gulden (pronounced GOOL-dan) was a lovely person and a wonderful source of information. She was also delighted to talk about her faith and her heritage as a Muslim. Part of the reason she took us to this mosque was because it was off the beaten tourist path and in a more traditional Muslim neighborhood. As we stood in the back of the mosque, the main floor filled with men coming to pray. The sense of reverence was quite different from the Blue Mosque where the tourists far outnumbered the worshippers.

One of the most intriguing things about the mosque was this sign posted outside of the entrance to the tomb. Gulden translated it for us. It said something to the effect of “Don’t pray to the dead Sultan; you can only pray for him. No candles. No flowers. No strings or ribbons. No pieces of paper with messages. Don’t ask the Sultan to do anything for you. This is forbidden in our religion. You can only pray to Allah.” When we went inside, a number of people were kneeling or sitting around the walls. Some were reading out loud, though softly; others were praying. I wondered if they had read the sign. Most seemed determined to do or pray whatever they wanted, or at least that’s the way it felt to me.

From there we went to the Chora Church (The Church of the Savior Outside the City Walls), which is now the Kayrie Museum. This church was out of the way, even during the Fourth Crusade when the Crusaders sacked Constantinople, so it was not raided or damaged. Though the Ottomans plastered over the mosaics and turned it into a mosque, they did not destroy the artwork. The Turkish Repubilc uncovered the mosaics and turned the church into the Kayrie Museum. Gulden did a wonderful job showing us how the mosaics on one hall told the life of Mary and those on the other hall followed the events in Jesus’ life. Thus my next surprise: the life story of Mary, as it was told in these scenes, was one I had never heard. There were images of Gabriel’s annunciation of Mary’s birth to Ann, her mother; of various signs from Mary’s childhood; and of several other events that made her border on divinity. So much for being a lowly peasant girl.

Our next stop was the traditionally Jewish neighborhood of the Old City (the part inside the city walls from the sixteenth century). Up until the last few years, Turkish, Greek, and Jewish neighborhoods connected to one another quite well. The neighborhoods are still there, but many of the Greeks and Jews have relocated to the northern part of the European side of Istanbul and these neighborhoods are mostly poor and a bit rundown. There are still some synagogues there, but because of bombings in 2003 security is extremely tight: you have to make a specific appointment that has to be approved by the rabbi in order to visit them. We didn’t have such a connection, so we walked a bit and ended up at the Orthodox Patriarchy in the adjacent Greek neighborhood and visited the church there, which is still active. Inside was yet another surprise: the relics (bones) of St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory Nyziansus are ensconced there. Gulden said they were returned (from Britain, I think) about two years ago. Both are significant early theologians and names I have become even more familiar with as I have learned to write icons and learned more about Orthodoxy.

We said our goodbyes to Gulden about one-thirty and spent the afternoon roaming around on our own. We crossed the street and entered the Basilica Cistern, built by the Romans. We had no idea what we were going to see. I was expecting the equivalent of a big well. What I found was a huge underground cavern supported by beautiful Roman columns (the whole thing was twelve rows of twenty eight columns, each twenty seven feet high). They were playing wonderfully atmospheric music as we walked the wooden platforms through the cistern. Once again, I was surprised. When we came out we were hungry, so we stopped at the first restaurant we came to, which was a tourist trap and surprised us with how much they wanted for their food. We then wandered through the Grand Bazaar, a marketplace dating back centuries – and also a tourist trap — that stretches for blocks and has grown and morphed to presently house over four thousand little shops, all of whom have the best prices and, as one of them said, will be happy to help you spend your money. The instructions the guides give are to ignore the barkers and salespeople. If you act like they are not there, they will leave you alone after a bit. Ignore them long enough and you become numb to their presence.

We got out of there quickly, after feeling as though we had gotten a taste of what it was like, and found our way to Cidgem Pastanasi, a bakery and pastry shop recommended by the folks at Lonely Planet. We sat at a sidewalk table and I had some of the best baklava I have ever tasted. My senses were restored.

While we sat at our sidewalk table, the calls to prayer began and, as with every other time we have had a chance to watch people respond, no one stopped or changed what they were doing to pray or even acknowledge the calls were going out. The haunting chants appear to be little more than white noise. Yet, another surprise, I suppose, and a disappointing one. Is it so easy to fill our lives with noise that God’s voice becomes just another in the cacophonous chorus? (Did that really need to be a question?)

We decided to start back to the streets around our hotel, which are in a little bit more economical section and inhabited by both Turks and tourists living on a budget. We bought things in two shops where the shopkeepers were not hard sellers and the prices were fair (another surprise) and ended up for dinner at Doy Doy (another Lonely Planet suggestion and two blocks from our hotel) where we both ate for less than what it cost to feed one of us at lunch. By the time we finished dinner and began walking home, the calls to prayer were pealing out once more. Gulden talked about the origin of the prayers five times a day, accompanied by ritual cleansing and body positions as one prays, coming out of life in the desert. The washing of the hands, feet, head, ears, and neck three times before praying would have refreshed the desert traveler; the prayer positions would have served as stretching exercises: the practice of prayer was a way to stay healthy in more ways than one. Here, far away from the desert, few seemed willing to stretch their muscles, both physical and spiritual.

For all of the day’s surprises, what we noticed most was not new to us or new to the world. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “And every common bush afire with God; And only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

She’s right, you know; I saw her words become flesh right before my eyes.

Peace,
Milton

Our first full day in Istanbul has come to a close.

We arrived yesterday evening, landing on the eastern edge of Europe to be met by Onal, our host from Kirkit Travel, with whom we have only communicated by email to this point. It was nice to know that someone who knew our name really was there to pick us up from the airport. We we teaken to the Tashkonak Hotel, which is within walking distance of the Blue Mosque, as well as in singing distance of it and several others; even in a short time, we have become accustomed to hearing the Muslim calls to prayer beaming out from the minarets five times a day. Since Istanbul has 3,200 mosques (and the population is 94% Muslim), the wonderfully melodic calls stack on top of each other in serendipitous harmony as their different songs and styles float across the city.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Istanbul is city of 14 million people. As I said, 94% of them are Muslim. Three and a half percent are Christians (157 churches) and one half of a percent of the population is Jewish (with twenty-two synagogues). Can you tell I paid attention on the tour? Our tour guide, Alsi, took us to the Blue Mosque, the Hippodrome, the Aya Sophia, lunch along the water, the Sulemanni Mosque, and the Topkapi Palace, all the while filling our heads with facts and stories, which run deep in this place.

For her, history began with the founding of Constantinople in the late fourth century. Constantine built a city and named it after himself. She told it as though nothing significant had happened here before that. Yet, the Greeks had had a city here – Byzantium – centuries before Christ; the Romans had been here, too. But Turkish history seems to work hard to leave the Greeks out of as much as they can; the Greeks are happy to return the favor, still refusing to call Constantinople by the Turkish name it has had for almost a century: Istanbul.

No matter who we are, when it comes to history we tell the story the way we need to hear it – or perhaps the way we wish it had been – which then allows us to see the present the way we want it to be as well.

The two mosques were beautiful and quite active with both tourists and worshippers. We all had to take off our shoes, but those of us who came to look were limited in the parts of building where we could go. At Suleman’s Mosque, we saw where the men wash themselves before they pray to purify their hearts in prayer so both bocy and soul be clean. Aya Sophia began as an Orthodox church, was converted to a Catholic church after the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (they were supposed to go to Egypt but didn’t get that far, so they wasted this city instead), remaining so for about fifty years until becoming Orthodox again, only to becoming a mosque when the Muslims conquered the city. One of the rulers who followed made it into a museum, so it is the one building we saw where both Christian and Islamic symbols of worship exist side by side, though no official worship takes place in the building. I found a sort of strange comfort and hope in seeing the images side by side.

At one point along the way, our group got to go around the circle and tell where we were from. It was then I realized that this is the first time I have been in a tourist city where the majority of the tourists are not American. We had twenty five people on our bus with people from Croatia, Serbia, Iran, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Mexico, Germany, Romania, Portugal, and Pakistan. Ginger and I were the only Americans. I’ve never thought about where Croatians and Serbs go on vacation before.

We ate lunch with Sohail, a Pakistani banker, who was a very pleasant and gentle man. He lived in the US for ten years and went to the University of Chicago. His wife, I found out, grew up in Lusaka, Zambia and went to the same school I had attended when I lived there (though several years after me) . He had a deep love for his country and couldn’t say enough about how much we would enjoy it if we were to go there. He and his wife had been in the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center just weeks before September 11, 2001; he spoke with fondness about their time there and with sadness about the attacks.

We talked about the differences in how governments act and how the people they supposedly represent actually feel. None of us felt particularly well represented by our leaders. They are retelling history, or at least repackaging it, to fit where they need it to fit so they can convince us what they say is the way things really are, the primary message being, “Be afraid; be very afraid.”

Why do we settle for that?

When we came out of the Sulemanni Mosque, I asked the guy from Iran how the mosques we had seen compared to the ones in his country. He told me very energetically how much larger and more beautiful the mosques were in Iran, going into significant detail. Then he said, “I am not Muslim; I’m Christian. But the mosques are beautiful.”

Iran is 97% Muslim and I got to talk to an Irani Christian who was in Istanbul on vacation. Even as our governments sling ultimatums, we were walking the cobblestones streets trying to understand each other.

I know the diplomatic problems of the world won’t be solved by a day long tour on a bus. I know fuzzy little anecdotes about multicultural munch outs are not necessarily substantive. I know there’s a lot of crap going on out there that makes it easy to choose to be frightened. I also know I don’t want fear to get the last word.

When we left the palace, the bus turned down a narrow little street to begin dropping us off at our hotels. From the first narrow street, he turned down a smaller one, cutting the corner closely. When the left rear tires cut across the curb and manhole cover, the pavement gave way and the back wheels dropped into the hole. We were stuck. We all got off the bus so another one could take us to our various lodgings. Ginger and I were close enough to the Tashkonak to walk, which also afforded us the chance to find the restaurant where we wanted to eat dinner. One of the tour company folks gave us directions back to our hotel which took us down some small and very quiet streets. For five minutes or so, we were pretty lost; then we found a street we knew and, soon after, the hotel. It was a little unnerving, but mostly because the city is new to us; we were not threatened by anyone.

The last paragraph is not intended to be either allegorical or parabolic. Take it at face value: here in a country that borders those whom CNN and Fox tell me are all throwing fits and chanting, “Death to America,” I spent a fascinating day getting to know people who are as unsure of what my government is trying to do as I am of theirs. As the calls to prayer wafted through the night air like an exotic aroma, I found comfort and was moved to pray as much with them as for them.

Peace,
Milton

Friday was our final full day in Athens and we had nothing planned. It was a great day.

One of our favorite things to do in a foreign city is to just hang out and that is what we did. After breakfast on Greek time (about 9:30), we walked up the street to a bookstore called Eleftheroudakis and found our way up to the café on the sixth floor (the store had nine stories). Along the way we stopped and browsed, picking up a couple of things. Ginger settled into her seat in the café to finish reading her book on Orthodoxy and I went back to the second floor to look at cookbooks. I returned with my treasures, got a cup of coffee for myself, and we read and talked until we decided to walk towards where we planned to eat lunch. It was a little after two o’clock when we left the bookstore.

Part of our conversation was about things we have learned while being in Greece. Here are a few of them:

— A Greek salad doesn’t have any lettuce in it and is not covered in “Greek” dressing. It is simply quartered tomatoes, thinly sliced red onions, cucumbers,
Kalamata olives, feta cheese (with a little dried oregano sprinkled on top), and
olive oil.
— Feta cheese and Kalamata olives are appropriate any time you eat (and good, too).
— Ouzo tastes like a liquid Twizzler with a mean kick (and I kind of like it).
— Americans make up most of the people in the world who only speak one language. (That’s not a new lesson, but one that bothers me.)
— There is such a thing as enough. Though their standard of living is not as high as what we know in the States, the Greeks are more content. They have fewer possessions and yet more time to drink coffee and enjoy life. They build their houses in stages as they can pay for them so they don’t have to take out mortgages. One of the business people on our trip commented that the reason the Greek economy isn’t growing is because there isn’t much economic flow since people don’t borrow much money. I’ve never thought about debt helping to drive an economy.
— Once you’ve been a way from work for a week you learn a whole new level of relaxation.
— You can do a bunch of things with eggplant.
— Until they speak, it’s hard to tell the difference between Italian teenagers and
American teenagers – except that on high school trips the Italians can smoke and
drink late into the night without getting in trouble.
— Italian teenage boys love Paul Pierce and the Boston Celtics (or at least those whom we’ve recently polled).
— We should all call our cable companies and demand they give us the international version of CNN rather than the cheese that passes for journalism on our cable channels; the folks over here actually get to know what is going on in the world rather than being kept informed as to the whereabouts of Tom Cruise and Jessica Simpson.
— Greek people think Ginger is one of them.

After we left the bookstore, we wandered down some streets we had been before and some we had not, ending up back in the Plaka, the market area below the Acropolis. The narrow streets separate the pastel colored row houses and apartment buildings, each one filled with shops and cafes. We were headed to Taverna Byzantino, which we had read about in one of our guidebooks, to eat lunch. By the time we meandered to our desired destination, ordered, and looked at our watches, it was six o’clock. We were right on schedule in this Mediterranean world: we would be ready for dinner about midnight. We ate and took our time walking back to the hotel. We stopped by the dining room to see who from the remnants of our tour group was there and to catch up with Duane and Robin in particular. They came in around eight thirty; we closed down the dining room and then moved up to the Olive Garden (the rooftop restaurant in the hotel, not the American chain), which is where we met the Italian teenagers. We finished out last night in Athens talking and drinking with our new friends while we looked at the Parthenon illuminated by spotlights atop the Acropolis.

I never imagined I could write such a sentence and it would be nonfiction.

Here’s another one: we are now in to Istanbul.

Growing up overseas has left me somewhat uncomfortable as an American. I like that I can find Burundi, Bulgaria, and Burkina Faso on a map and that I can feel comfortable in most any place, and I struggle, as a Third Culture Kid, to feel at home anywhere. Walking the streets of Athens, going into bathrooms and reading signs that tell you not to put the toilet paper in the toilet (they have a special trash can – the sewer system can’t take the paper), talking to the chef in the restaurant who works full time for one thousand Euros a month (and paid 300,000 Euros for a small apartment), and seeing gasoline selling for over five dollars a gallon (when we complain about it getting to three), makes me mindful of how much we consume as Americans when we are such a small part of the world population. We have gotten used to a “normal lifestyle” that is unrealistic by world standards; the planet couldn’t take it if everyone lived the way we do.

That said, I like having sewers that work and a house by the beach and many of the comforts of the culture in which I live. The creative tension between those two poles is fed in me by trips like this. Living in a global economy means more than all my sneakers are made in China and the guy who answers the computer help line seems to always be somewhere in India. If history without a face means nothing, the same is true of the present tense. As Americans, we listen to the news about Iraq because we know people who have been sent there; we miss the details on Darfur because wholesale suffering is hard to grasp.

On the first page of Zorba the Greek, my novel for the plane ride, one of the characters says, “This world’s a life sentence.” That’s one way to look at it; the other is to let Louis Armstrong provide the soundtrack: “And I think to myself, ‘What a wonderful world.’” Once again, the power is in the creative tension between the poles. We have seen beautiful and amazing things, both natural and human, from the Aegean coastline to Mount Parnassus, from the Parthenon to Philippi, and we have stopped to feed homeless people on the streets of Athens and seen the news reports of the terrorist attacks in Egypt.

I don’t know how to respond to all the information I have about what is going on in the world and what needs to be done. I know I can’t do it all and I know the world cannot afford for me to do nothing. Though I can start by meeting the needs in front of my face, I am also called to put a face on sorrow and despair faraway from me; yet another creative tension in which to live. And we must live in it for there are too many lives in the balance.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve been tryıng sınce yesterday evenıng to post about our last day ın Athens. The wıreless networks have conspıred agaınst me. We’re ın Istanbul and havıng fun. More tomorrow.

Peace,
Mılton

For the first time all week, we didn’t have to catch an early morning bus; our trip to Corinth didn’t begin until 12:30, which, in Greece, does not mean after lunch – the meal times run a bit later. We left the hotel and drove along the Aegean coastline to the bottom of the Corinthian Canal, which connects the Aegean and Ionian Seas. People have been trying to figure out how to connect the two bodies of water, which are only separated by 6.2 kilometers of land, for centuries. One ruler dreamed of a canal a millennium before Christ. Another realized he didn’t have the technology for a canal, but built a stone road which allowed for ships to be pulled from the water and rolled on giant tree trunks across the land to the other side rather than make the six hundred mile journey around the Peloponnese, so Corinth became a city with two harbors. That road was used for centuries. The canal, as it stands today, was constructed in the nineteenth century and remains the third deepest canal in the world, behind Suez and Panama.

At the end of the day, we stopped for coffee at the other end of the canal; here are a couple of pictures.

Corinth has had several incarnations as a city, all of them with attitude. Edward Stourton quotes H. V. Morton’s picture of Corinth as

a city built on a narrow neck of land, with the eastern harbour full of Egyptian, Asiatic, and Phoenician galleys, while the western harbor was full of the cargo boats of Italy, Spain, and the Adriatic. Wagons must have been constantly crossing the few miles from Cenchreae with the good of Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria for transshipment to the west at Lechaeum; and a reverse line of wagons from Lechaeum must have carried western merchandise to Cenchreae from transshipment to the Orient. No wonder that Corinth, situated between two such ports, developed a cosmopolitanism tinged with the vices of the foreign nations
whose ships lay in her harbours. (120-21)

The ruins we saw were of the Roman city built by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. The Romans razed the city that stood before that one in 146 BCE because the Corinthians were too rebellious – and kind of nasty, too. Stourton says what really ticked the Romans off was the way “its rebellious citizens threw turds into their chariots as they passed” (120). That will get you in trouble in most any country. Besides being rebellious, the city was Vegas without the lights: a place where any appetite could be gorged without any guilt at all. What happened in Corinth stayed in Corinth.

Walking the ruins here was particularly meaningful because we have a more detailed account of Paul’s feelings for and dealings with the Corinthian church than we do any other, thanks to the two letters we know as 1 and 2 Corinthians. (There were at least two more letters that we don’t have – ours, as best we know, are really 2 and 4 Corinthians.) There is also particular evidence that connects the archeological discoveries with the New Testament. Erastus was a government official mentioned in one of the lists of people Paul mentions at the end of the letter to the Romans (Romans 16:23: Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus, greet you). We saw a stone inscribed with Erastus’ name and title in the ruins that have been unearthed.

Beyond that, walking the streets of a city – the largest Roman forum in Greece – where the church had drawn such deep emotion from Paul, and such amazing writing, spoke to the heart of our faith which has come down through the centuries:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

The legacy of what has been done in the name of God over the centuries is not necessarily admirable. Many of the Acropoli in the cities we saw held the remnants of fortresses built during the Crusades when “Christian” soldiers destroyed the cities that stood in Jesus’ name, thinking God’s cause could be advanced by armies. They were wrong. The layers of civilization we have seen, stone stacked on fallen stone, demonstrate again and again that those who live by the sword will die by it as well. As obvious as that lesson is, we have yet to learn it.

The legacy of faith was passed down incarnationally, from person to person, in love. Even if Constantine had not made Christianity the official religion of the empire, or the Popes had not amassed such wealth and power, walking among the ruins and listening to the stories, I believe our faith would have still traveled the centuries to find us because of people like Paul and Phoebe (who let the Corinthian church meet in her house), down the days and dreams until the list of names would include our own. Love never ends.

Our trip to Corinth marked the last official segment of our group tour. All of us are headed in different directions from here. Ginger and I have Friday to do nothing but be together in Athens and then we head for Turkey and a whole different kind of experience. As we neared Athens last night, we sang, “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.” We said goodbye to Betty, who has been amazing, and to Christos, our bus driver, and wished each other blessings as well. Our group will never be together again as we were this past week. Nothing stays the same.

And love never ends.

Peace,
Milton

PS — Today marks my 100th post, a landmark significant to me, I suppose, yet still worth marking.

We took a step away from Paul’s travels to make a sojourn to Delphi yesterday, but first, we went to Kalambaka to an iconographer’s workshop. Every souvenir stand has copies of icons, but Betty encouraged us to wait until we got to the studio to buy any of them. I’m glad we took her advice.

The bus pulled up in a rather industrial parking lot and wewalked up the wide stairs to the second floor of a warehouse building where we found the workshop. The sister of the Orthodox priest, who is the primary iconographer, showed us the woodworking room, where they cut and carve the boards; the racks where they stretch the canvas and then cover it with a mix of animal glue and mastic; and the studio, where she also showed us the stages of icon writing. The walls of that room were covered with shelves full of finished icons, so, after the presentation, many of us purchased them. This is what I have been waiting for. I bought an icon of St. Paul,, which seemed appropriate for this trip. Later, I realized how deeply moved I was by the experience: I didn’t take any pictures. Here is a picture of the icon I bought, taken in our hotel room.

From there we began the four hour trek to Delphi, which was the home of the most famous oracle of the ancient world. We climbed up and down mountains until we ended up in the foothills of Mount Parnassus and the ruins of Delphi. The first temple was built there, to Gaia, the Earth goddess, in the third millennium BCE. In the eleventh century BCE, the first temples for the oracle were built. What is left now are the layers of building and rebuilding. At the lowest level, where the shops for people to buy gifts for the gods and souvenirs for the ride home would have been, we could see the Greek layer, covered by the Roman layer, covered by Byzantine marble marked with crosses. From the shops, we zigzagged up the hill to the Treasury of Athens, the Temple of Apollo (where the oracle was housed), the amphitheater (where performances were held when the oracle was not speaking), and – at the very top – the athletic venue (even the fans would have had to be in shape).

Once a year, the oracle spoke. Both governments and individuals came from all over the Known World to ask questions and seek advice. We stood at the top of the hill, looking down over the valley that was hours drive from any significant metropolis, and would have been an incredible journey for those walking and riding from the many city-states around Greece. According to Betty, the power of the oracle lay in two things: the amount of information available and the ambiguous answers given, which called people to make their own choices. The oracle was not a carnival fortune teller, reading tea leaves or palms to say you were going to meet a dark and handsome stranger. There was a network of spies, or information gatherers that covered the Greek world and fed the information back to Delphi. When the questions were asked (should we go to war?), the answers were given (if you do, a great empire will be destroyed) and then the decision was left to the inquirer (is she talking about my empire, or my enemy’s?). The lesson we humans have had to learn down through history is our decisions have consequences; there is no magic formula.

The sheer scale of both the natural landscape and the human construction was humbling. As I walked, I wondered what ruins will be found from our lives a millennium or two from now. Shopping malls. Maybe a stadium or two. I asked the question of one of our group and he replied, “We don’t have anything that will last that long.” And people will probably still be coming to Delphi.

As we walked, we encountered people from all over the world. An Italian woman stopped Ginger to ask a question. Ginger does not speak Italian, and the woman did not speak English, but Ginger said she spoke “un poquito Espanol.” So did the Italian woman. The two of them stood among the giant columns, saying all the Spanish vocabulary words they knew, trying to connect. I ran into some American college students at lunch. When I asked where they were from, they said New York and New Jersey. When I told them I was from Boston, one of the guys said, “Oh, that part of the world.” He laughed.

So did I. “At least this far away from home we can act like friends, right?” I asked him.

Our group is made up of people from Arizona, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Connecdticut, and Rhode Island. Ginger and I are the only two that aren’t with a larger church group; We are also the least conservative theologically, by far. And everyone has worked hard to connect, rather than debate or differentiate. This trip is a pilgrimage for all of us, even though what is sacred differs from one to another. We are fellow travelers, on the road together, as Christians have done for about as long as there have been Christians.

As we left Delphi and began our descent back to Athens, which was another three hours, we sang hymns together, which seemed the most appropriate response to the grandeur of nature that cradled us as we rode.

O Lord, my God, when I, in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder –
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee –
How great thou art, how great thou art

For five thousand years people traveled that valley with a sense of awe and wonder, searching divine guidance. What they learned we felt as we rode and sang together: God speaks first through those with whom we share the journey.

Peace,
Milton

Yesterday, we packed up and left Thessaloniki and drove to Veroia, which is the modern version of the ancient city of Berea where Paul visited. There was a small outdoor mosaic altar where we had our morning devotional and then we all took off for the local cafes to find the bathrooms, or WCs as they call them here. Many of us came back with little snacks from the cafes as well. From there we continued our trek to Meteoria, a lovely little village at the foot of some amazing rock formations, atop of which stand six monasteries.

By the time we got to town, it was lunch, so we had yet another amazing meal and then began working our way up the switchback road to the first monastery where we could take pictures. The decision to build at the top of these giant rock pillars began with hermits settling in the caves above the town, the first of whom was Barnabas in 985 CE. Later, in the fourteenth century, a monk named Neilos decided to build a small church. In 1382, another monk, Athanasios, built the first monastery at the top of one of the rocks. How they ever got up there in the first place, I don’t know, but they soon rigged a net that allowed them to hoist both people and supplies from the valley below. By the time construction was finished, there were twenty-four high altitude monasteries, none of which was accessible by any other means than the nets.

The Ottoman Occupation sent the monasteries into disrepair because the monks had to flee and no one did anything to them for four hundred years and by the nineteenth century they were in ruins. When the Greeks ran the Ottomans out, the monasgteries were reestablished on a smaller basis; today only six exist: four for priests and two for nuns. Stairs were added in the 1920s. The largest has about fifteen monks; the smallest has one. In the sixties, when the Greek government realized tourism could help them keep the monasteries in shape, they built roads so folks like us could get there without relying on a rope hoist. We went inside two of them, Holy Triinity and Varlaam.

The wall paintings in the churches of both were amazing. Betty our guide, did an incredible job of explaining the logic behind the way the iconographic images were painted on the walls. The narthex was covered with paintings of saints being martyred. There were images of them being beheaded, beaten, stoned, and even skinned. The images were to remind worshippers of the price paid for faith. “They show the two most important things for a Christian,” Betty said, “to be patient and to be faithful.” The icons were done by iconographers from the Cretan school. The colors were dark and subdued; the images were stern and, well, not very handsome.

“The Greek art always shows youth,” Betty said. “The ancient Greeks thought the most important things were to be young, rich, and beautiful. The icons were meant to show that those things did not matter. These are not young people, or rich, and of course they are not beautiful. Look at them.” She smiled. “The icons are painted so you will look at the eyes, so you will see the spirit. They show the beauty of the spirit.”

Inside the church she showed us how the architecture and the icons worked together, giving us a cosmological lesson of the universe: earth and sky. The dome at the top of the church was an icon of Christ Pantocrator (creator of all), flanked by angels, and supported on each of four columns by the four gospel writers. Below them – between earth and sky – were scenes, beginning with the Annunciation to Mary and ending with the Ascension, which showed the life of Christ. (We were not allowed to take pictures in either church, other than the one I took before I read the sign.)

“One of the main reasons these scenes were painted over and over in many churches,” Betty said, “was so the people could learn the stories. They could not read, but they could learn from the icons.”

We came out of the churches and out on to balconies that hung over the valley far, far below. Creation was telling the same story; the rocks were crying out. Even as we walked the forest trail from the road above to the second monastery, I could swear I heard the trees clap their hands. It is spring here and the trees are almost fully leafed. The ground is covered with wildflowers and the air full of bird calls. The one I recognized was the mourning dove. I love that Betty took the time for a walk in the woods in the middle of our tour.

I started reading Paul: A Visionary Life by Edward Stourton as we drove. The author is a journalist with the BBC and does a wonderful job bringing fresh eyes to look at Paul and what we make of what we know about him. He has given me new insights in several places, or at least challenged my presuppositions. Paul was a passionate, brilliant, sometimes arrogant, compassionate, tenacious, belligerent, complicated human being. And he, more than any other one person, is the reason Christianity is a world wide religion and not a small historical sect. Stourton paints a picture of a man who was deeply committed and passionate in his faith, administratively adept, politically astute, and relationally opportunistic. He paints the picture without one ounce of cynicism. He admires Paul and doesn’t let his admiration get in the way of the picture of who the man really is. Like the iconographers, Stourton paints a picture that allows us to see the beauty of the spirit.

The hermits climbed into the cave; the monks found a way to live our their calling on the top of the mountain; Paul traveled over twelve thousand miles on his missionary journeys trying to live out his faith; and we wound our way up and down the hills, rubbing up against them all, on a pilgrimage of our own. I don’t understand how the monks live their lives in seclusion and Paul is sometimes hard for me to grasp, yet we all help to tell the story of faith, which winds like a mountain road to the most unexpected places.

Peace,
Milton