It was an Antioch that the disciples were first called …… (Acts 13:3)
[Subtitle. Paul's little rant]
A deep lethargy set in when I arrived back in Israel just on a week ago. I had the whole week to blog but felt uninspired. Superlatives like fantastic, amazing and brilliant without any reason or explanation just didn’t seem to encompass the fantastic, amazing and brilliant experiences of the previous 25 days. I could describe Ephesus as fantastic, amazing and brilliant but so are the Bulldogs!!! Hence my dilemma.
What I needed was a change of emotion. And it came to me in the shape of anger. Tomorrows first reading for the Feast of St Barnabas it taken from Acts of the Apostles. Verse 13:3 reads It was at Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians.
Well, I can boast that I have been to Antioch which is modern day Antaykya and it is fantastic, amazing and brilliant. But, here is the cruel punch line; we can read Acts 13:3 as much and as often and as proudly and loudly as we like and we can even give boppy youth groups the same catchy name but (and this is a BIG but) but there ain’t a single Christian left there now!!!!
Turkey is fantastic, amazing and brilliant. In fact I can quite honestly say that I was greatly taken by all things Turkish (with Turkish Delight comming high up on that list).
This is the soil of the first Christians,
the first martyrs,
the first Church Councils (Nicea, Chalcedon and Ephesus are all in modern day Turkey),
the Church Fathers arose from this Land – Sts Basil, Gregory, Ambrose,
it was in Turkey that John wrote his Gospel and the Book of Revelation,
it was here that Paul preached to the Romans (who were in Ephesus after the Hittites and Greeks and before the Byzantines) and got himself thrown into jail and eventually martyred,
Even Santa Claus made his debut in Turkey under the name of St Nicholas of Myra. I had my photo taken with his finger bones, the rest of him was stolen by Italian relic bandits in the 9th Century.
Tradition say’s that Our Lady lived out her earthly days with St John just outside of a place called Selcuk …. yes, in modern day Turkey.
And finally, did I mention the Turkish Delight!
And all this happened in a place where there is now not a single Christian community fully intact. What happened? Where did they all go? Why didn’t anybody say anything / do anything / try to stop it happening? As I travelled the country I felt overjoyed by seeing these amazing places while under the surface I was starting to question why these 1700 year old churches where now called museums. For the first time in I couldn’t flash my priest smile and get into a church free of charge, it was strictly 10Lira each visit. The only Christian symbols that brought my fellow back packers to prayer and contemplation were the rows of crosses in the fields of Gallipoli and Lone Pine. Very telling.
How can you love something and be deeply angered by it at the same time? If we believe that Church = People, then we must conclude that we have stood by and watched much of our root system wilt and die. So many Catholics see Rome as their centre but (the odd truth) is that Christianity is very much a Middle Eastern religion. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which is technically Palestine and not Israel.
Allow me the briefest church history lesson (that if you haven’t long since scrolled down looking for the absent video clips and pictures): In their valiant but misguided quest to free the Holy Land from the Muslims or “infidels” (from where we get the modern word infidelity) the Crusaders raped and pillaged their way through what was then a very Orthodox Christian Constantinople, (modern day Istanbul / Turkey). This led to the eventual shameful split between the Roman (or Latin) Church and the Eastern (or Orthodox) Church. It also weakened Constantinople to such an extent that it made it easy prey for the advancing march of Islam.
You can blame Attaturk (the founder of modern day Turkey) for the massacre of the Armenian and Iraqi Christians and the deportation of the ‘Greeks’ (who had lived in Turkey for 1600 years – yes, 1600) but the truth is that we (the Roman church) just stood by and watched it all happen. My theory would be that part of the reason we failed to act was that we still felt the shame of our actions 900 years earlier. Stolen artefacts are still held in the Vatican museum and requests by the Orthodox Patriachate for their return have been processed at a slower-than-snails pace.
Sometimes it is necessary to swallow our pride, offer an apology for the sins of the past and work together for a healthy future.
Perhaps I should stick to “this place is fantastic, amazing and brilliant” because (in all truth) it most certainly is.
End of rant,
Paul
PS. Still no pics – and it’s not my fault. I may need to ditch this site and go to another blog provider.
