pat loughery

Day 2: October 21, 2008

For the first time in four days here, I slept through the night but for the 5AM prayer over the speakers. I even slept through my alarm watch, though perhaps it wasn’t set for the right time anyway. When the room phone rang I knew immediately what was happening – Robert Calvert told me it was 8AM and worship was beginning. My roommate, Coz Crosscombe, had gotten up much earlier and decided I must need the rest.

I threw on my clothes and arrived as the group was underway, and my friend from Celtic Trail and host during this trip, Mihai Pavel, read the Biblical story of Jesus taking bread and fish and feeding a multitude with small, broken fragments.

In this cultural setting with 90% of the city being Muslim and visiting Christian historical sites that have been transformed for use by Islam, this part of the story had deeper meaning for me. Small, broken fragments are an image of Christianity in history during its early, pre-Constantinian empire days. It is easy to argue that from Christianity’s transition to a state religion through today, the minority of devoted, dedicated disciples of Jesus compared to the larger number of cultural believers can be illustrated by this image also.

Mihai read a quote from Gerald Gray, which I tried to capture in my notes. It went something like this:

“Orthodoxy works in a different conceptual frame than the one of the western tradition. When we refer to orthodoxy we are into another world even if the words we are using look the same.”

In this tradition and culture, time has a different meaning. History and stories are treated differently than in the Western tradition. As I have studied this spirituality, it is striking that words may mean different things as well, so meanings can shift. In history, we have seen that is true; what appears to be a small difference in understanding of theology or practice (do you hold two fingers or three together when you make the sin of the cross, or does the Spirit proceed from the Father or the Father and the Son?) has deep meaning and people have fought and died for their perspectives.

This topic arose at our introductory dinner, with one of my fellow students asking how we felt about the Orthodox position on theosis, the idea that we become more and more united with Christ, hopefully reaching a state that we are fully as He is. Not wanting to start out the class with a divisive debate, I said that I thought much of what we were learning about Orthodoxy is very similar to what evangelicals traditionally believe, but we use different terms for the same things and we use some similar terms differently.

For introductions we went around the circle introducing ourselves. As this happened, a significant thought struck me. I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with my D. Min after I’m done, and two things have come to mind – I’d like to help to teach spiritual formation, perhaps in a way similar to how Dale Pollard is doing for an upcoming BGU course I’m planning to take with him in spring or to how David Nixon does with Sustainable Faith in Cincinnati. The other thing is that I love the experiential learning model in the Trails, and during both trips I’ve wondered if there was a way I could help BGU with trails. During this circle time, it struck me that it may be very helpful to have a spiritual director available on the trip to help students process what they are experiencing. I know that for my own Trails, I’ve had strong a-ha moments that I didn’t expect, and the role of a spiritual director is listen to a directee and to identify threads and moments that help midwife the work of God in a person’s life. I want to talk more with BGU staff about the possibility of helping in this capacity with upcoming trails so that students can process their experience along the way as completely as possible.

Later in this Trail I was able to talk with Shirley Akers about the idea, and I will continue to pursue the possibility.

We drove our bus through Istanbul with a tour guide pointing out some features of the city and arrived at the Ecumenical Patriarch’s facility. Unlike the Roman Catholic church which has the Pope (or Bishop of Rome) as its undisputed leader, the Orthodox Church is led by local and national level bishops. The national bishops relate to one another in a peer community, although the bishops hold varying places of honor based upon the historical importance of the cities they serve.

One of the five primary bishops of the worldwide Orthodox church, the Ecumenical Patriarch is considered the most honored among the five peers because of the historical importance of the city of Constantinople (which laer became Istanbul when it fell to the Ottomans). His Holiness was involved in some ecumenical meetings and unable to meet with us, but his Public Relations director spoke to us about the role of this institution.

To be honest, I wasn’t able to hear much of the lecture as I needed to sit and rest my leg, but I was able to take some good pictures and catch bits and pieces of the conversation.

One piece of the conversation which I was able to overhear struck me as unfortunate. One of the students asked our host about the Orthodox mission to Istanbul, given the church’s tenuous position in this overwhelmingly Muslim city and country. His response was that the church had all the work it could do in surviving, and had no goals to grow. Although I recognize that I do not understand the Muslim-Orthodox relationship in this city or in Turkey as a whole, I have come to strongly believe that a church movement is dying when it is only trying to survive . A movement which is trying to grow in the midst of impossible situations is poised for success. Because Christianity is renewed generation after generation, I hope to see the Orthodox church thrive in Istanbul.

It must be noted that the topic of mission in the orthodox church is a wholly different question among Orthodox than it is among evangelicals, which this journal will discuss later. As a brief note at this time, I will say that for the Orthodox, the goal of the community is worship (Orthodoxy, after all, means right worship), not evangelistic conversion.

After the lecture we moved into the church building and were given a tour of this majestic church. It marked my first time in an Orthodox church, ansd the liturgical elements were sacred and beautiful. The building was much smaller than I expected, perhaps not even ten thousand square feet. Low-hanging chandeliers were in the middle of the room, and past that was the gold iconostasis, the wall that holds painted icons which are representations of Jesus, Mary, other apostles and prophets. Icons are a core element of Orthodox faith, and while I have seen them before I haven’t seen them in the context of a full wall, glittering in the low light.

The aroma of incense filled the air. The Orthodox are intentional about engaging all five senses to reflect the celebration of humanity introduced at the Incarnation, when God became fully human and fully God in Christ. The theology and practical outworking of a deep theology of incarnation is a central factor for Orthodoxy, and icons and incense are seen as reflections of the value of incarnation in the church’s continuing worship experience.

A sense of history is thick in this building as well, from the icons of saints to the relics, which are sacred items from history. In this church there was a granite column which had been brought to Constantinople from Jerusalem and which was believed to be the pillar that Jesus was tied to when he was flogged at the crucifixion. There were caskets containing the remains of three saints whose legacy included post-death miracles. On the other side of the room were relics from two great saints of the Christian church, John Chrysostum and ?? In this case, relics were bones from their bodies.

These bones are used in ceremonies of dedication for new church buildings, and sometimes even embedded in the building itself. This is one of the most unique portions of Orthodoxy for me. Saints are recognized by the Church by some form of consensus, with no specific office of people doing this work as there is in Roman Catholicism. Some of the identifying markers of sainthood include miracles occurring after the person’s death (most frequently healing), people making pilgrimages to markers from the person’s life, the lack of decay in their physical body, miraculous generation of oils and other holy substances, and sweet aromas instead of the smell of decay in the physical body.

As a result of this theology, the relics (bones) from saints are venerated just as if the person were there. Our guide, Nicolas, said this: “It’s problematic for us to think of a soul without a body. They’re together. Therefore where the body exists, something of the soul does as well.”

There is in Orthodoxy a strong connection from life to death. The transition is not as abrupt or final as our cultural understanding in the West, especially as we’re abstracted from death. In the presence of relics, Orthodox believers behave in the same way they would if the saint were there in pre-death form.

This discussion, surprisingly, didn’t feel wrong or creepy to me. In fact, it gave me some comfort in at least these ways: First, I believe that the Orthodox understanding of death and life-after-death is holistic and careful. They understand what Paul calls the “great cloud of witnesses” in Hebrews better than we do. But more importantly, it reminded me of an event that happened after my father’s death.

My dad died at 49 after a long bout with cancer. He had met Christ around a decade before and had a deeply personal relationship with his God, and had matured in his faith very well. After his death, the family was given a private viewing of his embalmed body in the funeral home as is customary in our culture. This was emotionally very difficult, although I noticed at the time that the mortician had somehow captured Dad’s sense of mirth in his eyes. He appeared to me to be smiling in the way he did when a good joke was underway.

But more importantly, each of us in the room smelled the aroma of roses. I thought it was probably from a bouquet that the funeral director had set out or perhaps from some decorative incense but there wasn’t anything noticeable nearby. My mother smelled it also, as my brother and sister did, and we asked the funeral director, but he hadn’t placed any flowers. At the time we believed it to be a spiritual experience, an aroma of worship that God was granting to us to help us to grieve and to celebrate Dad’s arrival into the presence of God. Hearing the Orthodox tradition in this area, I’m been more convinced that what I smelled at this viewing was a sacred experience

We next went to Haggia Sophia, the great church that was a pride of early Christianity. It was just a block way from the hostel I had stayed at. We paid our entrance fee and then toured the building. It is stunning and majestic. It is massive and its engineering is brilliant. The great dome being nearly 100 feet wide is awe-inspiring, as is the fact that the building was built in the 500s in a short six-year time span by either 7000 or 10000 slaves (we heard both during this tour). The building has stood for 1500 years, which is simply mind-blowing. The engineering and construction work are exquisite

It is beautifully adorned. However when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and drove the Christians out of the city, they changed the nature of the building from a church to a mosque. Since Islam prohibits images in worship, they plastered over the majestic painted icons throughout the building and they placed six giant round discs on the walls, each proclaiming a name of Allah. I found it an odd mix of religions, since the architecture didn’t fit, the colors didn’t fit and the discs stood out as tacky to my artistic taste, let alone my religious sensibility.

After the state of Turkey was established in the 20^th century, the government chose to turn Haggia Sophia into a museum. In that capacity they restored some of the pre-Muslim artwork in the building. Most importantly to me, they have begun to restore some of the mosaic icons, one of which was stunning and holy. It is a depiction of the Last Judgment, with Jesus in the center flanked by his mother Mary (in the Orthodox tradition, “theotokos” or God-bearer), and John the Baptist. Simply taken as art, the sense of emotion and presence of the three figures were striking. However, iicons are created not just as art to be admired, but to act as sacramental items, drawing us into the presence of God for worship as we identify with the life of the person depicted.

I’ve read about icons for this trip, and this was a powerful experience for me. I was drawn into the scene and was able to commune with Christ by meditating on this artistic image.

It was also helpful to have Randy White touring the icon floor with me as well. The new director of the D. Min program at BGU, he is also an artist who does mosaics. He was able to share some of the technique used in mosaic creation, and his enthusiasm for this piece of work was infectious.

After our tour of Haggia Sophia, we then went to the Blue Mosque, which is across from the Haggia Sophia and separated by a grassy park, walking paths and a fountain. After too much walking already in the day, I decided to sit in the park instead of touring Blue Mosque and rested, taking photos of the surroundings.

I was struck by the wide range of head coverings on the women, an element of Islam that I do not yet understand. Some women wear burkas, the black clothing which covers the entire body covering except for the eyes. Some wear contemporary dress but with a silk scarf over their heads. At one particular point I saw two young women walking together, one in a bright yellow and the other in a bright redhead covering, just behind a woman in a full burka. I also found it fun to see a pair of teenage women who wore head scarves and Chuck Taylor shoes.

After the others finished at Blue Mosque, they came in the bus to where I was, and some people went to the Grand Bazaar while the others went back to the hotel. I went to the hotel and had a good Skype video chat with my wife.

With the large amount of walking I did, my leg was very sore and I had a difficult time finding a comfortable position in which to sleep. I woke in the night with more pain than I’ve had since the day of the accident and didn’t sleep after around 4AM.