Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2024: 102, Tuesday 20 August 2024

‘Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19: 24) … a camel at the Goreme Open Air Museum in Cappadocia (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and this week began with the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XII). The calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today (20 August) remembers Saint Bernard (1153), Abbot of Clairvaux, Teacher of the Faith, and William Booth (1912) and Catherine Booth (1890), founders of the Salvation Army.

Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a reflection on the Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

Squeezing through the Eye of a Needle? … a narrow, low gate in the streets of Tangier (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 19: 23-30 (NRSVA):

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ 25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ 26 But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.’

27 Then Peter said in reply, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?’ 28 Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. 30 But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’

‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor’ (Matthew 19: 21) … torn and ragged banknotes in a tin box outside an antiques shop in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Reflection:

A rich young man has come to Jesus seeking advice. He has many possessions, but he knows this is not enough. He wants to possess eternal life, and comes to Jesus for advice. When Jesus suggests he should go, sell his possessions, and give the money to the poor and then return and follow him, the young man ‘went away grieving, for he had many possessions.’

Then Jesus tells the disciples ‘it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven … it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’

During her sermon preparation some years ago, a priest colleague asked on Facebook: ‘If a fire broke out in your house, what three possessions would you grab?’

The answers she got were interesting. People included their laptop (with their photographs), their phone, their keys, their wallet or purse with their plastic cards, and their passport.

What would you take with you?

What do we cling to?

I once had a large collection of old banknotes. There was enough there to make me a millionaire or even a multimillionaire … in Weimar Germany, war-time Greece or Ceausescu’s Romania. But in reality they are worth nothing today and would earn no interest apart from the interest they might have for collectors.

They were in circulation at times when inflation became rampant in those countries and at times of crisis in Europe. Had they been spent at the time they were issued they might have bought something of value; had they been given away in their day, they might have helped the poor and the hungry. But circumstances saw to it that those who became attached to their wealth on paper would lose all they had.

Our readings this morning challenge us to think again what we cling to and what are our true values.

Does the faith of the man who falls down before Christ in the Gospel reading depend on his own wealth and money? When our prosperity and wealth disappear, like the fast-fading value of those banknotes, are we in danger of feeling abandoned by God?

How would we grab our faith and take it with us if we rushed to escape a crisis?

In the Gospel reading yesterday, the man runs up to Jesus, and falls on his kneels as if in adoration, or like a servant before a master, and asks what he should do to inherit eternal life.

Christ’s response is cautious. Is he challenging the man to see whether he really knows the Ten Commandments? Or is he testing the man to see how he has acquired his riches and wealth?

The man slinks away because he has much property.

What acts as a ball and chain that holds us back in our lives today, leaving us not fully free to follow Jesus? I may not have much property. But is there something else that I need to shed, in my attitudes, values, habits, behaviour, priorities, use of time, commitment or lack of commitment?

In his compassion, Christ sees this man’s weakness. He has emphasised his relationship with others. But is this founded on his desire for personal salvation, some sort of personal version of the concept of ‘karma’?

What about his relationship with God?

Does he trust in God because God is God, rather than because of what God can do for him?

The man asks how he may inherit eternal life. Is eternal life something to be inherited, like wealth and social status or place in society? In that society, religion was inherited rather than a matter of personal choice – one was born a Jew, but few people ever became Jews. Is eternal life to be inherited, like religious identity and social class?

Are we in danger at times of thinking that we are entitled to our place in the Kingdom of God?

And in our behaviour, as well as our prayers, do we let God know, and others know, this?

Christ comes to the quick when he points out that this young man puts his trust in his own piety and wealth, in his achievements, in his inherited status. But wealth stands in the way of his relationship with God.

So, Christ tests the man. If he truly loves the poor, he will make a connection between loving God and loving others. The man is shocked and makes quick his departure.

This rich young man may lack nothing, but he wants eternal life. Yet he fails to realise he has met the living God face-to-face, and he turns away.

But Christ does not say the rich and the wealthy cannot find salvation. He says money and riches can hold us back and make it difficult to be true disciples, to enter the kingdom of God. It can be so difficult that, ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’ (verse 24). The Talmud sggests thought it would be even more difficult, perhaps even impossible, where it speaks of ‘an elephant passing through a needle’s eye’ (b. Ber. 55b; b. B. Metz. 38b).

We cannot save ourselves, but God can save us. However, Peter’s implied question (verse 27) points out again how easy it is to think that being a disciple or follower of Christ should be linked with the hope of rewards in the here and now.

I find I have to ask myself again after reading this Gospel passage: What do I cling onto most now that I can shed – not in terms of property and possessions, but prejudices and values – that get between me and Christ, and between the way I live my life and eternal life.

Then will I be happy to get down on my knees, like a camel, and squeeze into the City of God through the smallest and most narrow of the city gates, and find in the most humbling of ways how to squeeze into the Kingdom of God?

The Talmud speaks of the difficulty of ‘an elephant passing through a needle’s eye’ … an elephant in Lichfield Cathedral as part of the March of the Elephants in support of Saint Giles Hospice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Today’s Prayers (Tuesday 20 August 2024):

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘What price is the Gospel?’ This theme was introduced on Sunday with a programme update from Dr Jo Sadgrove, Research and Learning Advisor, USPG.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Tuesday 20 August 2024) invites us to pray:

Lord, we pray for the healing of the deep wounds – spiritual, psychological, economic, environmental and social – inflicted by the SPG and the Anglican Church in the name of the Gospel.

The Collect:

Merciful redeemer,
who, by the life and preaching of your servant Bernard,
rekindled the radiant light of your Church:
grant us, in our generation,
to be inflamed with the same spirit of discipline and love
and ever to walk before you as children of light;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

God of truth,
whose Wisdom set her table
and invited us to eat the bread and drink the wine
of the kingdom:
help us to lay aside all foolishness
and to live and walk in the way of insight,
that we may come with Bernard to the eternal feast of heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (20 August) depicted in stained-glass windows in Mount Melleray Abbey, Cappoquin, Co Waterford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Tourists on camels near Levissi (Kayaköy) near Fethiye in Turkey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The tragic tale of a pleasant hill-top village in Anatolia

Sirinçe is a peaceful village nestling in the mountains above Selçuk and Ephesus (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Patrick Comerford

It was a sunny afternoon late this summer. I was on a small ferry from the Greek island of Samos, as we approached the Turkish port of Kusadasi. And I was watching a Greek Orthodox monk who had boarded with me. He carefully tucked away his black cassock and stove-pipe hat into a black plastic bag that for all the world could have contained his only worldly possessions.

Perhaps he first set out from the Monastery of Saint John on the neighbouring Aegean island of Patmos, or even from one of the monasteries on Mount Athos. And as I watched him passing through Turkish passport control and police surveillance, in plain, everyday clothes, dressed like the business people and tourists he had mingled with, I wondered how many isolated Christians in Western Anatolia were waiting for his pastoral and sacramental ministry in the weekend ahead.

The road from Selçuk to Sirinçe follows the same route the Revd Edmund Chishull climbed over 3000 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

As the weekend approached, I caught a dolmus or minibus to the neighbouring city of Selçuk, which stands on the ruined outskirts of the classical and Biblical city of Ephesus, and then another dolmus that took me 8 km up into the mountains to the east and into the small hilltop village of Sirinçe, which was once one of the prettiest Greek villages in Anatolia.

The cobbled streets of Sirinçe are lined with shops that depend on tourists and visitors (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

There have been Greek communities in this part of Asia Minor since the time of Homer, and they preserved their culture through the centuries as generals and armies marched through and Biblical saints and preachers journeyed across the landscape, including Alexander the Great, Antony and Cleopatra, the Apostle Paul and Saint John the Evangelist, Byzantines and Crusaders, and the Selçuk and Ottoman Turks. In more recent centuries, Greeks and Turks lived side-by-side, often in harmony, until the disasters brought about at the time of World War I.

Early settlement

The inscription over the door into the Church of Saint John the Baptist attests to the ancient roots of the Church in this part of Anatolia (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

The area around Sirinçe was probably first settled after the collapse of Ephesus, when a small group of people left the city and moved to the mountains. The churches in Sirinçe were part of the Diocese of Heliopolis, which extended from present-day Torbali to Birgi and included Tralles (modern Aydin), Telmessos (Fethiye) and Denizli. The carvings at the entrance to the partly refurbished Church of Saint John the Baptist point to the links with Heliopolis. The monastic ruins in the area are small and relatively unimpressive but date back to the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.

But before the village was known as Sirinçe, the name Kirkinçe or Çirkince appears in deeds from the 16th century on, following the arrival in the area of Turks and the settlement of Ayasuluk on the ruined site of Ephesus. During the 15th century, a group of Greek-speaking slaves freed under Ottoman rule also came to settle here.

Old maps name the village variously as Kyrkindje, Kirkindsche, Kirkidje, Kirkica, Kirkinca – which may date from the early monastic settlements. But when the new villagers were asked if their new home was a nice place, their answer was çirkince, “ugly place.” It is said these new Greek-speaking settlers named their village Kirkinçe or Çirkince (ugliness or ugly place) to deter others from following them to this beautiful, peaceful spot.

A priestly visit

The oldest English-language account of this beautiful village is provided by the Revd Edmund Chishull (1671-1733), an antiquarian and Anglican priest, who was best-known for his controversial disputes with the Irish Nonjuring theologian, Henry Dodwell.

Chishull was the Anglican chaplain in Smyrna from 1698 to 1702. During that time, he travelled widely through Anatolia. On 30 April 1699, while they were visiting Ephesus, Chishull and his companions found the only place where they could stay was the nearby village of “Kirkinca” (Sirinçe). They arrived on horseback, having climbed up through the valley from Ephesus. It was a 1½-hour “tiresome but pleasant journey between two hills with a stream running. We were met with trees of various species with their pleasant and inviting dark shade.”

Sirinçe once had a population of mainly Greek-speaking Christians ... today its churches are falling in or have been demolished (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Chishull and his party stayed overnight in tents set up by their guides. The following day, they toured the village and noted that the entire population was Christian. About 200 years after Chishull had left Anatolia, about 4,500 Greek Christians were probably living in Sirinçe in 1919. In addition, there were small numbers of Armenians and Jews, and a large number of Muslim Turks. But by then, everything was changing dramatically for Greek and Turk alike.

Fiction and history

In her novel Farewell Anatolia, first published in 1962 in Greek as Ματωμένα Χώματα (“Bloodied earth”), the Greek writer Dido Sotiriou tells the tale of Sirinçe – a story of paradise lost and of shattered innocence, through the eyes of Manolis Axiotis. His tale of personal fortitude, betrayed hope, and defeat is part of the greater tragedy of two nations: Greece, which was vanquished and humiliated, and Turkey, which was bloody in victory.

It is a first-hand account of the Greek community in Asia Minor at the beginning of the last century, telling how it was bitterly afflicted by events before and after World War I. It tells of the suffering of Greeks conscripted into forced labour brigades by the Ottomans, the collapse of the sultan’s rule, the arrival of the Greek army in Anatolia in 1919, and, finally, the nightmare of the “Asia Minor Catastrophe” of 1922, resulting in the death or expulsion of two million Greeks from Turkey by Ataturk’s forces.

In frank language, Axiotis paints a tragic fresco of how Greek culture was wiped out in Asia Minor. It is a stinging indictment of Great Power politics, oil-lust and corruption.

The character of Manolis Axiotis is based on the author’s father, a prosperous industrialist. Encouraged by the Greek advance towards Ankara in 1919, he had moved the Pappas family to Smyrna from Sirinçe in the hills above Ephesus, where they had lived for generations. Three years later, in 1922, the teenage Dido, with countless thousands of others, was forced to flee in terror as Ataturk’s troops seized Smyrna. More than 30,000 Christians – Greeks and Armenians – were burned to death or slaughtered in the massacre that lasted for days.

The Pappas family escaped to Athens, but at least a dozen of their relations perished in Smyrna and the family lost everything. Dido’s father was reduced to working in the docks at Piraeus.

The frescoes on the walls of Saint John’s Church in Sirinçe have faded and peeled, and some have been damaged and desecrated (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

In the subsequent “exchange” of people, more than a million Ottoman Greeks were forced to move to Greece, while 380,000 Muslims were forced to leave Greece for Turkey. The exchanges were marked by chaos: people from the same villages boarded separate boats; some people who once owned no property were given land because they had made false declarations; others arrived having lost all.

A tragic career

The apse of Saint John’s Church is bare, with only a stone stump where the altar once stood (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Dido Sotiriou’s memories and her family’s experiences provided the raw material for Farewell Anatolia four decades later. “War is Circe for all of us,” reflects one of the characters. “It turns men into swine.”

Similar experiences in Kaya Köyü or Levessi, a village near Fethiye, provided the setting for Louis de Bernieres in Birds Without Wings (2004), his prequel to Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1993).

Farewell Anatolia has been described as the War and Peace of Greece, the recording angel of the “catastrophe” of 1922. But far from being an ultra-nationalist tale, it is a very frank, down-to-earth story told by a villager who speaks openly about the good and the bad among Greek and Turk. Farewell Anatolia has been a best-seller in Greece since it was first published in 1962, and it has since been translated into ten languages, including English, French, Russian, Hungarian and Turkish.

In Farewell Anatolia, Dido Sotiriou provides a doorway into the lost lives of the villagers of Sirinçe(Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

The book articulates many dearly-held Greek sentiments about the past, enhancing its popularity in Greece. But it also urges reconciliation with Turkey and its objective tone gained Dido Sotiriou a wide following in the land of her birth. The Turkish translation in 1970 was welcomed as a major contribution to reconciliation between the two neighbours

Dido Sotiriou’s life was marked more by tragedy than literary success. Her parents died shortly after their enforced exile, and she was raised in Athens by an aunt. She studied literature at the Sorbonne, and began writing as the French correspondent of several Greek newspapers and magazines, becoming one of the first Greek women to break into journalism. By 1945, she was the editor of the newspaper of the Greek left, Rizospastis.

The 1950 show trial of her sister’s lover, Nikos Beloyiannis, was memorialised in Picasso’s sketch of him, The Man with the Carnation. When he was executed early on a Sunday morning in 1952, there was widespread outcry, and two Greek ministers were shamed into resigning. At the same time, Elli Pappas was jailed for 16 years, and her sister Dido raised their new-born son. Before these events, Dido had no literary ambitions, but now, she said, “I had a duty to society, to tell the truth.”

A pleasant place

After the Papas family had left Kirkinçe, the village clung onto its self-deprecatory name until a visit in 1926 by the Governor of Izmir, Kazim Pasa. When he saw the beautiful setting, he declared that from then on the village would be “Sirinçe,” namely lovely place or pleasantness.

Ninety years ago, there were 1,800 houses in Sirinçe; today only 200 or so are lived in, mostly on the southern and western slopes of the village, many dating from the 19th century. So many of the farmhouses, monasteries and churches have disappeared, even the memories and stories of the villagers cannot pinpoint where they all stood.

The village mosque is the only public place of worship in Sirinçe (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

In the lower part of the village, shops and coffee houses line the street that runs down to a plane tree. At the eastern end of the village there was a laundry, with the village graveyard beyond it. The former schoolhouse is now a restaurant and the only place of public worship is the village mosque, for the 600 people who live in Sirinçe are all Turkish speakers and Muslims.

Saint John’s Church is now used for exhibitions and concerts but has not been fully restored (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Sirinçe once had many churches, but only two remain: the Church of Saint John the Baptist has been partly restored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture for concerts and exhibitions; its once peaceful courtyard, with a fountain, is cluttered with vendors’ stalls. The second church is crumbling, its roof is falling in, and it is impossible to gain admission.

Tasty sun-dried peppers … most of the people in Sirinçe work in the surrounding orchards, olive groves and fields (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Sirinçe’s heritage, architecture and beautiful location mean tourism plays a major role in the local economy. Souvenir shops, an open market, a dozen restaurants and a few guest houses are scattered along the pretty cobbled streets. But Sirinçe is a working village too – most of the people work in the surrounding orchards, olive groves and fields. The tourist season is now over and winter peace has returned to Sirinçe once again. But the old families and their descendants may never return.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay was first published in November 2009 in the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough) and the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel and Ossory)