Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2024: 62, Wednesday 10 July 2024

‘Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority’ (Matthew 10: 1) … the Twelve Apostles, an icon in the church in Panormos, east of Rethymnon in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are continuing in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar and the week began with the Sixth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity VI). I am staying this week at the High Leigh Conference Centre at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, where the annual conference of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) began yesterday (9 July) and continues until tomorrow (11 July).

Later this evening, undoubtedly, I shall find an appropriate place to watch the England v Netherlands semi-final in Germany, and appropriate company to share the excitement and anxiety. I remember when England and the Netherlands last met in a fixture like this it was 1996 and I was on holiday in Crete, staying in Mika Villas in Piskopianó, in the hills above Hersonissos. But, 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 in connection with this week’s USPG conference;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

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

The 12 disciples in an icon of the True Vine in the church in Piskopianó in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 10: 1-7 (NRSVUE):

1 Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. 2 These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; 3 Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; 4 Simon the Cananaean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not take a road leading to gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan town, 6 but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’.”

The Very Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas is the keynote speaker at the USPG conference in High Leigh this morning

This morning’s reflection:

The annual conference of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) began yesterday in the High Leigh Conference Centre near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and continues until tomorrow. The conference theme this year is ‘United Beyond Borders’, and I am reflecting on the conference in this prayer diary throughout this week.

Today begins with morning worship led by Derby Guerrier from Haiti, a member of the Tsedaqah Community (Triangle of Hope), a missional community based at Liverpool Cathedral and made up of young people living together in community for a year. The Triangle of Hope links the Diocese of Kumasi in Ghana, the Diocese of Liverpool in the Church of England and the Diocese of Virginia in the US.

Tsedaqah community members work in a variety of social justice projects across the Liverpool City Region in conjunction with the Anglican Diocese of Liverpool and Liverpool Cathedral.

Tsedaqah is a Hebrew word that means ‘righteousness' or ‘to do justice', the very reason that the community was formed. The instruction in Micah 6: 8 inspires its mission as a community. Community members seek to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. These values are echoed in the words of the Tsedaqah Prayer.

The conference Bible studies later this morning are being led once again by Bishop Dalcy Badeli Dlamini, Bishop of Eswatini in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. She is the second woman bishop in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), and she is leading the Bible studies throughout this week, bringing fresh perspectives on leadership, faith and community.

The Very Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas is the keynote speaker this morning. She is a leader in womanist theology and racial reconciliation, and is the Dean of Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral.

Bradon Muilenburg, the Anglican Refugee Support Lead in Northern France, is the keynote speaker at the conference this afternoon. He works along border lines and his day-to-day experience of ministry in Calais is expected to bring many of this week’s discussions to life.

I have a choice between three workshops during the day:

1, Beyond borders: Gender Justice female Leadership in the Anglican Church – this workshop is an invitation to explore the opportunities, strengths, and challenges for female leadership in the Anglican Church. The facilitators are USPG’s Senior Regional Managers Fran Mate and the Revd Davidson Solanki.

2, The Past in the Present: Mission, Empire and Racial Justice – this workshop explores the legacies of a history marked by slavery and racism that offer unique possibilities in the present. The facilitators are Dr Jo Sadgrove, the Revd Dr Evie Vernon and the Revd Garfield Campbell.

3, Seeing Differently – an interactive workshop using a real-life case study, to help us recognise and reveal attitudes leading to exclusion of others in plain sight, and it involves Gypsy Roma and Traveller Friendly Churches workshops.

Bradon Muilenburg, the Anglican Refugee Support Lead in Northern France, is the keynote speaker at the conference this afternoon

Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 10 July 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 ‘United Beyond Borders.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday with reflections on this week’s USPG conference by Rachael Anderson, Senior Communications and Engagement Manager, USPG.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Wednesday 10 July 2024) invites us to pray:

We pray for all who are gathered for the USPG conference. Give wisdom to all who speak and grant that all attending have open hearts and minds.

The Collect:

Merciful God,
you have prepared for those who love you
such good things as pass our understanding:
pour into our hearts such love toward you
that we, loving you in all things and above all things,
may obtain your promises,
which exceed all that we can desire;
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.

Post Communion Prayer:

God of our pilgrimage,
you have led us to the living water:
refresh and sustain us
as we go forward on our journey,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Additional Collect:

Creator God,
you made us all in your image:
may we discern you in all that we see,
and serve you in all that we do;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The logo of the Christian Conference Trust, which runs the High Leigh Conference Centre, in reception area at High Leigh (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition copyright © 2021, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Valuing the freedom of land, sea and air 20 years after a crisis that threatened war

Peaceful afternoons on the beach near Rethymnon are seldom interrupted by sonic booms and overflights, unlike 20 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

I have been coming to this part of Greece since the 1980s. Today, Rethymnon is a relatively quiet area for holidays. With the long sandy stretch for sand that continues for miles east of the town, it is a family-friendly place.

There are no signs offering cheap beer to lager louts, as I have seen at bars further east in places such as Hersonissos and Malia, and the resort areas east of Rethymnon are even quieter at the moment because school holidays have yet to start in Britain.

It is easy to fall asleep on the beach and to be undisturbed in the sunshine.

It was not always so peaceful. Not because of loud lager louts, not because Crete was attracting the wrong sort of tourists, and certainly not because of bad management on anyone’s part. But because of the threat of war.

An afternoon’s snooze on the beach was regularly interrupted in the 1980s and the 1990s by the sonic booms of overflying Greek air force jets, preparing or returning from buzzing their Turkish counterparts over the blue waters of the Aegean and the Mediterranean seas.

It almost came to a full-scale war between Greece and Turkey 20 years ago, and all because of a dispute over who owned the two tiny uninhabited rocky islets of Imia. I was flown into the middle of it all in 1996, and ended up as a part of a press posse that was threatened with coming under fire from the Turkish navy.

The dispute back in 1996 cost the lives of three crew members of a Greek Navy helicopter who died during a mission, and 20 years later, despite improved relations between Athens and Ankara in the intervening decades, many Greeks have not forgotten this tense time in modern Greek history.

The crisis had international leaders scrambling to urge bot sides not to come to blows over what was derided as a pile of rocks. But Greece insisted they were “Greek rocks,” and Athens refused to back down as Ankara tried to assert Turkish sovereignty. Greeks were reminded all too easily of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus over 20 years earlier on 20 July 1974.

Windmills at the entrance to the harbour in Rhodes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Imia is part of the Dodesanese islands, which are dripping with history and oozing with culture: Kos, where Hippocrates formulated the foundations of modern medicine; Patmos, where Saint John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation; Kalymnos, Leros and Simi, with their neo-classical mansions; and Rhodes, where the giant Colossus once straddled the harbour of Mandhraki, holding aloft the flame of freedom that inspired the Statue of Liberty.

At the crossroads of three continents, this island chain was once ruled by Alexander the Great and Ptolemy; it has been occupied by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Knights of Saint John, the Turks, the Italians and Nazi Germany. Only with the end of World War II was it finally handed over by Britain and incorporated into the Greek state in 1947.

Today, only 26 of the Dodecanese islands are inhabited: the largest, Rhodes, has about 100,000 people, but most have only a few hundred residents or less, and there are only 79 people left on Pserimos.

The large Turkish minorities in Rhodes and Kos and the mosques and minarets still dotting the skylines of many islands are ever-present reminders that Turkey occupied the Dodecanese for almost 400 years, from 1522 to 1912. Turkey is Greece’s nearest neighbour, and on many islands you can feel it is almost possible to touch the Turkish coast with its harbours and towns, houses and hotels.

On 29 December 1995, Turkey said the Imia islets were Turkish territory, registered in the prefecture of Bodrum. The dispute began when a Turkish cargo ship, Figen Akat ran ashore on the islets and had to be salvaged. It turned out that maps of were showing conflicting claims of the islets by Greece and Turkey, and there was a conflict between the Turkish captain and the Greek authorities over who was responsible for the salvage operation.

For more than 60 years, Turkey had accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged by Ankara until that December. But as Turkey faced a major political crisis with the unexpected electoral success of the Islamic Welfare Party, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara claimed for the first time that Imia was part of the Turkish province of Mugla.

The official response of Greece came on 9 January 1996. The then-Greek Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos, sent a reply to Turkey claiming an indisputable Greek sovereignty over the islets. The dispute was escalated when the Mayor of the Greek island of Kalymnos and a priest landed on the islets on 26 January and raised a Greek flag on the rocky outcrop.

Tensions escalated, and on 27 January Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the largest of the two Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.

Four days later, Turkish troops landed on the smaller rocky outcrop. Tensions heightened as Greek, Turkish and NATO forces sailed to the islets. At dawn on 31 January, a Greek navy helicopter flying over Imia said reported that Turkish troops had landed on the islets. The helicopter then crashed in mysterious circumstances. The crash was blamed on bad weather conditions, but some reports said the weather reports amounted to a mutual cover-up to hide that it was shot down by Turkish fire.

Both Athens and Ankara were accused of concealing what really happened to prevent war. The two countries had been on the brink of war when President Clinton intervened and the Turkish troops withdrew.

At the time, I was the Foreign Desk Editor of The Irish Times and I found myself in the middle of this crisis. I flew to Athens to interview the new Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis, his Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos, and other Greek cabinet ministers.

A few days later I was one among a small group of about two dozen journalists who travelled from Athens and boarded the NV Nissos in Kos Harbour, close to the Plane Tree of Hippocrates and the Mosque of Hatzi Hassan.

At the time, the NV Nissos offered day trips to Turkey on Saturdays and Sundays, leaving Kos at 9 a.m. and returning at 5 p.m. But this was to be no pleasure cruise. We were reminded of an ever-present fear of an invasion from Anatolia, 5 km across the stretch of water. The local people were talking in terms of “when the Turks come”, not “if”.

With blue skies and blue seas, it could have been an idyllic summer trip. Apart from goat herds and environmentalists, few people ever bothered to visit the more remote rocks off the coast of Kos, Kalymnos, Kalolymnos and Pserimos. The crew took down the sign reading “Turkey” as we sailed off for the islets of Imia or Limnia, two flat pancakes less than two miles from Kalolymnos, almost 2½ miles from the Turkish island of Cavus, and over three miles from the western-most Turkish coast on the peninsula of Bodrum.

The Greek naval frigate HS Limnos, which had taken part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was fresh back from the Adriatic and had offered to take us out to look at the rocks. But before we left, Turkey protested and summoned the Greek Ambassador in Ankara, Dimitrios Nezeritis, to warn against the media trip.

It was no idle warning: two days earlier, a Greek coastguard vessel and a Turkish patrol boat had collided in Greek waters, a mile south of Imia.

As we sailed out of Kos, the military tension was palpable and visible. Greek and Turkish jets buzzed overhead sporadically, a Greek coastguard vessel and a navy ship were within sight and, in the distance, we could catch a glimpse of a ship with Turkish naval markings.

Costas Bikas, the Foreign Ministry spokesman from Athens on board the Nissos, insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cruise and that it was none of Ankara’s business. But the Turks made it their business. As the Greek and Turkish jet fighters swooped low over the area, the Turkish foreign ministry took a group of foreign and local journalists out from Bodrum. Once again, there were new Turkish claims to the islets known to the Turks as Kardak – by Defence Minister Oltan Sunguklu and by naval spokesman Ali Kurunahmut, who told cruising journalists: “Kardak is a Turkish islet and we are in Turkish waters.”

Trailing both groups were reporters and camera crews from the Greek and Turkish press and television. The crisis had moved from territorial claims and counter claims to cruise and counter cruise for journalists in the Aegean. As Imia faded out of sight, we followed past Pserimos, Kalolymnos, Leros and Kalymnos, through the straits separating Kalymnos and Telendhos, into Pothia, the port harbour of Kalymnos – names that once tripped off the tongues of backpackers in the 1970s.

As we disembarked at the dockside in Pothia, the microphones and cameras crowded into our faces: the foreign media had become the message.

The rocky island of Kalymnos is famous for its traditional sponge fishing; its fame in the past rested on Homer’s reference in the Iliad to the ships from the “Kalyndian Islands” taking part in the Trojan wars. That day, we felt war remained an ever-present threat to the peace of the islanders and their sponge fishers.

The Nissos returned to Kos to prepare for Sunday’s day trippers to Bodrum, and a launch from the Hellenic Coast Guard took us out from the harbour to the navy frigate Limnos, with its crew waiting to take us on to Rhodes. For four hours, we watched the crew tracking Turkish moves in the Aegean sea and skies, before our odyssey came to an end and Rhodes came into sight with its mediaeval castles and palaces, mosques and minarets and three harbours.

Two deer stand at each end of Mandhrki where the Colossus once straddled the entrance to the harbour, with ships passing through its towering legs. A small tug, the Herakles, took us ashore, reminding us of the apt inscription that once graced Colossus, praising the lovely gift of unlettered freedom. “For to those who spring from the race of Herakles, dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.”

The crisis was a temporary boost at home to Turkey’s Tansu Ciller as she searched (in vain) for a coalition partner to keep her in power. But it threatened to bring down Costas Simitis, Theodoros Pangalos and their Pasok government in Athens. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces from the area around Imia and return to the status quo ante, although Ms Ciller continued to press Turkey’s claims to 3,000 Aegean islands – the sum total of all islands in Greek waters.

After intense pressure from the US, Greek and Turkish government removed their military forces from Imia. The territorial issue has remained unresolved since then. Imia and other islets in the Aegean are considered as “grey zones” of undetermined sovereignty by Turkey.

When I returned to Crete a few weeks later, my interviews with the Greek media and my appearances on Greek television became a topic of conversation over lunch with Greek friends on the island. Overhead, the sonic booms of fighter jets continued to break the peace of afternoon naps by the pool or on the beach.

When I returned a second time from Greece, The Irish Times published a major feature on my adventures on this day 20 years ago, 6 July 1996. I think the headline ‘Dropping Ankara in Rhodes,’ with its intended pun, was written by the then Design Editor, Andy Barclay.

The casual freedom of land and sea, to hop from one island to the next, is part of the lure of a holiday in the sun in many parts of Greece. But it is a freedom that comes with a price, a freedom that is valued by the local Greeks, and a freedom that is denied 20 years later to many refugees who come in search of it as they make the difficult passage from the coast of Turkey to the islands of the Dodecanese.

An Irishman’s Diary: CP Cavafy

An Irishman’s Diary
Patrick Comerford

CP Cavafy ... a portrait by David Hockney

IT IS HARD to imagine that modern Egypt dates from 1799, when Napoleon drove out the Turks. It is even harder to imagine that until this century, the port city of Alexandria was one of the major centres of Greek culture and civilisation.

In a heated conversation late one night or early some morning in a taverna in Crete, I was told pointedly by a Greek whose grandparents came from the city that “there were Greeks living in Alexandria when Moses was a boy.”

The city, of course, takes its name from Alexander the Great. But it is well to remember that Cleopatra was not an Egyptian but a Greek, and that in classical times Alexandria was as purely Hellenic as Ptolemy, the founder of the dynasty of Greek monarchs which ruled the city for generations. This first Ptolemy was determined to make his capital the world centre of culture, the “Glory of the Ptolemies”:

The mentor city, the Hel-
lenic world’s acme, wisest in all the arts, in all:
philosophy.

In the mid 19th century, Greeks controlled the commercial life of Cairo, Khartoum and Alexandria, and in 1900, there were still 20,000 Greeks in Alexandria.

It is no accident, therefore, that Constantine Cavafy, hailed by Kimon Friar as “the undisputed founder of modern Greek poetry”, was born in Alexandria in 1863 and lived there for most for of his life, living in declining grandeur as a civil servant until his death in 1933. When his relatives, scandalised by the neighbourhood, implored him to leave his flat at 19 Rue Lepius, he went to the window drew back the curtain and asked. Where else could I be better situated than here, amidst these three centres of existence, a brothel, a church which forgives, and a hospital where you?

Craved recognition

During his life, Cavafy craved public recognition. He was introduced to English readers early in the century by F.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Arnold Toynbee, and he is the genius loci in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. But his own sister forbade her daughter to read, her Uncle Constantine's, disreputable verses, scandalised by his homosexuality, decadence and rejection of the Orthodox Church.

Cavafy went unrecognised and without appreciation from the Athenian literati until some time after the publication of his first collected edition in 1935, two years after his death.

Today, he is read in every Greek school, and schoolchildren easily recite poems such as Ithaka, Waiting for the Barbarians, The City, and The god abandons Anthony. He has been popularised among English language readers with translations by Peter Bien, Kimon Friar, John Mavrogordato, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, among others, and major studies by Friar, Sherrard, Christopher Robinson of Christ Church, Oxford, and Peter Bien of Dartmouth. His popularity was confirmed when poems by Cavafy were read at the funeral of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

Yet little attention has been given to a translation of 33 of Cavafy’s poems by the Irish poet, Desmond O’Grady. O’Grady, who was born in Ireland in 1935, later travelled as a student and teacher throughout Europe, America and Egypt, where he taught at the American, University of Cairo and the University of Alexandria.

In recent years, with a grant from the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs, he was able to accept an invitation from the Greek poet Kostis Moskof to go back to Alexandria.

Through the tireless efforts of Moskof, the Hellenic Foundation and other admirers of Cavafy’s poetry, and his cultural legacy, Cavafy’s house at 10 Rue Lepsius (now Sharm elSheykli) has been restored to what it looked like when the poet lived there and has been turned into a museum and library in his memory.

Returning to Egypt and the English Department of the American University in Cairo, O’Grady completed his translation of a selection of Cavafy’s poems, and Alternative Manners, his version of 33 Cavafy poems, was published in 1993 by the Hellenic Society, Athens Alexandria. Unfortunately, much to his regret, the proofs were never properly corrected. And so the book was never put on the market commercially and has never been reviewed in newspapers.

Readers, forgive

He feels Alternative Manners “reads like Greek ruins” and asks readers now to “please forgive, and overlook, and correct.” But, he concedes modestly, the collection has its admirers. “Greek people who know their Cavafy and who have read it found my Hiberno English very suited to Cavafy’s Alexandrian Greek, and closer to the text of Cavafy’s language than standard British and American translations.”

A reading of two of Cavafy’s best known poems illustrates the particular insights and turn of phrase which an Irish translator can bring to his work.

His translation of Ithaka loses the references by Friar and Keeley and Sherrard to Laistrygonians and Cyclops; instead, they become “cannibal bogeymen met in half light” and “those with one eye, open for their main chance.” The “Phoenician trading stations” or “market places” of the other translators become “ports you’ve not dreamed of” and “every city”.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, Sherrard and Keeley have the city fathers “assembled in the forum” and Friar has them mustered in the forum but O’Grady has them “waiting, here in the square.” Instead of the barbarians being dazzled, they are not impressed by “bamboozle”. And, instead of rhetoric and public speaking or “eloquence and public speeches”, O’Grady speaks of boring baloney.

Secretary to Pound

For some years, Desmond O’Grady was secretary to the American poet Ezra Pound in his exile in Italy. Now he lives in Kinsale, but regards Greece as his second home. His work as a poet has, of course, been recognised at home, where he is a member of Aosdana, and where he has been back for the opening of “Waves of the Sea”, the new writers’ and translators’ centre.

His earlier frustration with the printers handling of Alternative Manners could be rectified if an Irish publisher found an interest in the book. But in the meantime, he can take comfort from the theme in Cavafy’s Ithaka: the journey, not the destination, is what constitutes our true reward.

This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 20 July 1996