One more museum

Our first Saturday back in Canada we went to yet another museum, just to compare: the Museum of Civilization in Hull. We'd driven past it before, and I've always liked the way it looks - layers of limestone just like the cliffs in Ottawa - but we'd never been in it before.

My tolerance time for museums is about 2 hours. We were there for 3 hours before being kicked out at closing time. The exhibits are what I had been hoping for in Turkey and Greece and Egypt. There weren't acres of identical stuff that would only mean something to an expert. In the West Coast First Nations part they'd chosen the best items and displayed them in a context that gave some idea of their significance. On the Europeans in Canada floor you walked through the last 1000 years of Canadian history and felt like you were there. If the early parts are as accurate as the 20th-century displays (which made me feel like I'd slipped back into my childhood), they're good.

This is the best museum we've seen in the last year. Click on the title above to see something about it.

Re-entry

So we've been back in Canada for a week now. Almost time to get used to the place again. And the culture shock isn't too great yet. Of course, we've been pretty sheltered by our loving family so far; just wait until we try to make it on our own.

We left Istanbul early in the morning of the 8th, flying Lufthansa to Munich and then London, and Air Canada to Ottawa. Lufthansa disappointed me for the first time. We arrived ready to check in two hours in advance, as instructed, but there were agents only for first and business class. The rest of us waited 45 minutes or so. They gave us a decrepit rattletrap of a plane that made it somehow to Munich. The flight to London wasn't bad, except for the dry roll and lonely piece of cheese that passed for lunch on that flight. Heathrow insisted on putting us all through a security check again - less thorough than the one at Munich that I think even picked up the metal in my fillings. Took close to an hour to get through that one, which made me glad Ron had timed our flights so perfectly. Air Canada was a blessed relief : good plane, good food, attentive attendants. So we made it to Ottawa in time for Evan to pick us up on his way home from work.

The first thing I noticed was how handsome and fit our kid looked in his suit and tie. You really can dress him up and take him places. And then I noticed how pleasant the air in Ottawa smells, and how green everything was, and how smooth and clean the roads were, and how everyone stopped for red lights. Only in Canada, you say. How nice to be home.

We loved staying with Evan and Anna in their comfy home. But Monday we headed south to Toronto, picked up a car, met our friends Bob & Eunice on their way to Toronto and our way to London, and had dinner in London with our friend Royce. Back to Toronto the next day to check in with my friend Patricia and her gorgeous new four-year-old son who was born in Haiti - what a healthy child in every way! Lunch the next day with Don, then off to Calgary.

So now we're in Ron's brother Earl's house in northwest Calgary, far too full from much delicous food and warmed by the company of more family. It's cold and rainy outside (and I left most of my cool-weather clothes back in Izmir), but we don't mind being here at all.

At the moment we're still enjoying cool, clean, affluent Canada a great deal. I don't know when the longing for chaos will set in; I assume we're going to get homesick sometime soon. For now all I miss is Turkish toilets and yogurt. And my friends back in Izmir, of course. I'll let you know if that changes.

A sermon for Pentecost

Given at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Izmir, June 4

In my old parish we used to have an elderly Englishwoman named Freda. Freda didn't have much formal education, but she was wise and faithful and often quite funny. I loved to hear her read in her cockney accent; she often cast new light on the scriptures with her fresh point of view.

One Pentecost it was her turn to read. She got to the Acts reading and, although I know she'd done her homework; she always did, the list of countries and nationalities threw her. “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of a whole lot of other places” she said. And most of us thought that was really quite good enough.

Over the last year my Ron and I have been to an awful lot of the places those first hearers of the Holy Spirit came from: Parthia, near Lake Van; Media, the home of the Kurds; Mesopotamia, between Diyarbakır and Gaziantep; Cappadocia; Pontus – the Karadeniz; Phyrigia, near Eskişehir; and Pamphyllia, near Şanlıurfa; not to mention Asia, the whole rest of Anatolia. I'd had no real understanding until this year exactly how important Anatolia was in the history of Christianity. There were just these names in the New Testament that I mentally translated as “a whole lot of other places.”

So this year has been quite instructive. And one thing has struck me in particular: except for Smyrna – our city of Izmir – there's hardly a trace of the Christian church left in those places where it began its life.

I think the place where that knowledge really hit was the mound that's what's left of Colossae. That's all it is – a hill, with a poppy field on its side. And Laodicea, just down the road – just a few ruins.

But you know what? That's all right. Because the Christian church is more than buildings, more even than scattered communities of believers. The Christian church is bigger and stronger and stranger than any of us can imagine.

The Church was born that day in Jerusalem when faithful people from all over the known world heard Jesus' followers telling the story of Christ's life and death and resurrection. And the most amazing thing: they all understood. They heard it told in ways that made sense to them. Jesus' friends found themselves speaking in languages and in ways they'd never used before, and it worked.

That was the first time the Holy Spirit went public. She'd been at work for untold ages before, of course, since the very beginning of the universe: breathing order into chaos, life into dry bones, words into prophets' mouths. But finally she burst into the world in a huge way, kicking reluctant disciples out of their comfy upper room into the streets, and creating a whole new way for God to be present in the world.

And she hasn't stopped. Every time we get comfortable in our safe, predictable ways of doing things she gets to work again. Every time we hit a dead end in our ways of being the Body of Christ in the world, look out, here she comes.

And so I'm not sad that Christianity is not in control in this country anymore. We had our chance and we blew it. Constantine co-opted our faith and made it a route to power. But that's not what Christianity is about. It's about love; it's about the little ones who are the ones who really matter to God. It's about not getting comfortable in our pews or in our daily lives.

So the Christian church got it wrong when it sided with the powerful ones of this world. But that's okay. The Spirit isn't finished with us yet. There's still a church, and there always will be a church. It's just not always going to look the same, that's all. The church here is very different from what it was in Byzantine times, but it's still the Body of Christ, still one of the ways God acts in our world. And it will keep on doing that in one way or another until the Kingdom comes.

The Holy Spirit can do some unusual things. I'm sure that's what pushed me to be ordained; it's also, I think, what pushed me to come here. It works within us and among us to strengthen us and give us the courage to do things we'd never dream of doing.

This is the last time I'm going to be with you for awhile. But no matter how far apart we are, we'll still be together in this strange and wounded miracle, the Church. And I hope before too long we'll be together in the same city again. So until then, thanks for your goodness and kindness to me, thanks for the help you've given me to understand this wonderful country – and Görüşürüz!

Farewell tour

I know something you don't know

The end is getting near. In a few days we'll be boarding a bus for Istanbul, visiting our dear friends, the Şamlı family, and finally jumping on a plane for Canada. Part of me is really longing for familiar food, familiar language and familiar friends, but there's a big part of me that's going to miss this place terribly.

There's still a lot of Turkey we haven't seen. Last week and a bit of the week before we tried to make up for that failure and show our Turkish daughter Begüm some things she hadn't seen yet. We did a lightning tour of south-central Turkey.

We started off in Cappadocia, which we'd seen briefly at the end of March in preparation for the solar eclipse - but Begüm had never been there. We repeated much of the tour we'd done before, walking through familiar moonscapes that astonished her. We stayed in an even nicer place than before, the Gamirasu Cave Hotel. If you needed a reason to visit Turkey you have one now. This is my lifetime favourite hotel. Nice people, great food, amazing scenery, and rooms - not all in caves, but some - that are clean and appropriately decorated. At dinner our first night a local man was playing an oud or some similar instrument, and eventually a Turkish woman at another table got up and began dancing with the host. (Turks are the world's best dancers, IMNSHO).

The last morning we got up in time to be picked up at 4:05 a.m. for our balloon ride. Oh my goodness! We had a long wait while they dealt with some tourists getting a short trip as their package tour, but finally we headed off in a minibus for the launch site. The 15 or so of us who had paid for a longer trip were to fly in balloons piloted by the owners, a Swedish man and a New Zealander woman who have been handling balloons for more than 20 years each. The wind was coming from an unusual direction, so we took off from a small parking lot to the east of the main wonders of Cappadocia. We drifted over valleys and ruins we'd toured on foot the days before, seeing things from an entirely different point of view. We travelled above the highway and the main street of Göreme, waving at women hanging out laundry and men enjoying their morning coffee. Finally we came down in an unused field, being caught and held by the company's contingent of strong men who then became exterior decorators, covering our basket with flowers and preparing a morning cocktail of cherry juice and champagne.

It was a great experience. Don't miss it.

We drove - or I drove - to Konya after that, with a side trip to try to find Tuz Gölü, Turkey's second-biggest lake, which is so salty that crystals precipitate out of the water. We drove and drove along a road that the map said would lead us to the lake. Finally we came to a fence and a gate and a young man making welcoming gestures. Turns out that the lake has been sold to a private company, a salt manufacturer. Tuz Gölü has always supplied a large proportion of the salt Turkey uses; now it's privately manufactured. The young man was a tour guide hired by the company for the summer. He got into our car and drove with us to a place where we could get a good look at the lake.

We wanted to go to Konya for two reasons: Çatal Höyük and Mevlana's shrine. We got to both of them. I'd first read about Çatal Höyük in Scientific American in the early 60s, when they were discovering the earliest (at that time) traces of agriculture and city life there. We saw many artifacts and wall paintings from Çatal Höyük at the Ankara museum and were really looking forward to it.

There's not much there now but a couple of grassy hills and a building or two covering excavations in progress. Really it's just another hill like millions that dot the Turkish landscape; it must have been pure luck that led the first archaeologist to dig there. Perhaps if someone else digs someplace else they'll find someplace even older. But it still thrills me to look at walls put in place 9000 years ago, and see (in the Ankara museum) carbonized knitting preserved by a fire. One of the buildings had a painting on its wall that looks like a map of the city, and in the distance there's an erupting volcano. You can see exactly the same mountain today, but it's covered with snow at this time of year. That place was one of the highlights.

Mevlana's shrine was another. Mevlana (Rumi) was a great Muslim mystic and poet, the founder of the Sufi order. His shrine is a place of prayer and peace, and it felt holy. He was a great man whose faith transcended labels, and I felt deeply moved to be in his presence.

I think we all liked Konya, which surprised us, since it's supposed to be one of the most conservative and narrow-minded cities in Turkey. Not that we could see.

From there we drove to Antalya on the Mediterranean via Isparta, hoping to see the fields of roses that are said to be harvested at this time of year to make perfumes and things. Alas, they told us the season was late, and I saw only one field full of single-petalled roses, the oldest and most perfumed sort.

So we got to Antalya, me driving and Ron navigating - the reverse of the usual situation, although I'm not sure it would have been any easier if I had been navigating, given the quality of Lonely Planet's maps. We circled the downtown for what seemed like hours trying to find the entrance to the ancient castle, where we were supposed to be staying. We finally had to enlist the help of a taxi driver. So we got to a pleasant pension with a pair of doves nesting behind the shutter of our bathroom window, and we spent a couple of days experiencing the tourist hub of Turkey's south coast. Very ancient and very pretty.

And then we moved on to Olympos, west and south along the coast, where we stayed at the Turkmen Tree Houses. This was our chance to kick back and do nothing, really have a holiday. We must have been among the oldest people there, but it didn't matter. The beer was good and the beach was great. We went to see the Chimaera our first night. This is a fire that emerges from the rocks of a nearby mountain in several dozen places. The ancients thought it was a monster encased in rock; modern science says it's methane gas that spontaneously ignites. Whatever, it was worth the hour-long climb in the dark and the equally harrowing descent.
The next day Begüm tried out sea kayaking for the first time while Ron and I did absolutely nothing - wonderful!
And the next morning we drove to the airport and came home.

Now we're sorting through stuff deciding what we need to take home and what we can leave here for when we come back next spring. It's hot and sunny in Izmir, no rain any more, and the spring flowers are beginning to realize life's tough after all. I'm beginning to enjoy our klima for its cooling properties - what a wonderful invention that thing is. Probably the next time I write we'll be back in Canada!