Vespers

MSNBC describes attempts by a monastery to keep lands it has held for centuries in the face of a newly militant Islam.

In a remote village near the Turkish-Syrian border, a land dispute with neighboring villages is threatening the future of one of the world’s oldest functioning Christian monasteries. Critics say the dispute, which has become a rallying cry for Christian church groups across Europe, is a new chapter in the long history of religious persecution of the small Christian community by the Turkish state.

Tucked amid rugged hills where minarets rise in the distance, a small group of monks chants in Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, inside the fifth-century Mor Gabriel monastery. It is a relic of an era when hundreds of thousands of Syriac Christians lived and worshipped in Turkey. “This is our land. We have been here for more than 1,600 years,” said Kuryakos Ergun, head of the Mor Gabriel Foundation, surveying the barren land and villages from the monastery’s rooftop. “We have our maps and our records to prove it. This is not about land. It’s about the monastery.”

The dispute, on which a court is due to rule on February 11, is testing freedom of religion and human rights for non-Muslim minorities in this overwhelmingly Muslim country that aspires to join the European Union. The row began when Turkish government land officials redrew the boundaries around Mor Gabriel and the surrounding villages in 2008 to update a national land registry.

Things weren’t always that way. A friend who lived in Turkey wrote to me by email that:

I lived in that monastery for two months in 98. Turkish soldiers regularly visited with their trucks and tanks. Drank tea quite amicably with the clergy etc. Neighbouring villages are barren and run by illiterate Muslims who in turn stole the land / property from Christians. I hope this doesn’t stoke violence in Turkey. That would be very bad indeed. Islamism is on the rise there. Big time.

The lives of ordinary people are affected by the ebb and flow of civilizations. Right now, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the civilization upon which Mor Gabriel once rested is in ebb. The monks look to the European Union for help, but I don’t think they will get much. The telephone will ring in Brussels, but there is really no one to answer it. No one who really cares. The crisis over the monastery is the tail end of a much longer process. The largest Greek city in the world in 1922 wasn’t Athens, but Smyrna. In the convulsions following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, abetted by the cynical policies of the Western European victors of the Great War, huge population movements — what we would today call ethnic cleansing — redrew the map of the region. Smyrna was burned to the ground and its population put upon the road. Today Smyrna is Izmir.  And the way things are going Mor Gabriel will soon be something else.

The tides over the past thousands of years have flowed both ways. The cries of the victims have been heard on either side. But what is new in the game is that one side has decided it doesn’t want to be a “side” any longer. It is above such things. And normally, when civilizations take that attitude, they are also beyond help. Much of 19th and 20th century European ideology has turned upon itself; and is even now pecking at its own carcass. Paul Tillich wrote that individuals once sought to transcend death by becoming part of a community; that we wanted to flow into the Ocean and the still greater Ocean because we believed the Ocean was real.

Spirit is life. “To be carnally minded is death.” There is a man of our time who discovered the truth of this profound statement. Sigmund Freud recognized that at the root of our infinite desire lies the will to death. The individual, feeling the impossibility of fulfilling his desire, wants to rid himself of it by losing himself as an individual. Death is inevitable, but it is also chosen. Not only must we die, we also want to die, “for to be carnally minded is death.” “But,” continues Paul, “to be spiritually minded is life.”

Today all philosophical rivers run to the desert. Perhaps it is no accident that in this most carnally minded of eras, many have found not cause to celebrate life but to despair of it. That in a time when ‘togetherness’ is so publicly praised, the possibility of real community is so denied. The word ‘community’ today can have no meaning outside of an assault upon Western tradition. True belief in things like Christianity is today indistinguishable from bigotry. There is no Ocean and there is no drop. But I think Tillich was wrong to to believe that Freud was the only recent modern to understand the relationship between life and nation. Someone else did. I think Winston Churchill believed that there were greater tragedies than dying; which would have been to have died for nothing. He understood that meaning was impossible without community, the ecclesia, the universal monastery of mankind. But he put it in the language of an Englishman, leaving all the rest of us to say it in our own tongues.

He told the millions who hung on every word that issued from the wireless that “the curse of Nazism will be lifted from the brow of mankind” and “that wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred” would be vanquished. In private, Churchill was not always so sanguine. He forced himself and others, he admitted, to be brave “because everyone realised how near death and ruin we stood. Not only individual death which is the universal experience, but incomparably more commanding the life of Britain, her message and her glory.”

To lose your life is the first death; but to lose all connections of love is the second and greater.