Traveling as Encounters of the Soul

Those of us who travel abroad encounter countries and cultures first hand. With our own five senses we experience how others live, interact with each other, worship, eat, work. We have insights into how their surroundings shape patterns of behavior, culture, and thought processes. It has been my experience that sometimes, things are not as they have been reported through the mass media. Some times these experiences sadden me. At times I wish to cry out, "Why are not these autocracies being reported to the wider world!?" At other times I have found myself stunned into silence by shear Grace. And I find myself marveling, as one person has said, "that all true prayer leads to silence." And I am left with a profound sense of hope.

I am reading William Dalryple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East. He has got me thinking about my own experiences of travel, and of those you are acquiring as I write. May you find yourself amazed at how God is at work.

~ Joel

"[At the convent of Seidnaya in Syria] I too witnessed a miracle, or something that today would certainly be regarded as a miracle in almost any other country in the Middle East. For the congregation seemed to consist not of Christians but almost entirely of heavily bearded Muslim men. As the priest circled the altar with his thurible, filling the sanctuary with great clouds of incense, the men bobbed up and down on their prayer mats as if in the middle of Friday prayers in a great mosque. Their women, some dressed in full black chador, mouthed prayers from the shadows of the exo-narthex. A few, closely watching the Christian women, went up to the icons hanging from the pillars of the church, kissed them, then lit candles and placed them in the candelabra in front of the images. As I watched from the rear of the church I could see the faces of the women reflected in the illuminated gilt of the icons.
"Toward the end of the service, the priest reappeared with a golden stole over his cassock and circled the length of the church with his thurible, gently and almost apologetically stepping over the prostrate Muslims blocking his way, treading as carefully as if they were precious Iznik vases. While I had seen Muslims and Christians praying together on the island of Buyuk Ada, off Istanbul, this was something quite different: a degree of tolerance - in both congregations - unimaginable today almost anywhere else in the Near East. Yet it was, of course, the old way: the Eastern Christians and the Muslims have lived side by side for nearly one and a half millennia, and have only been able to do so due to a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West" (187-8).