July 12 2021 First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy…. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity….Hence the attempts to play on the ”national question“ and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another. Vladimir Putin, “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”

Feb 12, 2012 MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of the Russian Orthodox church on Wednesday called the 12 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule a “miracle of God.”

I began writing this post near the end of February 2022, on tenterhooks along with much of the world about the likelihood of a war being unleashed by Russian military forces on the sovereign territory of Ukraine. At the same time, preparations were underway in Rome to facilitate a meeting between Pope Francis, supreme pontiff of the world-wide Catholic Church, and  the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, perhaps as soon as June or July of 2022, although the venue had not yet been chosen. So I learned from one of the Google alerts that were popping up daily in my Inbox. Not only was I nonplussed and distressed by this development, I was taking it very personally.

Jan 24 2022 Peace is an aspiration Patriarch Kirill shares with the pope, a goal they should strive for together. During the Christmas service, on Jan. 7 in the Russian calendar, the patriarch thanked Pope Francis for a fraternal message and added, “Hopefully, these relations will translate into many and many kind joint actions, including those aimed at achieving peace where there is no peace today,” according to Tass, a Russian news agency.

As a practising Christian, I am a bundle of contradictions spiritual, historical, geopolitical and personal. As this blog – “What am I doing here?” –  announces itself, I am a baptised and active member of a parish within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada. From this fact all other affinities have developed – with Ukrainian Catholics, with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with oblates and brothers of the Order of Saint Benedict and, God help me, with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Then Russian military forces invaded sovereign Ukrainian territory on February 24, 2022.

February 27 2022 “Religious exceptionalism, self-identification as ‘Holy Russia,’ ‘The Third Rome, and the Fourth cannot be,’ resided in the Russian religious consciousness as radical conservatism. And Russian religious nationalism is not the nationalism of a small nation that wants to survive. It is mainly imperial nationalism.”

Prince Volodomyr baptises the people of Kyivan Rus 988 AD

I will try to be succinct.The Church into which I was baptised in 1944 was still called the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada. The “Greek” is there not because its members and clergy were Greeks (although I did try to pass myself off as a Greek for awhile in elementary school) but because we were Greek Orthodox (as opposed to Roman or Latin Catholics). We were descended from that initial baptism of Kyivan Rus in 988 by its prince Volodomyr (Vladimir) who had accepted Christianity from Greek-speaking Byzantium. (The Moscow church would not get its first Primate until 1322.) Not only was Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul) situated west of Rus on the Black Sea , it was the Second Rome, still draped in Imperial splendour compared to the ruined First Rome, now fallen to various barbarians and usurpers, and sacked, plundered, vandalized with many of its citizens enslaved.  Who would not want to be a Byzantine? But then, catastrophe.

Russian clergy (archival)

With the utter destruction of Kyiv by Mongols in 1240  and the massacre of its population (after its citizens had refused to surrender), the Mongols advanced unstoppably into Hungary and Poland. And the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and its spiritual leader the Metropolitan were not to return to Kyiv until late in the fifteenth century. For all the vicissitudes of history, however, Ukrainian Orthodoxy remained within the jurisdiction of Constantinople until – another catastrophe! –  the Kyivan Metropolia was annexed by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1685. It must be said, however, that Ukrainian bishops were powerful churchmen throughout the 18th century in the Russian empire, their superior education setting them apart from their Russian counterparts. And a century later, all the ancient Ukrainian dioceses had been incorporated into dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church, itself the product of missionary work from Kyiv, and all its spiritual leadership was occupied by ethnic Russians.

Early one evening in May 2018, days before the annual parade celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II, a convoy of military trucks carrying long-range nuclear weapons trundled to a halt on the Russian capital’s ring road.As police officers stood guard, two Russian Orthodox priests wearing cassocks and holding Bibles climbed out of a vehicle and began sprinkling holy water on the stationary Topol and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile,  another shock to Ukrainian Orthodoxy in central Ukraine had been administered by the Union of Brest in 1596 (an event of “tragic” proportions to some Orthodox even today). That region had been incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a large and populous federation ruled by a single King of Poland. Ethnically diverse and relatively tolerant of diverse Christian and Jewish religious communities, its Constitution nevertheless acknowledged Catholicism as the “dominant religion.” At the time of the Union, the main concern of the bishops was the consequences to their episcopates of internal Polish affairs. The Moscow threat was not very strong in 1595/6 as it became later. Nevertheless, it is useful to be reminded in the swirl of disinformation that emanates from Moscow that not all Ukrainians have lived in the “spiritual realm” of the Moscow Patriarchate.

St Josephat Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in Edmonton

Thus was created the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine/Orthodox in its rites but in full communion with the worldwide Catholic Church.(As recently as 1995, the spiritual head of much of world Orthodoxy, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople -never of Istanbul, please – insisted that the “Eastern Catholic churches” should be regarded as “irregular communities.” For their part, the Roman Church post-Vatican Two no longer labels the Orthodox as “schismatic” although the accusation still finds purchase – online where I found it – “It would be very difficult to find the right name for this so-called Church. Heretic and schismatic ‘Church’ is highly fitting, however.”)

On Feb. 5, 2015, Crux noted: “During the Soviet era, no church produced more martyrs in percentage terms or suffered more vicious crackdowns. In light of that history, Greek Catholics become understandably nervous anytime they see Russian forces crossing their borders, or insurgents armed and supported by Moscow trying to slice off pieces of Ukrainian territory.” Therefore, it would be in the interest of the Vatican to take millions of Ukrainian Catholics under its wings.

(I become sensitive to a kind of tone-deafness on the pontiff’s part when, for example, on March 25 2022 Pope Francis  “consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary with a prayer asking for peace in the world.” Right Rev. Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean of Theology at St Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba, would remind the Holy Father that Russians and Ukrainians are not one people – this is Putin’s line -and that “Kyiv has been dedicated to the Theotokos (Mother of God) since the 11th century” and his consecration is redundant.)

Embedded in Orthodox Christianity in Canada, I remained pretty much unconcerned with the vicissitudes of Christianity in the Old Country. As an undergraduate  at the University of Alberta in the 1960s, I took a smattering of courses in Soviet Studies, understood that the Ukr/USSR was an atheist state, watched jerky and grainy newsreel footage of the toppling of church domes, and knew from relatives’ letters from Ukraine that the women in the village that Baba had left behind furtively fasted, taught their young children basic prayers, wrote pysanky and even went once a year to the village’s (Russian Orthodox) church although none of their grown children did such a thing. On my first visit to the village in 1984, that church was pointed out to me as the one “your Baba went to,” as a girl, although in Canada, ironically, she was an adherent of the pro-Soviet Ukrainian Farm and Labour Temple Association and I never saw her in church until my wedding in 1972.

St John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, Edmonton

On my father’s side of the family, however, “church” was a very different story. The Kostashes had emigrated in 1900 from a Galicia that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that had earlier absorbed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – and therefore Ukrainians in Galicia were historically, and remained, Ukrainian Catholic. This aspect of their identity – that in fact my Galician grandparents had been baptised in Dzhuriv and in Tulova as Greek Catholics – went unnoticed by me for a long time.

I had been raised in the city in a made-in-Canada Orthodox Church (the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1929) to which a great-uncle and some great-aunts  and various others of the Ukrainian-Albertan intelligentsia had attached themselves, eventually carrying into it my parents. The founders of the UOCC not only seized the opportunity in Canada to return to the ancient faith of  Rus: they decided also to bring it up-to-Canadian-date, so to speak, having been deeply influenced by the model of Protestantism (Presbyterians) in the immigrant settlements of western Canada. Uniquely in Orthodoxy, congregations of the UOCC act as trustees of their own church property, consent to the appointment and dismissal of priests, govern as a General Council of clerical and lay members, and manage their lay organizations independently of episcopal authority..(This is important for the women’s organizations: although the parish priest attends their meetings, he is ex officio and has no voting authority. He can however, request to be on the agenda.)

Greek prayer rope/bracelet

Yet, I was aware that there were Ukrainian Canadians of my generation in Edmonton who went to Roman Catholic not public schools, and I thought them anomalous. What were they doing at St Joseph’s Composite High School (only two blocks away from our Orthodox Cathedral) among Polish and Italian and Irish classmates under the scholastic supervision of nuns in medieval dress and, as I imagined, frequently on their knees, hands bound in ropes of rosary beads and chanting in Latin? (Even in the privacy of our parents’ homes or anywhere else, we Orthodox didn’t “do” rosaries, although many did adopt the Greek prayer rope as a substitute.) It’s true that the Ukrainian Catholic kids went to churches mounted with bulbous domes just as ours were and whose interiors were as gorgeously adorned with icons and embroidered altar cloths. Their parish priests were also married, and wore similar vestments ; and their liturgies and hymnals are practically identical. But not wholly. For here’s the thing: over them all loomed the figure of their supreme spiritual authority, the Pope.

May 9 2022 When Pope Francis visited the Russian ambassador to the Holy See Feb. 25, the day after the war started, this was widely perceived in the West as a diplomatic peace initiative…The repeated calls for peace in Ukraine by Pope Francis have hitherto been interpreted by the Russian Orthodox Church as support for the central Russian justification of the war that peace in the Donbas was threatened by Ukrainian extremists and has to be restored by the Russian special military operation.

When I once took part in a series of classes (in the company of Ukrainian Catholic friends) on the Catechism [summary of doctrine] of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and had been assured by my priest that this would not imperil my Orthodox soul, I was struck by the virtual interchangeability of our Catechisms, except for this inclusion (there are others) in their liturgical prayer: “Among the first, remember, O Lord, our most holy universal Pontiff [name] Pope of Rome.” In the Orthodox world, said Pontiff is the Bishop of Rome but never included in our corporate prayer. (News flash from 2007: “A joint commission of Orthodox and Catholic theologians has agreed that the Pope has primacy over all bishops, though disagreements about the extent of his authority still continue.”)

After a prolonged, by decades, absence from participation as a parish member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada, I returned; and learned that while I had been busy as a professional writer who “dipped into” Orthodox worship only as a visitor when abroad in need of spiritual refreshment (I had never resisted the elemental allure of Byzantine interiors), the UOCC had

Hagia Sophia interior

ended Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s long separation from the patriarchate of Constantinople through whom we had been baptised back in 988 AD. In 1990, Eucharistic Union was re-established (common sharing in the sacrament of Holy Communion), bringing us Canadians into communion with much of world Orthodoxy. On each of my visits to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – that 6th century masterpiece of Byzantine architecture now a mosque – I stood in profound awe that in this very space I had a source and origin of identity. (An aside here for an observation I made of a listing on the Departures flight board in Athens airport in 2019: in English I was looking for the flight to Istanbul; in Greek, for Kωνσταντινούπολη/Constantinople. True story.)

It did eventually dawn on me as well that being in communion with “world Orthodoxy” also put me in communion with the Russian Orthodox Church, the most populous Orthodox jurisdiction in the world. This did not sit well with me.

May 4, 2022: “We do not want to fight against anyone. Russia has never attacked anyone,” said Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in his sermon yesterday, continuing his steadfast support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has caused the deaths of innocent Ukrainian Orthodox civilians.

With Ukraine’s independence as a sovereign state after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was inevitable that at least a portion of its Orthodox population under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate would seek an equally independent Church. And so it came to pass. In 2019 Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople granted autocephaly (self-governance) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) under its primate, Epiphanius, the Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill was so displeased with this “interference” by Constantinople that he dissolved the Russian Orthodox Church’s Eucharistic Communion with Constantinople and made a pivot to the Vatican.

May 4 2022 The week before his Zoom call with Francis, Kirill, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, described the war in Ukraine as a “metaphysical” struggle against a godless international order based on “excess consumption” and “gay parades.”  Pope Francis said in an interview published Tuesday that he told Patriarch Kirill — the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church — not to “transform himself into Putin’s altar boy,” CNN reported Wednesday.

Patriarch Kirill and President Putin

Also in 2018, I had become an oblate of the Order of Saint Benedict, about which I have written in an earlier blog post. I was accepted as a baptised Christian (an ObOSB is not necessarily a Roman Catholic) Over the years, because of retreats at the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter in Muenster, Saskatchewan, in the company of the brothers I became immersed in their daily cycle of prayers and psalmody, attended Sunday Masses, ate meals in the refectory and enjoyed convivial conversation with them all, especially the  Abbot and Guest Master, and, very important, spent hours reading in the Oblates’ reading room choosing from a library of quite extraordinary Benedictine-inspired literature. I shared their enthusiasm (mostly) for the reinvigorated papacy led by Supreme Pontiff Francis. Looking back on my more recent visits (resumed post-Covid in 2021), I am struck by the equanimity, even serenity, of the community’s response to the very issues that agitated me – why can’t women be priests? how should we settlers establish relationships with Indigenous neighbours? do you think the Great Schism of 1054 that split the universal Church into East and West can be healed?

April 27 2022 By the wanton slaughter of innocents in Bucha, in Mariupol’, and throughout Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has stigmatized himself with the mark of Cain. Kirill has tried to mask that stigma. For the Bishop of Rome to have met with Kirill as if the Russian were a true religious leader would have bitterly disappointed Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians, who would not unreasonably have regarded it as a betrayal; it would have depleted the Holy See’s moral capital in world affairs; and it would have contributed nothing to peace.

Abbey grounds in Feb 2022

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But the monks of St Peter’s live according to the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, in whose Prologue Benedict exhorts: “Never departing from [God’s] guidance, remaining in the monastery until death…so we may eventually enter into the Kingdom of God.” Not even the war in Ukraine seemed to disturb their composure as a community, to judge from their website. Do you suppose there is a lesson in this?

May 11 2022 Francis names this truth, and defends the other logic—God’s logic, the path of mercy—even after most of us have given up on it. God’s logic recognizes the depth of human relationship. It demands our mutual recognition as fellow creatures. The pope’s stance needs no clarification. It could not be clearer. Amidst the roar of weapons and cries of grief, he stands among the victims, their blood on his cassock, begging for peace, and ready to talk to anyone and to do anything to bring it about.

Part Two: Peace in a Time of War

Moustafa the night clerk, in an aureole of black curls, had bent his head over a medical textbook under a small shaded lamp at the miniscule Reception. He smiled dozily at my arrival, and left his duties at the textbook to lead me up to the roof to show me where breakfast would be served. I was staring out to the starry Sea of Marmara, enveloped by the plushness of the night, when Moustafa gently directed me to turn around. There, swelling up at us from the night sky, from a blackness as if from another world, heaved the vaulted floodlit bulk of Hagia Sophia, queen of churches in the Byzantine cosmos. It seemed to hang in the air right above us under the roof of heaven.

The Greeks called the church Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, the Ottomans, Aya Sofya. They made a mosque of it in 1453, eventually plastered over the mosaics and erected four superb minarets at its four corners. Sultan Murat IV, the Conqueror of Baghdad, delighted in this incomparable mosque, and when he came there to pray, attendants hung cages of singing birds near the southern door, particularly nightingales, “so that their sweet notes, mingled with those of the muezzins’ voices, filled the mosque with a harmony approaching that of paradise.”

My mouth will speak words of wisdom, the utterance of my heart will give understanding. Ps 49 3:1-2

For almost a thousand years (537 CE – 1453) the great Mother Church of Byzantium, Hagia Sophia, had stood triumphant in Constantinople as the place in all of Christendom where those who entered “knew not whether they had entered Paradise” (as recorded of an awestruck tenth-century emissary  from pagan Rus to the Imperial capital on the Bosphorus.) But 1453 – catastrophe! Holy Wisdom may have seemed eternal but the Byzantine Empire was decidedly rickety and Constantine’s city dangerously vulnerable to assault. It fell (or was conquered, depending on where you stood) to the Ottoman Turks on Tuesday May 29 when sultan Mehmed II cantered through shattered gates in triumph and claimed Hagia Sophia for Muslim worship.

As Ayasofya it was a mosque until the Ottoman Empire in its turn fell in the aftermath of the Great War, a secular republic was proclaimed and in 1934 the Ayasofya mosque was decommissioned, so to speak, and declared a museum, affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Fifty years later, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. So far, so secular.

In the early 1990s, however, in what professor of Islamic Studies at Stanford University Anna Bigelow called “rituals of majoritarian grievance” (in a webinar October 9 2020), crowds of Muslim worshippers began to congregate to pray outside Ayasofya Müzesi on the anniversary of the Conquest.  Then massive petitions circulated online to have it reconverted to a mosque. In June 2018 a survey among 6000 Turks older than 18 asked: “Should Hagia Sophia be converted into a mosque and open to worship?” YES: 78.6%; NO 21.4%

Muslim crowds outside Hagia Sophia

Good as done.

A council of State decision, followed by a presidential decree on July 10 2020, “within hours” annulled the 1934 regulation. In the Globe and Mail Michael Coren wrote: “…the Islamic call to prayer was recited, and the museum’s social media pages were shuttered.”  It was reported that, after signing the decree,Turkey’s excitable president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was so moved that he had been unable to sleep all night. Four days later “thousands” of Muslim faithful were on their way to Ayasofya for the first Friday prayers in 86 years.

I clipped and printed out many accounts of that day, from nonpartisan reportage to partisan – achingly, exuberantly, triumphantly, mournfully partisan – testimonials and homilies, press releases and op eds.

President Erdogan arrives in Hagia Sophia

Accompanied by 500 dignitaries, cheered on by those thousands who had arrived and were now packed in the newly-segregated (men and women) squares around the mosque. President Erdoğan arrived at noon, entered the church/museum/mosque and took his place as Prof.Ali Erbaş, head of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, climbed up on the minbar, gripping the hilt of the “sword of conquest” and gave his sermon. According to a post on Public Orthodoxy, “Erbaş’s sermon presents a sacred narrative of Turkish national history, where the Turkish state is appointed by God to be the patron of all who live within its dominion.”  The drawn sword, it turns out, dates back to the fifteenth-century “signifying that Hagia Sophia was a mosque acquired through holy warfare.”

A hotel manager: “Ayasofya is reconquered.” His wife: “Turkey’s Muslims have taken back what was theirs.”

A retired businessman: “This is a festival for us today. We are so happy.”

President Erdoğan: “This is Hagia Sophia breaking away from its captivity chains. It was the greatest dream of our youth.”

Adem Yilmaz, worshipper: “This turned into a place where all hearts beat at once.”

UNESCO World Heritage Site: “The Grand Hagia Sophia Mosque.”

“As for Agia Sophia, well, it depends on degrees. Is there some Muslim prayer, and then the museum resumes? I heard they cover the mosaics for some time everyday. It is hard to judge if one is not there to see. As a woman, I know I would be a lot happier to be in a museum free of the headscarf police in a mosque. Many feel it was a purely political gimmick, fear-mongering and garnering Islamic prestige and power politics.’ [an email from a friend in Athens]

Curtains cover the apse mosaic

Here and there were people who wondered what was going to happen to the “human images” – a stupendous achievement of Byzantine mosaic art and spirituality – that are offensive to Muslims at prayer. Straight off, in fact, to cover as needed the image of the Mother of God and Christ Child, workers clambered up and into the sky-high apse and installed curtains, but so far there seems no intention to replaster the images. Scholars and conservationists raised concerns about the status of the on-going conservation work now that the museum’s stewardship has been transferred to a religious authority: tesserae on mosaics are becoming detached, red paint from the 1980s has to be removed, research on the mortar in the ancient brick walls is still underway.

But normally, I think it fair to say, the western reading public would not overly-concern itself with the political and religious agenda at play in the fate of an old church just barely inside Europe. Take Mark Twain, who visited Hagia Sophia in 1869:

How Hagia Sophia became a museum

I had been reading his The Innocents Abroad on the sun-struck roof of the hotel, the paperback propped up against a salt shaker, while I scooped up breakfast – a boiled egg, packets of cream cheese and cherry jam and honey, black and green olives, tomato and cucumber slices, bread, cookies, tea, with wasps crawling over my honey-sticky fingers. ”I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia,” Twain wrote. “I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.”

Perhaps it was a shambolic sight, a Byzantine masterpiece stripped of bells and crosses, icons and relics, its ponderous architecture propped up by massive buttresses, its marble flooring randomly covered by strips of carpet, the incomparable mosaics – those that had not been excised – plastered over in the 18th century and not uncovered until 1931.

But when its patron, Roman Emperor Justinian I first entered its completed space in 537, having “disregarded all considerations of expense and raised craftsmen from the whole world,” he is said to have declaimed “Glory be to God, who hath thought me worthy to accomplish so great a work. I have vanquished thee O Solomon!”

Justinian I

Vast in scale, immense in cost, marbles and spolia taken from five pagan monuments – its green marble pillars once fortified Artemis’s own sanctuary in Ephesus – it took only five years to build. In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon described the emperor himself, “clad in a linen tunic” who “surveyed each day the rapid progress” of ten thousand labourers and made sure each was paid promptly at the end of the day. The bedazzled visitor for centuries to come would behold a sanctuary that contained “forty thousand pound weight of silver, and the holy vases and vestments of the altar were of the purest gold, enriched with inestimable gems.” As for the dome:

… And so the visitor’s mind is lifted up to God and floats aloft, thinking that He cannot be far away, but must love to dwell in this place which He himself has chosen. Procopius, De Aedificiis

Dome of Hagia Sophia

May 27, 1453: Hagia Sophia was thronged with worshippers when the besieging forces of the Ottomans had scaled the “impenetrable” land walls and had already arrived at the church’s mighty bronze doors which eventually gave way. “The pillage continued all day long.” 

Even so, when Sultan Mehmet approached Hagia Sophia as its conqueror, his horse wading through streams of blood, he dismounted and bent over to the ground to scoop up a handful of earth. This he sprinkled over his turban as a sign of humility, or perhaps of penance, for inside the cathedral was unfolding a scene of such bestial ferocity   – rape and murder of priests and nuns and cowering citizens, and the systematic looting and destruction of religious objects, of marble and silver and gold – that the last Patriarch to celebrate Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia is said to have taken the Chalice and Host into his hands and disappeared into a crack in the walls, there to be sealed up until the day the Cross triumphs over the Crescent on the church’s stupendous domes and he re-emerges to finish the Mass.

As for the Byzantines, they had vanished into thin air after the conquest, or so I had been led to believe. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul

What happened next is illuminating – something entirely new in my education – that strips at least some of the cynicism from the text of the brochure distributed by Erdoğan’s AKP [Justice and Development Party [whose symbol is an illuminated light bulb] : “Turkey has been delicately cherishing the historical, cultural and spiritual value of Hagia Sophia since the conquest of Istanbul.”

Mehmet the Conqueror was by no means oblivious to the prestige that the monumental glory of Hagia Sophia lent his ambitions. Without changing the city’s name, he had declared Constantinople the new imperial capital and Holy Wisdom as “the church most suited to the sultan’s dignity.”  As though an awe-struck emissary himself from an abode of the profane, he is said to have wandered through his new possession and climbing into the dome “as the spirit of God had mounted to the fourth story of the heavens.” And at once ordered it repaired and made fitting as the royal mosque. Unsurprisingly, then, Mehmet II was to see himself, as conqueror of Constantinople, Byzantium’s legitimate heir.

Paradise, paradise, heaven, angels, Cosmos: we all want a piece of it. Moustafa at the hotel told me that the postures performed at prayer – the bending at the waist, the crouching on the haunches – were performed in imitation of the postures of the angels who once greeted the Prophet from all the levels of heaven when he was taken up to meet God. I loved that idea, that one could be like the angels with a swoop and a bend of our human body. Though Mustafa’s place of prayer would never countenance music or icon, nor altar or sacrament or priest, it has admitted the dance of the angels.

Myths were fashioned for this enterprise. A mythical ruler, Yanko bin Madyan, had been guided by a dream to found Constantinople; it was constructed of materials from Solomon’s ruined Temple; its doors from the wood of Noah’s Ark; among its treasures, the stone cradle of baby Jesus. “Sixteenth-century authors…refer to Hagia Sophia as the second Ka’ba for the poor who could not afford the pilgrimage to Mecca.” Of course, at the same time the devout and the visitor would be impressed over and over by the rich visual affirmation of Islam’s subjugation of the Byzanto-Christian past, even as they spread their prayer rugs on its consecrated marble.

Patr. Bartholomew delivers Homily

Orthodox Christians, however, are inconsolable. While Muslims gathered from across Turkey to join the inaugural prayers at the church/museum/mosque, Orthodox Christian church leaders in Greece and the USA announced a Day of Mourning for “the confiscation of our Αγία Σοφία.” “We do not mourn only for ourselves,” His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros preached from Holy Trinity Archdiocesan Cathedral in New York. “We mourn for the whole world whose loss this is,” he asserted, echoing other clergy including the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, Orthodoxy’s spiritual leader who in his Homily of June 30, 2020, reminded listeners that, as a museum, Hagia Sophia was “the symbolic place of encounter, dialogue, solidarity and mutual understanding between Christianity and Islam.” His words were carefully chosen, given the delicacy of his position in an increasingly nationalist and Islamist Turkish state.

In a sign of solidarity with the Patriarch, Yuri Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada sent out a call to all his clergy and Brothers and Sisters in Christ to “unite in prayer” with his for the intercession of the Blessed Mother of God on July 24, 2020.

To You the Champion, we your City dedicate
a feast of victory and then thanksgiving,
as ones rescued out of sufferings, O Theotokos.
But as you are one with might that is invincible,
from all dangers that can be, deliver us.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times and Comments posted July 24, 2020 a reader raised the spectre of “colonialism and genocide” in the “taking over” of a people’s [Greek Orthodox] Holy Church, referencing perhaps what Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk had called “conquest fever.” In 1955, in the wake of the 500th anniversary of the “great miracle” of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, rampaging mobs for two days sacked and burned and raped in the Greek districts of Istanbul. “It later emerged that the organizers of this riot – whose terror…made the city more hellish than the worst orientalist nightmares – had the state’s support and had pillaged the city with its blessing.” Istanbul p.158

Indeed, behind the heated populism of Erdoğan’s rhetoric recorded in AKP’s brochure – that “there was a great demand from the people of Turkey, that this historic building regain its identity as a mosque” – observers see also a neo-Ottomanist second conquest of Constantinople. And a rectification of the “sinful act, a gesture to the West, offensive to the pious,” of having made Hagia Sophia a museum in the first place.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

The status of museum had been conferred by a regulation of the secular Turkish state under its long-revered founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938). When I travelled in Turkey in 2011 and 2015, his image was ubiquitous, from state institutions to neighbourhood bakeries, from schools to gas stations. In 2015 the tour guide disclosed to us, somewhat furtively, that already Erdoğan’s portrait was being included cultishly alongside Atatürk’s in sacrosanct places such as the frontispieces of school textbooks. His critics have accused him of inciting “culture war” and the “clash of civilizations” when he appeals to his political base that, in the symbolism of Ayasofya/Hagia Sophia, he is defending national sovereignty. Meanwhile, they go on, Turkey’s economy is weakening, prices are rising, and his political opponents are censored and worse: arrested and made to disappear in prisons without trial. 

But Kemal, so much admired in the West for his fashioning of a democratic, secular republic from the ashes of “the sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman caliphate, is evaluated by the writer-historian Karen Armstrong as “a dictator who hated Islam…Western approval of Atatürk led many to believe that the West sought to destroy Islam itself.” The Kemalist transformation – abolishing Shariah law, outlawing the Sufi orders and seizure of their properties, and the shutting down of the madrasses [religious schools] – was a “spiritual and cultural trauma” for the devout.

Soviet propaganda poster. Religion is the narcotic of the people

I admit to a certain fellow feeling when I review images of Soviet Bolshevism’s violent take-down of ordinary people’s faith and piety – burning liturgical books, smashing icons, pulling down church cupolas, humiliating village priests, outlawing Christian Feasts and festivities, the whole demonic Carnival of Reason.

Visit to Kadilli Girls’ School, Istanbul

In 2011, thanks to an invitation from my schoolteacher friend Taner, I spent a day at Kandilli Girls’ Anatolian High School in Istanbul, where he taught English. A bevy of girls, unscarved but in uniforms, whisked me around the bucolic grounds and building that overlooked the Bosphorus, chattering in bursts of creditable English, and led me to the office of the Headmaster, Dr.Abdurrahman Memiş, who, Taner informed me, is a scholar of Islamic theology, and I assumed that the green book open on his desk under his folded hands was a copy of the Qur’an. Dr. Memiş does not speak English but through Taner’s translation we managed a conversation of sorts.“In your view,” I enquired conversationally, “do you think there is a possibility of mutual understanding among the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam?” “Yes,” Taner translated his response with enthusiastic approbation, “it is a fact that correct Islam teaches that any Muslim who does not honour the Hebrew and Christian prophets, Mary and Jesus included, cannot call himself a Muslim.”

I was still mulling over the likelihood of some Christians on the wilder shores of the faith honouring the prophets of other people’s faith when I was whisked onward to the school’s Assembly Hall and onto the stage festooned with balloons and large cut-out letters spelling my name. I was presented an enormous bouquet of flowers, then for an hour I responded to the questions about my books volleyed at me from two students onstage with me, who had carefully studied my website. The students and faculty had been attentive enough that I ventured a new topic: the rather emotionally-charged subject of how an Orthodox Christian from the West might feel about the monuments of Byzantium, not to mention the very memory of it, disappearing under Ottoman/Turkish triumphalism. Take the very name, Istanbul. From the fourth century of its founding by Roman Emperor, Constantine, it was called Constantinople, a name not officially changed to Istanbul until 1930; even the Ottomans had kept the Byzantine name. The name Istanbul itself lightly conceals its origins in the Greek phrase, “eis ten polin,” in the city, there being only one city worth mentioning.

The other day, I said, I had taken a photograph of a bright, new monument erected just off a main thoroughfare, a statue of Fatih Sultan Mehmet in a simple cloak and turban and posed with his left hand held peaceably across his chest. Fatih means Conqueror, the Conqueror. “You conquered Constantinople,” I said, “but for us it fell, and great were our lamentations.”

A few days later at my hotel, I picked up a booklet advertising the “Panorama 1453 History Museum.” In his Foreword, the mayor of Istanbul writes that the museum has been opened “in order to bring to life the images of those bewitching moments [of the Conquest]”. The booklet reproduces some of those images, which I saw for myself in 2015. Mehmet front and centre on a noble steed gesturing toward the walls of Constantinople, feats of engineering that blasted open the walls that had stood impenetrable for a thousand years, a scene of Janissaries raising the Ottoman flag on the devastated ramparts. “You shall hear the shouting of Taqbir (‘God is great!’) by Fatih Sultan Mehmet’s thousands of soldiers and the victory marches played by his janissary band,” the brochure came to a rousing climax.

In 2015, as far as I could tell, I was the sole non-Turkish woman visitor in the crowd, gazing in amazement at the murals, with full sound and light effects of battle. “My” empire had fallen; “theirs” had just begun its 450-year-long imperium on the self-same banks of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn.

On the apse of Hagia Sophia where surges the magnificent mosaic of the Theotokos and Child, a Koranic text had soon been inscribed after 1453, Sura 3 verse 37. In its Christian context, the verse refers to the presentation of the girl-child Mary at the Temple in Jerusalem as a dedication by her parents, Joachim and Anna, who deliver her into the care of the High Priest, Zachariah. The Qur’an continues: And thereupon her Sustainer accepted the girl-child with goodly acceptance, and caused her to grow up in goodly growth, and placed her in the care of Zachariah Whenever Zachariah visited her in the sanctuary, he found her provided with food. He would ask: “O Mary, whence came this unto thee?” She would answer: “It is from God; behold, God grants sustenance unto whom He wills, beyond all reckoning.” 

Why that text, in that place? It is not in Christian Scripture; the Feast, Entrance of the Theotokos, commemorates only a Tradition. Because (as I learned from a webinar hosted by the Cantor Center at Stanford University) it is about protection and care, as represented by Mary within Holy Wisdom. The Sura goes on, in Mohammad’s speech to Mary, that the child she will bear “will speak unto mankind in his cradle and in his manhood, and he is of the righteous…And He will teach him the Scripture and wisdom, and the Torah and the Gospel.”  Was it only as a Museum that Hagia Sophia could hold all claims together in one space?

Theotokos in the apse of the Hagia Sophia

They served lentil soup, in the serene little courtyard of the Bazaar of Ottoman Arts and Crafts across from Hagia Sophia, and apple tea, and played Classical Turkish music through speakers under the roof while I kept on reading my travel guidebook.By now I had visited much in the way of museums, mosques, excavations and restorations: overtop the almost invisible Byzantine lie Ottoman marvels. Courtyards and fountains of mosques, men at their ablutions, the gorgeous blues and greens, aquamarines and emeralds, of Iznik tiles that line their interiors, the intertwined polyphony of the muezzin calling out from each mosque, the swirling sweeps of Arabic calligraphy, water, rose gardens, pomegranates, carpets, tea in delicate glasses. An early Ottoman miniature depicts the story of Abraham and Isaac who do not look here like sand-scoured patriarchs roaming the desert but like figures from The Arabian Nights, swathed in silk. From a map in the Museum of Islamic and Ottoman Arts, I saw that Turkey lies at the western margin of most of the Islamic world. The centre of the world lies east.

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: 2She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table.3She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city,10The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.11For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life shall be increased.

Дзвони дзвонять бам-бам-бам, Чи до школи, чи до церкви, час-час-час…The bells are ringing, ding-dang-dong, To school or to church, it’s time-time-time.

I knew how to make the sounds of each letter (Ukrainian vowels,unlike the Russian, are pronounced without variation) and I knew there were “false friends” that lurked among them: В was not “b” but “v” and Н was not “h” but “n.” But what I revelled in were the letters that arrived from another calligraphic imagination altogether. Д or “d,” Я, not a backwards R but “Ya,” Б or “b.” Further on into the Cyrillic ABCs (in Ukrainian there are 32 letters), I relished the shaping of Ш or “sh,” Щ or “shch as in fresh cheese,” Ч or “ch,” Ц or “ts,” and, most fun of all, Ж, or “zh.”

See, you can read Cyrillic too.

The fact that in Ukrainian you needed only one letter where in English – or, God help us, Polish – you needed at least two in Latin letters to make the same sound (Щ = szcz in Polish) eventually confirmed for me the wisdom of the ancestors in choosing such an efficient representation of the sounds of most Slavic speech. As a result I can read – but not necessarily understand – Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Bulgarian. This is handy for figuring out newspaper headlines or street names or where a bus is going. Or, in a museum cafe in Sofia, I read that the “vegetarian menu” is offered in Bulgarian as “Lenten.”

I loved drawing the letters, curlicues and whorls and slanted strokes in the cursive, long before the letters arranged themselves into discrete sound clusters and then words. So for me the written Ukrainian language was first a design, such as one could trace on an embroidered cushion. Pleasing, like the swirl of my own name written on the flyleaf of the Reader on mum’s lap: Мирося Косташ. I don’t think I thought of these letters as exotic. Private, yes, belonging to this homely place in the pool of light under the lampshade or, later, belonging to the church, including its basement (Saturday and Sunday schools) where none but hyphenated-Canadians would gather to study on weekends. Even before I could read them, I had seen the letters all my life, again in that private space of my father’s newspaper from Winnipeg, Український Голос or “Ukrainian Voice” and on the fragile airmail letters that came all the way from relatives in Джурів, Dzhuriv, in the УРСР, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And in a crabbed kind of cuneiform (to my childish eye) on the icons in the church.

And when I went to Greece the first time, I discovered I could read that too, or make a stab at it: shop signs, bus stations, icons. Once I had sounded out the letters (and thanks also to all those “Greeks” i.e. fraternities at the university with their  ΦΔΚ and ΣΑΜ emblazoned above their porches), I was already a foot in the door of Greek script. Γ = Г, Δ = Д, Φ = Ф, Λ = Л, Π = П….easy-peasy.

(In this respect, at least, I was not as naive as the American writer, Mary Norris, who wrote recently in the New Yorker “on the pleasures of a different alphabet,” the Greek in her case. “It had never occurred to me,” she writes, “that a person could become literate in a language that was written in a different alphabet.” I do admit that I am transfixed by the obvious literacy of a person reading right to left in the pages of an Arabic book or in vertical columns of Mandarin.)

And when I went to church in Greece, I had a field day: Ecclesia! Theotokos! Episkop! Liturgia! Khristos! And then learned the exact same vocabulary in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Just so, we Ukrainian-Canadian Orthodox are instructed to refer, in English, to an eparchy (Greek) and not to a diocese (Latin), to Divine Liturgy (Liturgia), not Mass, to the Mother of God (Theotokos) rather than to the Virgin Mary. This is no mere whimsy: our Orthodox Christianity is the fruit of missions among the Slavs of emissaries from Greek-speaking Constantinople, not Latin Rome. So when the need arose for a vocabulary of Christian terms and concepts that had no Slavonic equivalent, Greek was adopted holus-bolus. For example, the names of the priest’s vestments in English: Phelonion (robe),  Epitrahilion (stole), and Epimanikia (cuffs). Or translated into tormented (to me, trying to memorize the Creed, for instance) neologisms for ” Who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified” come up with five- and seven-syllabic words. 

I could read these words, i.e. sound them out, in my Children’s Prayer Book but, until the Church decided to publish bilingual editions of the Liturgical books we used, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a lot of the words meant. Rivnopokloniaiemyi, anyone? I memorized The Nicene Creed as a child, one ghastly sound group after another, but I had no idea what I was professing “to believe” until I read the English text. (Whether I then “believed,” is another issue.)

According to Mary Norris, “the English alphabet is descended, via the Latin, from the Greek alphabet, which, according to Herodotus, was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Well, that’s interesting:  that all those languages written in Latin letters (Czech, English, Turkish) should have the same root as Cyrillic letters? It seems I have been labouring under the illusion of the utter strangeness of the one to the other. And for this I account the story of how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be.

If you, dear Reader, have ever paused to wonder why this particular European alphabet is called “Cyrillic,” you could logically assume that it is attributed to the divine work of St Cyril (“Apostle to the Slavs” together with his brother, St Methodius) of whom you will have heard in order even to pose the question. They were 8th century monks and theologians from Thessalonica in northern Greece who were sent by the Byzantine emperor, Michael III in Constantinople, on a mission to Slavic Great Moravia, at the request of Prince Rastislav. The Prince requested translations of Scripture and Psalters into Slavonic and an alphabet in which to do so. The first attempt at the alphabet was not in fact Cyrillic but Glagolitic (it looks like this: Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰹⱌⰰ) and nothing came of it. Rastislav’s successor did not support their work and the Slavonic Liturgy was briefly deemed heretical.

But all was not lost. Although the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were expelled from Moravia, they were welcomed by Boris, ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, who gave them a scriptorium in Ohrid (Macedonia in former Yugoslavia) in which to work out a new, improved alphabet that would be called the Cyrillic in honour of their masters. And this one stuck. According to Wikipedia, Cyrillic is derived from the Greek capital letters script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including additional letters  for Old Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. There you have it. From Ohrid to Kyiv to…Edmonton.

Imagine,then, my aggrieved astonishment, on a visit to Venice, to hear a British travel guide address his group waiting to enter St Mark’s Basilica: “Strange as it may seem, you will see Greek in this Christian church.” Note to tour guides: San Marco is known architecturally as an example of eleventh-century Italo-Byzantine style and the mosaics in the main porch are in “a fairly pure Byzantine style.” In fact, to quote the official website of the Basilica, “essentially Byzantine in its architecture, the Basilica finds in the mosaics its natural integrating element.” And that’s where you will read that troublesome Greek.

August 9-12, 2018, in Saskatoon SK, I attended the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada (UOCC). In 1918, just as the first immigrants were burying their first dead, the Church got its start in that city when a group of disaffected Ukrainian Catholics (thus far the majority of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada) and “progressive” (read: social democrat) intellectuals  decided to organize a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a Church with which, in short order, members of my grandparents’ family affiliated. And so it came to pass that I was baptized into the UOCC in an Edmonton parish: how could I let the ancestors down by not showing up to celebrate their foresight in once again becoming Orthodox?

Besides, excited rumours were circulating that His All Holiness Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople (aka Istanbul), New Rome and Ecumenical [Highest Dignitary] Patriarch, the Spiritual Head of World Orthodoxy, First Among Equals, was about to grant – or commit to granting – independence to the much-beleaguered Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kyiv.

What a spiritual gift to our Jubilee celebrations in Saskatchewan if that were true!

But I am getting ahead of myself. And this is complicated history, which I will try to make as easy to follow as I can. After all, there was once a time when I couldn’t make head or tail of it myself. (I welcome easy-to-understand correction of egregious errors.)

The UOCC was a new creature in Ukrainian Orthodoxy: made-in-Canada, with no connections with any Church in Ukraine, least of all with the only legal Orthodox entity on Ukrainian lands, the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by the Moscow Patriarch. So, inspired in part by the practices of Presbyterians, for example, in Alberta who ran missions among the Ukrainian settlers,  the UOCC  decided its lay members, men and women (!), would have a voice and vote in the Church’s administrative matters, right up to the top stratum. (Remind me sometime to tell you what it is like to vote for a Bishop – think incense, Holy Water and ballot box combined.) Matters of doctrine and rites, of course, were reserved for the clergy. But everyone together wanted consistency with Eastern Christianity, the mother lode of Ukrainian spiritual legacies.

By the time I was seven years old, the UOCC had almost 300 congregations, 70 priests and 110,000 adherents. It would grow from there but, sadly, on its 100th birthday, the demographics are not hopeful. Even so, the UOCC may be embraced as “the Light of Truth for Contemporary Orthodoxy,” according to Very Reverend Fr. Roman Bozyk, Dean of Theology at St. Andrew’s College at the University of Manitoba, at a special symposium at the Jubilee. By which he meant – anticipating skepticism – our “heritage of Canadian mentality: a mosaic of influences, the British heritage of fair play, with clergy and laity working together. Our lay groups, especially women’s, are fundamental to our strength.” And, then, possibly as a nod to what was coming down the pike from Constantinople and Kyiv: “We do not change our practices to please a Czar.”

Ukrainians – or, rather, the people who would become Ukrainians – were baptized into Eastern Christianity  in 988 when Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) of Kyiv chose Byzantine (Greek) over Roman (Latin) Christianity. Constantinople thus became the Mother Church of the Kyivan Church. Grievously, in 1240, Kyiv fell to the Mongols, who razed it, but to the north a heretofore small fishing village, Moscow, gained prominence, and by 1453, when Constantinople (Byzantium) fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Grand Duchy of Moscow declared itself the Third Rome (after Imperial Rome and the New Rome of Constantine’s city). In 1686, after a series of ruinous wars, the Ukrainian Orthodox church was separated from Constantinople and subordinated to the Moscow patriarchate, the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople remaining spiritual head of both.

Moving smartly along…we arrive at the 1920s and a brief period when the Bolsheviks allowed a Ukrainian Independent Orthodox Church to function but in 1927 its Spiritual Head was arrested by the NKVD and executed in 1937. The early 1930s and again after the Second World War saw the destruction of tens of its bishops, thousands of its priests and tens of thousands of its lay activists. And we finally arrive at the break-up of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine in 1991, the arrival of Bartholomew I to the Ecumenical Patriarchal Throne in Constantinople (Istanbul), the looming split of the Orthodox Church in Kyiv from the Moscow Patriarchate – and (coincidentally?) the reception of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada into the Ecumenical Patriarchate, bringing us into communion with the four Ancient Patriarchates – Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople (but not, alas, with Rome, another long story).

From this point on, Church business in Ukraine becomes increasingly complicated and, to my mind, messy, but not without interest to us Ukrainian-Canadians, Orthodox and Catholic. Fights over property, defrockings and excommunications, meddling of nationalist political groups, expose of former NKVD agents and informers within the Russian Orthodox Church…Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin in Russia, church relations became strained to the breaking point. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, there began a wide-spread movement of Ukrainian parishes from Moscow’s patriarchate to that of “schismatic” and unrecognized Kyiv (almost half of the Russian Orthodox Church’s parishioners live in Ukraine).

With the Russian-sponsored war and occupation of eastern Ukrainian territory also in 2014, Ukrainian Orthodox faithful were confronted with images of Russian priests blessing Russian soldiers and weapons to the front, making visits to volunteers of the “Russian Orthodox Army,” where Russian soldiers are photographed kissing an icon of Putin, with Patriarch Kiril of Moscow, far from condemning the Russian invasion and occupation, calling President Putin a “miracle from God” – well, how can any self-respecting Ukrainian Orthodox Christian stay with  a Church that requires her to pray for the well-being of Patriarch Kiril? Asia News reports that the 1030th anniversary of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus was celebrated in Moscow by Patr. Kiril – because he has been barred from Ukraine. The Kyivan Patriarch, Filaret, had already suggested that Putin is “possessed by Satan.” 

This brings us to current events in the Fall of 2018, hastened by a request, in April, 2018, by the Parliament of Ukraine to Patr. Bartholomew that he grant full independence to the break-away UOC – Kyiv Patriarchate. Naturally, Moscow objects but broad support comes from Ukrainian Orthodox bishops abroad. Patr. Bartholomew is the soul of discretion until September 7 when he indicates he is in favour of granting Parliament’s request. This “bombshell” explodes a mere week after Patr. Kiril visited Constantinople, during an admittedly “frosty” meeting, after which the Russian delegates did not even stay for dinner.

A propaganda war heats up: Moscow “slams” Constantinople and warns against “fake news” coming from that source. Constantinople is of the belief that it never did “hand over” the territory of Ukraine to the Russian church in the first place (i.e. in 1686). “The Moscow Church is a daughter of the Ukrainian Church, which is a daughter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.” Besides, it was medieval Kyivan Rus that was baptized, not Russia. Publicorthodoxy.org reports that Russian military intelligence has sought to “hack and surveil His Holiness Bartholomew” as reported by Associated Press: what did Patr. Kiril know and when did he know it?

By this time international media are chasing this story. I read items from Kyiv Post,  Economist, TASS, Washington Post, Greek Reporter, Christian Today, Tablet, Irish Times and Eurasia Daily Monitor, among others, as Google Alerts pop up in my Inbox. Atlantic Council reports: “It’s no exaggeration to write that the granting of autocephaly [independence] from the Russian Orthodox Church to Ukraine’s millions of Orthodox believers is as significant as the disintegration of the USSR for Ukraine.” 

From my perch in Canada, I am amazed. That Orthodoxy – usually a footnote in the annals of (Western) Christendom – is so interesting to outsiders.That unfamiliar (Greek)vocabulary circulates: Exarch, Patriarch, Ecumenical, Synod, Metropolia. That the faces and voices of Orthodox clergy are posted on social media. That the spiritual hunger of Christians neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant has become news!

So perhaps you can understand what a joy it was for me to see, just a few days ago, the video and photo of Ukraine President Pyotr Poroshenko in Kyiv, greeting UOCC’s very own Bishop, His Grace Ilarion, an envoy along with American Archbishop Daniel, of the Ecumenical Patriarch,  “dispatched by the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians,” as AP reported, “to prepare for establishing a Ukrainian church that is ecclesiastically independent from the Russian Orthodox Church.”

What a birthday present for the ancestors!

16 Now I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is also a minister [diakonos] of the assembly in Cenchrae, 2 that you may welcome her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the holy ones, and assist her regarding whatever thing she may need from you; for she has been a leader [prostatis] of many, myself included.

Thus spake none other than St Paul, in a Letter to the Romans. He spake also of Priscilla, Mariam, Jounia, Tryphania, Tryphosa, Persis and Julia, “who have labored in the Lord.” Of Jounia he added that  she was “of note among the apostles.” Apostle! The highest title of authority and honour in the early church.  The 4th century theologian and archbishop of Constantinople,  St John Chrysostom, said of his friend and correspondent,  the abbess and deaconess Olympias, that he was honoured as a man “that there are such women among us.” These were women neither silent nor submissive in those early assemblies whose leadership was acknowledged….and then are heard from no more. 

But, when I was reading about the history of Byzantium and the early church (research for The Prodigal Daughter) , I came across their descendants – from the late 4th to late 7th centuries – there, in the churches of Constantinople, their ordination as deaconesses provided for by liturgical manuals and analogous to the rite for male deacons. They presented themselves at the altar, bent their heads for the Bishop’s hands, received the prayers of consecration, and received communion. At the time of Emperor Justinian in the 6th century,  the staff of St Sophia consisted of sixty priests, one hundred deacons, forty deaconesses and ninety subdeacons. As late as the 12th century, Emperor Alexis I Comnenos concerned himself that “the work of the deaconesses be carefully organized” in the Church of St Paul, according to his daughter-biographer, Anna Comnena.

And so began my brief life as a fantasist of Byzantium: a deaconess in the great church, Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom], vested in embroidered tunic and orarion (stole), making  the circuit of its stupendous interior while I cense all the icons, clouds of burning frankincense billowing around me as I swing the gold censer in a fragrant arc. Then I step into the sanctuary, escorted by candle-bearers and fan-bearers and more incense, to hand the priest the bread for communion and  pour warm water into the chalice of wine for communion. The Divine Liturgy begins and I chant the long petitions of the Litanies, read the Gospel as worshippers crowd around me, help distribute communion, command the people, “Let us bow our heads to the Lord,” and dismiss them: “Let us go forth in peace.”

(Not so fast, Myrna.)

I wrote my book, became a member of the parish of St Elias Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Edmonton, and had entirely forgotten my fantasy until I wandered into a meeting of the St Phoebe Center for the History of the Deaconess one winter afternoon in New York City in 2014. It was their Women and Diaconal Ministry conference and I sat enthralled as I heard a succession of Orthodox women – a nun, a tonsured chanter, a couple of PhDs, a sophomore, a parish council president – speak of the possibilities of a revived “apostolic order of deaconesses” in the 21st century.

Never mind that the order disappeared  in the eastern church by the 12th century (in part because of a theological dictum that forbade women to approach the altar and carry out any service there during menstruation). Never mind that the role of deaconess never did include any of my fantasy: we did not fan the Holy Gifts nor distribute them to laity, we did not wear that lovely tunic – only the stole – nor participate in liturgical processions. We Orthodox have a long memory. For more than a thousand years deaconesses did serve, at adult baptisms, visiting the bedridden, chanting Matins, as educators. And here were women speaking of what deaconesses could do if the Order were restored (a petition, by the way, made of the Russian Orthodox Church back in 1855 by the sister of Tsar Nicholas I, of all people). Chaplaincy, spiritual direction, Ministry of the Word, Ministry of Philanthropic Outreach. A woman “learned Orthodoxy” by attending Liturgy and then joining the chanters in an Antiochian church. Another said that “as an ordained deacon I would have the Bishop’s blessing for what I already do: serve the poor in my neighbourhood. The deacon is the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman with the flow of blood, the Myrrh-Bearers at the tomb, and Phoebe.” A chaplain described the experience of praying the Lord’s Prayer over a woman in such pain that she could not  stop moving. “After the prayer, she fell asleep.” A nun gives spiritual direction to young people who approach her at the monastery, “becoming open to the transcendent.”

And so it went. What’s not to love about such women and their desire?

Yet they are a scandal to the Church.

I shall leave aside the crippling misogyny of early Church apologists such as Tertullian of Carthage – “Woman is a temple built over a sewer” – and repress the memory of my indignation when, as a secular feminist, I first encountered such texts, in order rather to take up the issue of current hostility to the idea of a revived female diaconate. The women and men of the St Phoebe Center are serious scholars who challenge “distortions and misrepresentations of the historical record,” “fallacies,” “detractors,” and “errors.” They retaliate by citing Byzantine traditions, 8th century Codeces, Ecumenical Councils, Canons,  Apostolic Constitutions, just to mention one of their published papers.They reference recommendations in 1976, 1980, 1988, 1997, 1999 and 2016 that call for” full restoration of the order of women deacons.”

It would not be correct to say they are met with resounding silence: they are met with vociferous argument. Holy Tradition has no place for deaconesses; God’s intended  “natural order of male and female” requires female subordination to men; the very idea is a plot by secular feminists to carry Orthodoxy down the slippery slope of female ordination, after which come acceptance of gay marriage, calling God “She,” ordaining LGBTQ priests and… schism. After all, look at those Anglicans and Protestants: you start with women who serve  liturgically, they are cross-bearers and candle-bearers, they help distribute the bread and wine, they read the Epistles, and before you know it they’re ordained deacons, then priests, then bishops (for example, Anglican Bishop Jane Alexander of Edmonton).

In the meanwhile, our Orthodox churches are bleeding members, (male) priests, and finances. “We can do so much more as a Christian community,” writes Valerie Karras, ThD, PhD, “if we do not shackle the talents of fully half of our body, if we do not ignore the spiritual gifts which the Holy Spirit bestows on women as well as men.”

There have been times when I have been deeply grateful for the Eastern Church’s treasury of her own antiquity. I think of the fragments of third-century mystical wisdom, of desert Mothers and Fathers, of the first hymnography and Christological theology. Of the icons and festal memory of women-equal-to-the-apostles such as Mary Magdalene. All of Christianity’s first texts, first liturgies, first councils and creeds are remembered and are even part of Sunday worship. Now I ask, with increasing bewilderment and impatience, why the Church doesn’t remember its own wisdom about the equal gifts that women and men represent in church life? Talk about selective memory! Here’s St Basil the Great in the 4th century, who wrote in The Human Condition of men and women, that “the natures are alike of equal honour, the virtues are equal, the struggle equal, the judgement alike.”

Because objections raised to the revival of the Order of deaconesses may hide their authors’ misogyny behind pious reverence of  man-made “tradition,” I’d rather remember the tradition of St Gregory of Nazianzus who railed against the hypocrisy of men who lay down laws directed against women but leave themselves unscathed. (Discourse 37) 

Carrie Frederick Frost, a scholar of Orthodox theology, makes an argument, in “Women’s Gifts and the Diaconate,” familiar from suffrage movements in the early twentieth century. She writes approvingly: “Even within the context of the Church’s conviction of the essential equality of women and men, there is no sense that the Church understands women and men to be perfectly equivalent” [her emphasis]. Suffrage rights had been claimed for women on the basis of women’s “essential” difference from men: Give us a broom and we’ll sweep the Augean stables clean of men’s disorder. We have babes in our arms: we will stop wars. Women are nurturing, pacific, family-fused, tenderly sentimental creatures. Frost’s case for the female diaconate in Orthodoxy similarly rests on the “incarnational reality” of women – by which I assume she means our embodied lives as females of the species . And so we have “a different perspective on authority, its judicious use, its abuse,” and because of our lived experience, as females, of violence, abuse and assault, “a different view of child-rearing, marriage and family life.” These are the “gifts” from which the church would benefit, if only women could be “theologically and pastorally trained”  into the diaconate. I can’t help wonder if their “different perspectives” might not eventually be trained on the Church itself, as an abusive institution that upholds patriarchy at the expense of so many women’s bodies and souls.

On a happier note: in 2017, His Beatitude Patriarch Theodoros and the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria reinstituted the Order of Deaconess within the borders of the Patriarchate, the entire continent of Africa, revitalizing “a once functional, vibrant, and effectual ministry.” Note the Patriarch’s hand on the woman’s head: what’s not to love?