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.

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?

Fast forward a decade and I was busy travelling around most of Slavic Europe, including Ukraine, in search of the history, politics and culture that explained my generation of ’68 under Communism. I had already written a book about the Sixties in Canada and now was eager to find out how my counterparts in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, sort of, in Ukraine experienced their 1960s. The book that resulted, Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993), my first real achievement of creative nonfiction, records the rather bruising reality check I experienced as a Western feminist and New Leftist. But the journey had taken me beyond social and political realities. I realized that, since my sojourn in Two Hills, I had been excavating successive layers of personal identity and now, far from having come to bedrock in the history of Eastern Europe, I had laid bare an unsuspected deeper layer, Byzantium.

In retrospect, I can see how it crept up. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had frequently sought peace and quiet of mind and spirit in Orthodox churches and monasteries as I moved around. But these were not yet “Byzantium” to me but simply sites of cultural familiarity. Then I picked up on the jokey contrasts made by local wits between the cultures of espresso vs Turkish coffee, wine vs vodka, Austro-Hungarian vs Ottoman Turkish streetscapes, Latin vs Cyrillic alphabets, right-bank vs left-bank Danube, and the barely-disguised desire of speakers to be associated with the “European” side of the equations. Most dramatically, in Warsaw, after interviewing a young historian of modern Polish history, I walked with him along the city walls above the Vistula River, and followed his gaze as he pointed eastward, across the river to the Praga district, and to the prominent silhouette of a Russian Orthodox church, and exclaimed, “There is Asia!”

I was stunned. “Wait a minute,” I wanted to protest. “My relatives live over there, way east, and they’re not Asians,” but I caught myself on the defensive: what was this anxiety that he and I shared not to be excluded from “Europe”? More to the point, why did an Orthodox church lie outside Europe in this historian’s mind?

In 1988 I was in Kyiv, capital of the fast-receding Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the Christianization – or Baptism – of Kyiv and the land of Rus’ in 988. Christianity was brought to what would become the Ukrainian people not from Rome but from Constantinople. It is an oft-told tale, of how emissaries of Prince Volodymyr of Rus’, still a pagan, had ventured into the great church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, stood under its immense dome and wondered whether they had been transported to Heaven. Their report convinced Volodymyr to establish Byzantine Christianity on his lands and it was this Baptism that we were celebrating in Kyiv with all the pomp and circumstance as could be mustered by clergy and politicos not to mention the faithful masses. It took me another decade to get started but I knew that I had to write a book about Byzantium, the matrix, the Mother Lode, the progenitrix of the spiritual and popular culture of the Ukrainians, including those emigrants 900 years later who built those onion-domed churches on the Canadian prairie and parkland.

But Byzantium is huge. A thousand years of imperial history: the Second Rome, after the fall of that other one, that endured until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. Immensely wealthy and powerful at its zenith, missionary to the southern and eastern Slavs, repository of Hellenic arts and sciences, interlocutor with neighbouring Islam, “The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor,” as W. B. Yeats had it – what would be my subject?

I tell that story in Prodigal Daughter, how I stumbled on the iconographic representation of St Demetrius of Thessalonica, Great Martyr and Myrrh-streamer, martyred in 304 AD in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica, in the last of the Roman persecutions of Christians. He returned in the sixth century to defend his beloved city by performing miracles that saved it from marauding Slavic tribes. Perhaps the even greater miracle was that these same Slavs would in their turn come to venerate him as one of their own, a saint of Byzantine Christianity safeguarded for them in the Orthodox Church. I knew I had my subject: I would follow Demetrius around the Byzantine world and tell the tale of my people and his.

And so I went back to church. For purely research purposes, you understand – to immerse myself in the world of St Demetrius’s legacy as lived by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians of Canada. I started in Saskatoon (where I was writer-in-residence for a year) in Holy Trinity Cathedral, I bought my first Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible Revised King James Version, I memorized whole swatches of Liturgy, belted out the ancient hymns…and began to write my book. The book was published in 2010 and I’m still in church.