STORY - "The Road Paul Travelled"

After a few days travelling on pilgrimage In the steps of St Paul with Bishops Michael and Brian, I made this journal entry. “I am disgruntled with the early mornings, the number of kilometres we travel each day and the heat and glare giving me migraine. It is hard to remember the purpose of this trip.”

Keeping focused on our pilgrimage was difficult. Yet we visited only a few of the places where St Paul had been and Platinum Travel was looking after us with a level of care Paul would not have dreamt of. Paul had no pre-booked four-star accommodation and those of us who suffered seasickness as we travelled across the Aegean to Turkey might well have compared our sizeable ferry to Paul’s tiny sailing boat. As well as dealing with the disorientation of being in new places, Paul carried with him the urgent task of making contact with people so that he could share the Gospel with them.

On our first full day of sightseeing, our guide pointed out the Areopagus in Athens where Paul had to face an intimidating audience. Luke tells us, ‘Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.’(Acts 17:21) This eagerness for novelty was an opening for Paul but it was no guarantee that he would be listened to with sympathy.

Where did Paul, a stranger in the city, find the confidence to speak that day? And Luke tells us how cunningly Paul found his opening words: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.’ (Acts 17:22) Then taking the altar inscription to an unknown god as a starting point, Paul led into a discussion about the nature of the Creator, thus meeting the Athenians where they were, and skilfully connected with their search for God.

But this was not a formula he could repeat. Each of the cities he visited presented him with a different set of circumstances. In the ancient site of Corinth, we were shown the place where Paul interacted with the Jewish population and we learnt something of the cultural context of this worldly cosmopolitan city causing difficulties for Paul as he tried to deal with the fledgling Christian community here.

At Ephesus, our Turkish guide Tamar pointed out to us the theatre where the silversmiths accused Paul of being a troublemaker. We had ourselves that day been pursued by people selling books and mementoes and that made real to us something of the panic the artisans and merchants in Ephesus must have felt at the prospect of Paul’s new religion threatening their sale of images of the goddess Artemis.

In our days of constant activity and confusing changes of scene, we were kept on track by Bishop Michael and Bishop Brian leading us in prayer and expanding on the material from our study booklet. We also appreciated the celebration of the Eucharist wherever we could find a quiet spot, in hotels at Patmos and Istanbul, in small patches of shade in Corinth and Ephesus and most movingly on the beach near Anzac Cove.

Here on this lovely stretch of coastline, we were brought face to face with the suffering of warring nations. Never have I been more moved by the reading that morning from the prophet Micah, ‘…and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ (Micah 4: 3, 4)

We had already visited the war museum at Eceabat. Here I was taken by two letters, one by an Australian, one by a Turk, both young men writing to their mothers with clear affection. The Australian after a battle loss, says with striking understatement, ‘Hope the next show will be better’. The Turkish young man boldly speaking of his willingness to die for his country, finishes by telling his mother she does not need to send him any more underwear. The intermingling of everyday phrases with the rhetoric of war brought home to me the pathos of young lives cut short before their time.

We were fortunate on the pilgrimage to be accompanied by guides brimming with information about history and archaeology. Tamar was with us for nine days and in that time, he and the driver who negotiated the narrow lanes of Istanbul with amazing skill, became as close to us as brothers.

And in a country where we saw many mosques and where we could hear the daily sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, we became conscious of the piety of many of the Turkish people and their recognisable kinship as people of the book and fellow children of Abraham.

For each pilgrim, there were different highlights. I loved the visit to the acropolis at Assos from which we could look down to the bay, little changed from the time when St Paul set sail for Mitylene in Lesbos, the island sitting on a haze of cloud, in front of us, just across the Aegean.

One incident in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul amused us all. There, in the midst of jewellery shops gleaming with gold and stalls displaying magnificent carpets, we were taken by a merchant to meet one of his colleagues, a young woman who greeted us in English with an Australian accent and amazed us by telling us she had been brought up in Cessnock!

By the end of the two weeks, forty people, most of whom had never met before, had become a closely knit group. We had witnessed together places laden with history. We had marvelled at the beauty of the world and the beauty we found in the lives of those who had formerly been strangers to us. We had meditated on the journeys of St Paul and had shared in worship and conversation. It was a comfort to make plans to meet up again in September to exchange photographs and memories of our unforgettable pilgrimage.

Zeny Giles

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