Today was a quiet day at the Orthodox Academy of Crete, our base and headquarters for these weeks of our Sabbatical on Crete. I spent a couple of hours studying and identifying wild flowers blooming profusely on the hillsides here, using a wild flower guide we purchased a few days ago. This after a very hectic and busy two days on Tuesday and Wednesday. For those two days we rented a small KIA and drove to Iraklion, the largest city of Crete (150,000), and the city where we lived from 1969 to 1971. We wanted to reconnect with the place and the people where we first lived as a married couple as part of an international team of workers, and where our oldest daughter Joanne was born.
It was also an occasion to visit with the Archbishop of Crete, Irenaios, whom we have known since 1970. (He is pictured above, along with the church where he presides, the metropolitan church of Aghios Minas in Iraklion.) We were pleased to learn that this old friend of ours was now the Archbishop of Crete, serving in the place where we worked for Archbishop Evgenios nearly 40 years ago. The Church of Crete has eight (I guess now nine) dioceses, each headed by a bishop, and the Archbishop is the presiding chair of this church led by these 9 bishops.
Our own relationship with Irenaios began in 1970 when he was the assistant to then Bishop Irenaios (it is a common name here in Greece which means "peace")of the western most diocese of Crete, the bishop who had invited the Mennonites to come to Crete to establish an agricultural demonstration farm. Father Irenaios, as we knew him then, was a churchman in residence at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in 1970, and I remember how at Christmas, 1970, we discussed with him his experiences in Elkhart, Indiana. In those years he worked closely with the Mennonite agricultural volunteers here at Kolymbari, helping to coordinate their work for the Church of Crete. He had studied in France so knows French, but also speaks some English. And I know some Greek, so we manage to converse.
We met him again on our first Sabbatical back to Greece in 1984, when he was already the Bishop of Chania, the second city of Crete. He then hosted us and made arrangements for a number of our visits at that time. So it was very special to us to be able to meet him in the Archbishop's residence in Iraklion next to the church pictured above, and spend some time discussing with him concerns for the church and society. We met him first in his office, presenting him with an oil lamp Mennonite Church USA uses to communicate our prayers for peace around the world (like the one I used in our church during the Advent season). Then he invited us to his private dining room for a simple Lenten meal of bread, vegetables, octopus, wild onions, and various other dishes, all served by his sister Victoria, whom we remembered as his hostess also in 1984.
Archbishop Irenaios is one of the most kind and gentle persons I have known, and I'm sure the church here is well-served by his leadership. His is a most demanding office, having both religious and political implications, as the Orthodox Church here is a state church. Throughout our conversations, his assistants were bringing him documents to sign and phone calls to answer.
Archbishop Irenaios is a what I would consider a fairly conservative bishop. He is quite distressed by the increasing secularism of Greek society and culture. His response is to go back to the roots of the Orthodox faith, expressed particularly in the liturgy of the Greek Orthodox Church, the service of worship performed in every Orthodox Church every Sunday. This liturgical, ritualistic worship service, chanted and sung by priest and choir and carried out with ritual processions and incense, all surrounded by the ornate iconography in the churches and colorful vestments by the clergy, has great power to shape the communal life of the people. It is this, I am realizing, which has given the Orthodox Church the power to integrate faith into the communal life of the people, whether in village or city.
Our family hopes to worship in the church of Aghios Minas pictured above on April 13, and perhaps then we can have some more pictures to show and more description of the liturgical life of this ancient church dating back to the time of St. Paul's visit to Crete, and his commission in the letter to Titus to "establish the church in every city of the island."
In any case, Loretta and I had an exhausting two days visiting in Iraklion and reconnecting with some other friends as well before coming back here late last night. In fact, I think I about wore Loretta out, so we want to "lay low" here until Sunday when we meet our daughters in Athens!
So much for now,
Roy
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