The Pilgrimage of a Sabbatical.

The picture on the left is the view we have from our apartment of the bay of the Mediterranean Sea with the snow-capped White Mountains of Crete beyond. (You can see it is a real hardship being here.) The picture on the right is the Orthodox Academy of Crete, the conference/retreat center where we are staying. We are in an apartment just to the left of the picture, where you see me walking.
Just as we remember, the island of Crete is one of the most beautiful (and rugged) places on earth (though of course we haven't been in that many places!) And Springtime is the best time to be here. Yes, it is a little rainy some days and quite cool, especially in these concrete/stone buildings with no heating. But the flowers!! Everything is blooming and there is vegetation everywhere.
Yesterday (Friday) I made my 11th (second to last) spiritual retreat. I began at daybreak down by the sea below the Academy and watched the sun rise over the Akrotiri Peninsula across the bay. After breakfast and taking care of some tasks, I left about 10:00 AM for a long hike up onto the Rodopou Peninsula. If you look at a map of Crete you see on the west end two peninsulas jutting into the Mediterranean. Kolymbari, where the Academy is, is at the base of the eastern peninsula. My hike took me up onto the peninsula several hundred meters high. It was absolutely gorgeous, with birds singing, flocks of sheep and goats, clouds, mountains, sea, olive groves and vineyards, sleepy little villages, and virtual fields of wild flowers.
One of my regrets from our years in Crete years ago is that I never had (or took) the opportunity to walk in the countryside. Walking puts a person in touch with the landscape in a way that driving never can. You see everything so much clearer (including the litter which is like our rural roads in South Dakota.) I can't imagine what people think littering God's back yard with all their junk, except that when you drive you don't see it! Anyway, I am so pleased to be able to do these spiritual retreats in this setting. A week ago I also hiked up along the same road and spent most of the day in a country chapel watching the rain falling on the mountain.
This morning I finished reading one of the few books I brought along, The Way is Made by Walking, by AMBS professor Arthur Paul Boers. In the book Arthur describes his 500 mile long pilgrimage for one month in Spain following the Camino de Santiago. What he says about pilgrimages applies in many ways to my own experience on this Sabbatical, particularly our travels in Israel/Palestine, and now Greece. A pilgrimage involves travel to an unfamiliar place, suspension of regular responsibilities, a disconnecting from media, taking on disciplines that help us focus on God, being willing to make sacrifices, enduring psychological and spiritual trials, being inconvenienced in terms of travel and amenities, and having a spirit of openness toward the encounters we may have each day. (p, 184-185)
I must say that Loretta and I have experienced nearly every day all of these elements of pilgrimage during our Sabbatical, and especially during our travels these two months of March and April. It would have been so much easier to stay home, and we often long for the comforts of home. However, we know that we are gaining experiences that will stay with us the rest of our lives and shape the way we live from now on as well.
In particular, I am learning how much I have neglected necessary spiritual disciplines in my life. I have made excuses for myself, pleading busyness and family responsibilities. In the process I have greatly impoverished my life, and likely my ministry as well. I hope I am learning this lesson well, and I hope that you, my family, friends, and church community, will hold me accountable to continue with the spiritual disciplines I have found to be so healing and so empowering in these weeks.
Tomorrow, (Sunday), Loretta and I fly to Athens to meet our three daughters, who are even now beginning their journeys here. We are very excited to have this opportunity to spend two weeks with Joanne, Dora, and Susanna, and granddaughter Kaitlyn as well. Steve, Kaitlyn's Dad, will also be joining our family travels about midweek.
Roy

The climax of an ecclesiastical career!

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

Old friends!

Friends, just now it is early Sunday morning back home, and I see that its in the 30's and cold. (I'm listening to MPR online as I write this--a touch of home!) Here it has been cool and wet, but today it is sunny and warming up. Temps haven't been that cold, but we remember now how cold and damp these concrete houses feel when it is rainy!
So it is Schmeckfest season back home, and typical Schmeckfest weather! We wish all those involved the best in this time--thinking especially of Kaye and Jim and all the other "Sound of Music" cast and crew members, as well as all the kitchen and serving crews.
We went to the Gonia Monastery church this morning, but I confess are a bit lonesome this morning for home, despite the incredible beauty that surrounds us here. We are eager to be joined next Sunday by our three daughters and our granddaughter!
Nevertheless, we are mindful about how this trip is allowing us to reconnect with life-long friends. In particular, I want to reflect a little more about our time last weekend in northern Greece with our friends there.
We first met Tini in 1969 when we went to Iraklion, Crete, to serve with the Inter-Church Service team of the World Council of Churches. Tini was a home economist from the Netherlands, and one of our 5 member international team of workers working for the Greek Orthodox Church of Crete. By then she had done summer service with an international youth camp and had met Thanssi, her future husband, and they were courting when we first knew her. Thanassi was doing his service in the Greek armed forces at the time, and when he had leave he would come to Iraklion to see Tini and so we learned to know him as well. Thanassi is a Greek from north of Trikala, Greece, but actually his ethnic identity and mother language is Vlachian--a traditionally nomadic people who settled in the incredibly beautiful Pindus mountains of northern Greece.
Tiny and Thanassi had their engagement party in our Iraklion Team House in the summer of 1970, and later married and moved back to Holland. They had a daughter and 2 sons. Thanassi was a social worker and later went into politics, serving for some 12 years in the Dutch parliament. In more recent years Thanassi has been working with an international social organization dealing with the problems of illicit drugs around the world.
In more recent years, Tini and Thanassi on their visits to see his aging parents in his home village of Trigona began building a house of their own so they could come more often to help his parents. It was here that it happened we could meet them, as they are in Greece for several weeks now in Spring. It was a special treat also to have their daughter Bouwina and her friend Alexander there at the time.
We went to church with Thanassi in his home village last Sunday, across the street from where his parents live. Then we were honored to be invited to his parents' simple home for a chicken and rice dinner, which Tini and Thanassi both helped his mother prepare. (His parents are both in their 90's and spend the winter in Athens with a daughter's family.)
Our time was filled with sharing memories of our time together nearly 40 years ago, catching up on our lives and families since then (though we have stayed in touch through the years), and also discussing religious, cultural, and political concerns. Though we have diverse religious traditions, nationalities and ethnicities, we have always held many values in common with these dear people. It was amazing to see how we could pick up after all these years and still encourage and support one another in our lives and our desire to serve God.
While this visit with the Apostolous was not planned in advance (we only learned they would be here this past winter), the opportunity of seeing these dear friends and renewing our relationship with them is one of the things that has made our trip so precious to us. It was difficult to say goodby to them on Monday morning, as it is likely we will never see them again in this life.
It was especially significant to me to be in Thanassi's home village and to see how he, with rural roots similar to my own, was able to go on to lead a life of international service, including political involvment. It is often people with these kinds of deep roots in the land who are most able to make strong and positive contributions in the world.
Roy
P.S. As you can see, I again mastered the art of posting photos on my blog. The pictures on this blog are (in more or less reverse order): Tini and Thanassi's new house, a view across the valley from their house, a group picture of their family and Loretta, Thanassi with his mother and daughter Bouwina, Sunday dinner with Thanssi's parents (Stavros and Paraskevi), Thanssi's home village (Trigona) with his parent's house in the center, and a tree planting in Tini and Thanassi's yard. (Tini and Thanassi have a tradition of inviting guests to their new home to buy and plant a tree in their yard, so we bought an almond tree, and their daughter and friend a pear tree, and we had just planted these two trees in their yard!)