by Viveka Hall-Holt, ‘Let’s Go Together’ Program Coordinator
This spring I went to Turkiyë (Turkey) with my mother for a course about ancient Christianity, looking for answers. Who were some of the first people who practiced my tradition? How did they live? How do people live out their traditions in Turkiyë now? Instead of coming back with the answers I was looking for, I came back with more questions about so many parts of life. At 25, I really should have expected to find more questions than answers by now. Travel was transformational to my worldview as a teenager, and I hope it will continue to be for the rest of my life. This transformation did not come through finding the answers to my questions, but by being exposed to questions I might never have asked and through being changed by wrestling with them.
We go through each day with so many assumptions about how we should live our lives and what communities should look like. This is what it means to live in a particular group and place. But when we travel, these assumptions that seem like solid ground can become shifting sands. We are challenged by seeing differences that we never imagined, along with similarities that we never suspected. Our expectations are turned upside down when we travel, especially if we are open to it. We experience new sights, new smells, new sounds, new tastes, new words, new plants, new styles, new architecture, new colors, and new music. Travelling to any new place is a flood to the senses which flows into our understanding of what our human life looks like.
Here are some examples of what I experienced in Turkiyë and the questions they brought up in me:
During our course, I learned about how Romans tended to honor and adopt deities that came from other parts of the empire, while Christians often insisted that there was only one God and the Roman religion was simply idolatry. While rejecting the Roman religious structure was also a rejection of the way it upheld the empire, I found exclusivism in early Christianity hard to reconcile with the way I want to relate to other religions now. I am still struggling with questions about how this knowledge impacts me as a Christian, millennia later, living in a world where Christianity is one of the religions most commonly used to prop up empires.
Everywhere that I visited in Turkiyë, even in the mosques, there was an abundance of cats. One of the reasons, I learned, is that cats have a special place in Islam. There is a folk story that the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, had a cat who was sleeping on his cloak. When he needed to use his cloak, he cut around the place his cat was sleeping so as to not disturb his beloved cat. Where did this story come from? Does the cultural tradition predate Islam? I was inspired by the way that cats were communally cared for in Turkiyë and began to ponder all the things I don’t know about other people’s traditions and what my tradition could learn from Islam about how to care for other creatures.
When we visited the beautiful Sultan Ahmed (Blue) Mosque, I noticed that there were volunteers who were ready to answer questions. One of them was a young woman who may have been about my age. Rather than asking a factual question that I could find the answer to on one of the many poster boards around, I asked why she wanted to volunteer at the mosque. She said that many Muslims are hurting around the world and that many people are uninformed about Islam. She wanted to do her part to help people understand her tradition for the safety of her brothers and sisters around the world. I was touched by her motivation to volunteer her time for the benefit of people she would never meet and felt prompted to ask again how I can show up for what I believe in.
One of the first things that our guide told us about Turkiyë was its history of taking in immigrants and refugees from countries all around them. He explained that they have an ethic of welcoming in their culture that comes from the time when the Turks (originally from Central Asia) themselves were strangers in this new land. Of course, I know that every country’s relationship with immigration is complicated, but I couldn’t help but dream of what it would be like to live in a culture that opened its arms to people from different cultures and what it would take to create and sustain that kind of welcome.
Our first day in Istanbul, I saw so many mosques that I thought perhaps there was one on every street. Then I thought about my hometown in the Midwest and how there may be a similar number of churches. It was an opportunity to see my own culture with fresh eyes. I started thinking about the role religious spaces have in community life and asking myself how that does or does not affect who is included.
One difference between the United States and Turkiyë is that no religious gatherings or ceremonies (of any tradition) are allowed to happen in public without government permission. This was a very new concept to me. Coming back to the US, it has added dimension to my questions about which spaces we want religion to occupy in our society, what freedom of religion (or no religion) looks like, and what role we want the government to play in our religious lives.
At the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, I had a conversation with a representative about whether Christianity conquered or was conquered by Rome. In visiting old Roman cities and then the Patriarchate in Istanbul, I wondered how a religion changes when it is controlled by the powerful, and when it becomes a minority.
In every place we went we saw wondrous geometric and architectural Islamic art, but no depictions of people or animals except in the places that were originally or continue to operate as Christian spaces. The beauty of the colors and patterns had me asking how we leave space for mystery and do not limit our understanding of the divine and each other.
The Hagia Sophia is a renowned Christian structure and now an operational mosque. Only Muslims are allowed on the ground floor, but most of the mosaics of saints and Christian emperors are preserved on the second level. Two cloths hang over the mosaic of Mary and Jesus. This mosaic cannot be seen from the ground floor, but it still can be admired from the second floor. How do we share space, especially when we have different needs in the space?
I want to acknowledge that travel is both a profound experience and a privilege not available to everyone. Thankfully, we do not need to travel great geographical distances to find ourselves in the midst of cultures originating from all over the world. In the United States, we have communities hailing from every continent, including the many different cultures of North America. All of our communities have celebrations, gathering spaces, restaurants, and festivals where we can show up to be present and learn from each other. We just need to walk out of our own doors into other spaces where we do not always think to go. When you go with openness, explain why you are there, and respect that you are in someone else’s space who has no responsibility to teach or host you, you can learn just by being present with other communities on your doorstep. This can take similar courage to going somewhere continents away, and your courage will be rewarded with beauty and even more questions.
Where can you go to learn a little bit more about the other cultures all around you? When you go, I hope you also find some good questions.