(Another non-virus story)
In the last blog post I explained how an encounter on a train, travelling across Europe in 1964, created significant changes in my life. It led to doors opening and enabled study opportunities which went on with some energy until the mid-80s. From around 1984 my focus for study shifted from my interests in the early Church’s art and liturgy to my current interest in healing and power and the way these dynamics are experienced within church communities.
I described in the previous blog how I received a travelling scholarship to study the Orthodox Church in Greece during the academic year 67/68. In all, I was away for ten months and the time away included visits to Israel, Bulgaria and Romania. It may sound like a long holiday but there were times of hardship and considerable stress. Part of the problem was that Greece was going through a dark period politically with the arrival of the Colonels’ regime in April 1967. The Orthodox Church was divided over whether or not it should support this ultra-right administration. The more interesting churchmen and women could see that it was rooted in a bombastic crude nationalism. The problem for the opposition was that jobs were on the line for those who spoke out. More threatening than that was the prospect of imprisonment and torture. Many people were afraid and this fear meant that meeting people was a lot harder for me than it should have been.
My main academic study was done in libraries in Salonika and Athens. These were two places of large populations and thus the political oppression was all the stronger. The arrival of spring in March 1968 allowed me the luxury of leaving the cities to travel in the provinces. After a visit to the extreme north west to visit a small town called Kavalla near the Albanian border, blessed with many painted churches, I set off for Crete. My expedition to Crete was the first time when I felt the political oppression a lot less keenly. Crete had managed to keep the Colonels at a certain distance. It was difficult for the central government to pretend that there was a potential communist conspiracy in Crete as they did in the mainland cities. Communists had never gained a foothold on the island, even during the war. Another great asset which helped me along in Crete was the memory of British involvement in the Second War. Less than twenty-five years before my visit, British officers, supported by parachute drops and gold sovereigns, encouraged an effective resistance movement. As an Englishman I could draw on the considerable goodwill which still then existed for all citizens of my country. We were, in those days, not a common sight, especially out of season in the weeks leading up to Easter.
My normal pattern of operation was to call on a local bishop and ask for recommendations for whom I should visit. I carried a formal letter of introduction from Archbishop Michael Ramsey. This worked well in Crete because no one seemed to be afraid of associating with me, a foreigner. The bishop I called on in Heraklion recommended two parish priests and a monastery in Western Crete. I consulted the map to decide on my exact route. At the extreme west of the island there are two pointed pieces of land pointing north. One promised to be a good walk so I travelled to the nearest village so that I could find somewhere to stay and attempt to walk north as far as I could along this strip of land. At some point I visited the local café and chatted with the men there. Among the locals drinking coffee there was a young man called Nikos Giannakakis, then aged 28. We talked together and I discovered that his job was as a painter of churches and icons in the neo-Cretan Byzantine style. After describing his work to me (in spite of his lack of English and my poor Greek) he promised to show me the current church he was working on in Chania. This meeting took place a few days later and I was an instant admirer of his work, both the portable icons and painted church walls.
When I got back to England, I kept up a correspondence with Nikos. I publicised his work in the magazine Eastern Churches Review, but no one seemed to be interested in commissioning anything from him. It took me five years before I was able to help him find work beyond the frontiers of Greece. The background of how I came to find myself in Calabria (the ‘foot’ of Italy), among Greek Catholics of Albanian extraction, needs a word of explanation.
In 1969 the organisation Amnesty International wanted to organise a report on house arrest in Greece under the Colonels. After some searching they found me. My command of the language was still weak but after a crash exposure to Amnesty files at their then headquarters in Farringdon, I was sent off to do this piece of field work. The whole enterprise was probably flawed from the start and I found at the airport that my name was on the card index of banned people. I had flown in from Rome on a student charter flight and so I was sent back to the same place.* At the age of 23, I possessed a considerable amount of social cheek, and so, armed with this, I set off to find the Greek College in Rome where I introduced myself (in Greek) to staff and students. (Modern Greek was compulsory for all students then studying at the college) I am not sure what I expected to happen, but they invited me to stay for a celebration of St Peter (it was June 29th). Amnesty had invited me ‘not to hurry home’ and when one of the members of staff suggested I could profitably visit their Greek Catholic diocese in Calabria, I was keen to follow it up. I visited these dioceses (there is one in Sicily) three times altogether and wrote a couple of articles to explain the peculiarities of Greek Catholicism in rural Italy. This tolerated married clergy, even in the early 70s. It was one of these villages, Santa Sofia d’Epiro that, in 1973, was looking for an artist to paint their church in the Byzantine style. I knew just the person to recommend, my friend Nikos from Chania in Crete.
Nikos visited Calabria six times in the 70s as one village after another employed his services to decorate and beautify their churches. He had, initially, considerable difficulty obtaining a passport but eventually the entire family made their home in the villages for the summer months. Nikos’ two young boys picked up grammatical Italian with great ease, something that was to help them enormously later in their education. Italian was the language that the local children used to communicate with outsiders and was learnt at school. At home they would speak a dialect of Albanian. Both Nikos’s sons ended up becoming medical doctors but trained in Italy. One now teaches medicine to Italians. Their exposure to proper Italian as children though their father’s work, had equipped them to become part of a larger world than Crete. I, unknowingly, had played a part in making this possible.
It was Nikos himself, now 80, who posted the picture of Santa Sofia d’Epiro (above) on Facebook last Sunday and this picture sent a shock through the system. It was through those two interconnected chance encounters, first with the Toynbee sisters and then with Nikos himself, that new realities were created. First we have two Italian trained doctors, a career opportunity for Nikos and a series of painted churches in Calabria. It was a shock but a happy shock to be reminded how providence had put me in situations and places that had caused something new to happen both for me and for others.
*A local Italian branch of Amnesty was set up in Rome soon after my abortive visit to Greece. I take no personal credit for this initiative but the founding of the branch was directly connected in a complicated way to my brief time in Rome. Over the decades Amnesty volunteers from Italy have played a full part in helping to promote the cause of political prisoners around the world
What a wonderful story! If I’ve ever made much difference to anyone’s life, I have never found out, but it’s wonderful to see the end of a story like that.
I’m sure you have made big differences. You sometimes mention your family, and other people responding to you on here are clearly grateful for your thoughts. Not chance encounters except, perhaps, first discovering Stephen’s blog entirely by chance (as I did) both for you and those others.
Thanks Rowland. I met Stephen when he came to give a talk, and it was so terrific to meet someone who understood about bullying within the church, we stood and talked in the car park for three quarters of an hour! So when he set up the blog, he asked me to look in. Which I did.
There’s great value in standing back from a crisis, not to escape per se, but to retain the perspective of a lifetime’s experience. I found these two reflections valuable. Many thanks!
Thank you all for your comments. I initially felt reluctant to start a blog in case it looked like self-promotion and a projection of the ego. The same thing was true when I decided to share these interlocking stories. But in telling them I have become aware of two things. Firstly gratitude for having had the experiences. Secondly a need to invite people to consider the way that they can and do interlock with what other people are experiencing, good and bad. In my reviving recently my knowledge of modern Greek, I have had to learn the word for internet. The second part of the word means, as in English, the word for fishing net. We are all part of a huge fishing net which enables a job to be done. We only do that job when we connect with others, both those close to us and those far away. I commend that net image to all of you who read my rambling thoughts.
Your blog is brilliant – not only in terms of the support you provide to people who have been treated wretchedly by the Church, but also as a source of information and sophisticated commentary about Church affairs. That you manage to write as you so (and also as beautifully as you do) at some distance from the main sources and seats of clerical power makes your achievement all the more impressive; perhaps the physical distance is an advantage.
This piece of yours is especially intriguing for me because I have over the last few months been dipping into the oeuvre of C. M. Woodhouse after an interval of 25 years or so. Woodhouse is, absent his involvement in the coup against Mossadegh, rather a hero of mine. His two masterworks of contemporary Greek history were ‘The Struggle for Greece: 1941-1949’ (1976) and ‘The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels’ (1985). Insofar as that unhappy period is remembered at all in this country it is of a coterie of provincial hayseeds in epaulettes tyrannising the country in the style of opera buffa villains. Whilst this may have a grain of truth, what has impressed me the most is that the period 1967-74 functioned as a coda to the consecutive tragedies of the 1940s (if not also the 1920s) and that the bonds within the junta were ‘visceral rather than intellectual’, with Papadopoulous, Pattakos, Ladas, etc. having come from the same impoverished milieu and being united in the crucible of the Metaxas dictatorship, the German occupation and the KKE insurgency. Your personal recollections of life in the country under the regime as a British subject are very interesting, not least because there was still a perception in some parts of Greece that its national destiny as forged in London. Whilst I understand that Wilson and Brown waxed indignant about the coup, HMG said little in public and I understand that the attitude of the then ambassador, Ralph Murray, was along the lines of whilst ‘we [the British government] don’t want this dictatorship, however much we dislike it, to start its life with an anti-British bias’. In other words HMG, even under a supposedly progressive government, was all noise and no action – in contrast to the Scandinavians, for example.
As to your Calabrian adventures (in Magna Graecia) I have found it fascinating that the main flowering of Byzantine art in southern Italy and Sicily seems to have occurred *after* the extinction of Byzantine rule (at least from reading Hans Belting) or that the fashion for domed basilicas in parts of Calabria and in the Valdemone district of east Sicily occurred only after Roger I de Hauteville conquered the island and owes as much to Islamic as Greek influence. I have not visited the region (perhaps I shall not now get the chance), and still have almost everything to learn about it, but thank you very much indeed for having stimulated me in this direction!
I’d like to share a tale of one of my own ‘chance’ encounters. In 1998 I took a sabbatical in order to complete my thesis on the pastoral care of abuse survivors. I spent part of it at St. Deiniol’s Library (now called Gladstone’s Library) in north Wales. St. Deiniol’s is residential (residential library – heaven!) so there are plenty of opportunities to talk to others studying there. One vicar was finishing a book on abuses of power in churches so our areas of interest were similar. I read his manuscript and I think he read what I’d done so far.
I liked what I’d seen of his MS so bought his book, ‘Ungodly Fear’, when it was published. It proved useful and I loaned it to a few people who were having difficulties, and recommended it to others.
We got in touch with each other a few times over the years that followed, again to discuss common interests around abuses of power. Eventually he let me know he’d begun a blog so I started to follow it. You’ve guessed by now – the studious vicar was Stephen Parsons. And if I’d never got talking to him at St. Deiniol’s, if we’d never kept contact over the years, would I ever have found my voice as a survivor? I doubt it.
You may find yourself to be a reluctant pioneer. The way church happens is undergoing a quantum shift, with its physical doors being forcibly shut.
For centuries, millennia even, church leaders have been “broadcast only”. All sides have colluded in this of course. The people have exulted their priests to gods at times, as has often been described in these pages. The disaffected could always leave, and many did, or translate laterally to facsimile congregations in nearby estates, and repeat the process.
With the World Wide Web, what’s changed is reciprocal interaction. That’s not new though. I reckon I’ve been using the internet for 26 years and I was a relatively late adopter. No, what’s different now is the other side of the equation: the closure of physical church buildings. Almost all online media have interaction built in.
Bullying leaders, citing English Athena’s example, will be as deaf as ever to censure, but everyone else will know. Quickly. The timescale between “outing” wrongful behaviour and its being addressed goes from Never or Decades, to months or weeks.
The speed is magnified by connectivity between sufferers and sympathetic others.
I’m no great fan of the online world but here it is. Twelve years ago, when I first forced myself onto Twitter, a friend suggested we could set up a hashtag on a live sermon and tweet comments. This never happened where we were but has seen limited appearance at some of the bigger venues and conferences. Even just mediocrity will now hopefully have a shorter shelf life.
The ability to be heard, albeit remotely at distance, has been very valuable to me on this blog. The facility to find others, expert in their different ways, who have seen the same things as me, well that’s a game changer!
An internet community has friction and frailty just like any other with human beings present. But we’re learning. What we can no longer do is avoid completely what’s happening here.
The congregation can now contribute. The rules of engagement have changed. Appraisal is 360 degrees.
We’d better be good.
Well, we’re human. So maybe, with God’s help, as good as we can be!