Via Dolorosa

I follow a guy who really wants to be cheery on "a journey among the Christians of the Middle East"

Creatures, in 587 a man and his friend made pilgrimage through a Byzantine Empire “under assault” from West and East, a world which had glittered only yesterday but now was filled with raiders and refugees. Through monasteries and metropolises, John Moschos recorded what he saw and the stories he was told. 1400 years later William Dalrymple retraced Moschos’s steps—and found that he, too, was witnessing something that looked like the beginning of the end. Christians were leaving the places closest to Jesus’ birth. In the Middle East Dalrymple caught glimpses of the intertwining roots of today’s Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worship—and he also traversed a landscape where brothers’ blood cries from every stone.

You may be getting the impression that the Dalrymple of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East is not the Dalrymple of In Xanadu, his first book. In Xanadu is a real delight of a travelogue in which Dalrymple the undergraduate, the amateur, the “gentleman songster off on a spree,” possibly discovers the actual real site of Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome. Xanadu-Dalrymple is gleeful, rampant, a touch sophomoric, the best of British at large in the world. From the Holy Mountain still shows flashes of that Dalrymple. But things have changed.

Dalrymple’s older and soberer (literally—there’s a bit where he’s jolting through the night on the back of a truck or something, with a group of locals drinking arak, and I feel confident that In Xanadu–era Dalrymple would have partaken!). He still enjoys new sights, new tastes, new sounds: new songs. He still relishes the moments when he realizes he’s seeing something he was told was otherwise—everyone talks as if Christian worship looks one way and Muslim worship looks another, and yet here everybody’s prostrating in the same postures, chanting in the same rhythms. He’s a Catholic (the fact that you learn this, which I don’t think ever comes up in Xanadu, is another indication of something which I’ll go ahead and call “aging”), a Catholic with a casual sincerity; and his love of syncretism or intermingling of worship is also casually sincere. He really loves discovering the shrine of St George where Muslims and Christians pray together.

Sometimes they do more than pray together! One thing that stood out for me was the persistence of animal sacrifice, here done not to propitiate God for sin but to give thanks for prayers answered. Christians do this a whole bunch in this book and I was lowkey shocked! Oh sure, Jesus is the Spotless Lamb, the Sacrifice made once and for all time, but this goat is pretty good too….

But mostly the sober tone of the book is about the destruction and repression Dalrymple witnesses or hears about from his interlocutors. All across the Middle East, he meets Christians under pressure from the various Islamic states, from Israelis willing to make themselves into glib suburban tyrants in the name of the Jewish state, and, in Lebanon, from fellow Christians’ own worst impulses to grab and rule. He meets survivors of torture and there comes a point where you stop remembering what the justifications were—was this guy tortured by a secularizing force, a radical Islamic faction, or Maronite Catholic gangster-statesmen? Eventually Dalrymple says the thing the book is slowly pushing you toward: Even this enthusiast, even this ingenue of scholarship, feels like he’s watching the lights go out across a large and deeply-significant expanse of the Christian world.

Things have gotten worse since the book came out in 1997. Not only the destruction being wreaked on Gaza. Dalrymple’s work inspired one American to travel to Syria and record what may be the oldest Christian musical tradition in the world, and you can listen to quick clips of that here (there’s a DC punk angle! The whole world is my high school). He got there just in time to make these recordings before civil war broke out: “Hamacher ended up staying at that church as a guest of the archbishop, who has since been kidnapped by rebels.”

One of Pope Leo XIV’s early trips may be a visit to Turkey to commemorate the 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicea. One of Pope Francis’s last calls, as we know, was his nightly call to the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza. Between those two facts lies the whole Calvary of Dalrymple’s book.

NOTE: I edited the opening of this post to give a somewhat clearer sense of the historical context.

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Links Losers Like

“A 1960s Taiwanese Board Game Where You Take Back Mainland China.” Sent by my Taiwanese-American best friend, with a strong air of, “I’m just sayin’…”

I had a chance to talk recently with Sara Larson, founder of Awake, “a community of abuse survivors, concerned Catholics, and allies responding to the wounds of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.” I wrote about Awake’s work for America magazine; I’m endlessly impressed with the humility, dedication, and spiritual depth they bring to the needs of survivors. If you’re at all involved in matters Catholic, I hope you’ll check them out. And if you are a priest (I think some of you may be!), I would really encourage you to get in touch with Sara, as she’s always looking for participants in Awake’s “Bridge Dialogues.”

“In final act of mercy, Pope Francis donates entire private bank account to prisoners.”

I’ve been reading The White Stone, a substack by a Dominican in the West of Ireland: “Essays on Irish Christianity in the first millennium, with a focus on biblical interpretation.” Fr McDonough is forthright and quite engaging (see, for example, his book review that’s also a wry commentary on Ireland’s pleasurable, not always truthful glorification of its pagan past), and I love how he connects Irish Christian history to broader questions in Church history and theology, without ever losing sight of how these ideas call us to Jesus. For example, this post about Classical Irish poetry is also about whether high emotionality (you may have read the phrase “affective piety”) is really an invention of the High Middle Ages. (“Siri, did people have feelings in the past?”) And it’s also about, you know, how Mary felt at the foot of the Cross, and how Jesus loves us, and how one might feel and love in relation to that feeling and that love.

Mount Athos, where Dalrymple began his journey, photographed by “michael clarke stuff,” found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.