a good story : part 1

 

A good story will often turn on the smallest of seemingly incidental details.

One night, Paul, stuck in the Troad on the northwest coast of Asia Minor, has a vision in which he meets a man from Macedonia. In a beautiful mutuality, the man comforts Paul — who is stuck, and frustrated — and asks him to cross the northern Aegean Sea to rescue the Macedonians.

When morning comes, Paul and his travelling companions decide to go: “We set sail from Troas [the harbour of Alexandria Troas] and took a straight course to [the island of] Samothrace, the following day to [the harbour of] Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony.” (Acts 16.11, 12)

There is not a lot for Ancient or Modern tourists to do in Samothraki. Nonetheless, ancient tourists came, to visit the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. Unlike the gods of Mount Olympus, the Great Gods were shrouded in mystery: it was taboo to speak their names. They were, simply, the household of the Great Mother, who was venerated at altars made of porphyry, purple stone.

Though Luke — the author of the two-part work The Gospel According to Luke and The Acts of the Apostles; and who has just made himself a first-hand eye-witness to this sea journey — makes no mention of the night Paul spent on Samothraki, it is inconceivable that they did not visit the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, or speak with other travellers, who had come here for that very purpose, about their hopes and fears: about what they were searching for and what brought them to this place.

The next day they continue on their journey, arriving eventually at Philippi, and staying there for several days. Whereas Jewish communities were widespread in Asia Minor, and it was Paul’s practice to seek them out, there was no synagogue — a gathering of the Jewish community: from which the Church derives the word Synod — in Philippi. Therefore Paul and his companions looked for a gathering — that is, a ‘synagogue,’ if not a synagogue — of god-fearing women, Gentiles who were drawn to worship the God of the Jews.

There, they meet a woman who has come to be known to us as Lydia. Except, that was not her name. Lydia was an ancient kingdom and by this time region of Asia Minor from where this woman came. She was a Lydian woman, identified as the Lydian woman, from the city of Thyatira in Lydia. Thyatira was the home of many syndicates: records exist for guilds of wool-workers, linen-workers, cloak-makers, dyers, leather-workers, tanners, potters, bakers, slave-traders, and bronze-smiths. The Lydian woman who lived in Philippi was a dealer in purple. It is unclear whether a dealer of purple cloth or a dealer in purple dye: either way, a syndicate member, or syndicate-adjacent.

This is the hidden detail: a woman whose identity is shrouded in mystery and associated with purple, who is the Great Mother/the mother of the first recorded church in Europe.

This is not to say that the story of the Church is derived from older stories, but, rather, to say that the story of the Church transforms existing imagination. Not to demystify the stories by which we navigate the world, but to lead us deeper into a mystery the surface of which we had barely scratched. It does so to connect with existing hopes and fears; to purify our desires; to set us free from our night terrors; free, to be at home in our own lives — even though having no name in the world — and so to be a home in this world for the God who is Love.

This is what it means for the God who is revealed in the human god Jesus, whose risen life his apprentices participate in, to cross into our lives to rescue us.

And it turns on the smallest of incidental details, even your small life, and mine.