Hospitality:
A Lesson from a Syriac Village in Tur Abdin
by Fr. Dale A. Johnson
For many years I have written about Oriental monasticism and those who preserved the
language of Jesus in their rites and culture. I have lived among these people as a Syriac
Orthodox priest in their monasteries, churches and homes. Always, I have been welcomed
whether in Mesopotamia or Montreal. Although I knew that at some level I was being
respected as a priest, I also knew there was a fundamental reception of me as a stranger. After all I am a non-ethnic Orthodox priest in the Syriac Church, one of only a handful in the world today. But this issue was never at the forefront of their hospitality. I was being welcomed as Christ. It is a deeply humbling experience, one to which I have never quite been used to.
The practice of hospitality has deep roots in Syriac tradition. In the book of Acts we read that the early church placed all things in common in a communal act. This allowed people to live simply and it freed more resources to be distributed to the poor, the needy, widows and orphans. One can debate the merits of this system but the more profound lesson is that these people gave up everything for Christ in order to serve others. These were sacrifices which we can hardly imagine but it came from deeply committed hearts transformed by God.
They met in private homes and also went from house to house in the joy of fellowship
alternately acting as host and guest. It was a living image of the heavenly banquet to come.
Deacons served at these meals and table fellowships. It was the beginning of a type of
monasticism based on hospitality. Early Christians sacrificed themselves to each other in
response to the sacrifice Christ made for them. Being a Christian meant being a living
sacrifice and host of strangers.
By the time Luke writes his Gospel we witness a church that is made up of itinerant preachers and local hosts of house churches. The partnership of traveling stranger and local host emerged to form early Christian communities. Societies of people who served these teachers imitated Christ and his disciples who traveled though the provinces spreading the Good News.
At the end of the third century of the Christian era, monasticism in three forms began to appear in the Middle East. Christians who had not fled to the Roman West, and remained in the lands of Jesus, began to emerge with expressions of profound hospitality. First, there was the Bet Qayama, Sons and daughters of the covenant. This was a form of monasticism that died out by the fifth century. Nevertheless it was a corps of single people, idahiya, who served at the pleasure of the local bishop and performed acts of hospitality. These were people who were celibate, poor, and completely dedicated to serving others, usually in an urban environment. Some scholars believe they were descendants of the Jewish covenanters of Qumran. After the fall of Jerusalem, there is strong historical evidence that many fled to Edessa and converted to Christianity. Here the roots of this form of monasticism flourished. Within Christianity they found support for their work in the early communal work of Christians who served at agape feasts. They were more than deacons who had specific liturgical functions by the third century. Son and Daughters of the covenant, according to the late Lutheran scholar Arthur Vööbus, were focused on Hospitality, distributing goods, visiting widows and orphans, praying for the world, and alleviating the suffering of the poor, the oppressed, and forgotten of society.
The second form of monasticism was a radical individualism that expressed itself in monks who roamed the hills and deserts, naked, sometimes only eating grass, living in walled up cells, sometimes living in coffins and graves for years at a time, and beyond the rule and jurisdiction of Bishops and priests. It eventually saw its culmination in the pillars saints of the fifth and sixth centuries, such as Simeon the Stylite. It died out because these spiritual athletes began to compete against the ecclesiastical institutions. Play people would go out to the deserts and receive the sacraments from these saints instead of being served by their local priests. This was intolerable to the established church. Bishop Rabulla in the fifth century wrote a monastic rule strictly forbidding parish people from taking sacraments from these hermetic saints. In a sense these saints were true monks, people who lived alone.
This second form of monasticism was also dedicated to hospitality. Generally the cells of these monks when they were not wandering were along major roadways. Saint Augin served water to the thirsty who traveled the highways leading east into Persia and China. St. Habib taught the poor. St. Malke cured the sick. This form of monasticism was almost exclusively confined to the region of Mesopotamia
The third form of monasticism was cenobitic, or group centered. Large monastic buildings were built often with imperial help, especially in the region of Mesopotamia in order to win influence. Monks were the eyes and ears of Kings and Generals who needed notice of advancing enemy armies. But generally these monasteries were hospices and places of hospitality. They served as hospitals to the sick and weary, they were sanctuaries for the mentally ill, and they were places where the traveler could find food and a place to rest.
Mor Gabriel monastery of the Tur Abdin Region near the upper Tigris River was built in 397 AD. Saints Samuel and Shemoun built the monastery on the ruins of a Zoroastrian temple near a well traveled road that eventually became known as the Silk Road. By the eighth and ninth centuries there were over 2000 monks living in this institution. One Bishop, Simeon of the Olives, is reported to have planted over 10,000 olive trees and filled the cistern with oil. The income from this oil helped to feed the poor, establish schools, host travelers, and appease raiding armies. Cenobitic monasteries created thousands of jobs for the local communities who helped to support the monastery growing food, making cloths, building houses, walls, and adding to the giant monastic structures.
The development of these monasteries was vastly different than the development of monasteries in the West. The eastern monasteries were never cloistered. So many depended on having access to these places for rest, food, medicine, work, and hospitality. As a result they became small villages housing not only monks, nuns, but large numbers of families and support staff. Recent excavations at Mor Gabriel reveal there may have been as many as 3,000 people who lived outside the monastery walls, probably from the tenth to thirteenth centuries. Many of these people were masons and laborers for the monastery. These were communities of hospitality.
I recall in the millennium year 2000, I was asked to go to a village along the border of Turkey and Syria where I was to perform a funeral. It was a tiny mountain village. The Bishop of Mor Gabriel Monastery in Southeast Turkey had loaned me his all terrain vehicle. It took us hours to snake our way into the mountainous and nearly road-less village. I was welcomed by the entire village who were mostly the aged, disabled, and ill. These were the people who could not emigrate and escape the wars and ethnic conflicts in the region. First, we went to the home of the deceased to pray. I comforted the widow. Drank her tea and accepted her meager presentation of sweets. We cried together. After and hour or so of socializing, introductions, and visiting, I began the prayers for the dead assisted by a couple of deacons who had come along. We buried the husband of the dear woman and cried again. He had been to the monastery only a few weeks earlier where I had met him when he came to visit the Bishop.
As we were ready to leave the villagers took me to their chapel to show me their Gospel Lectionary, a giant and ancient tome filled with brilliant Syriac icons which I judged to be about 500 years old. They kissed it and caressed it and wrapped it in cloth with such care. Then they took me to a small fenced enclosure and offered me two goats. They said that they had no money and all they had were goats and I was to pick two of them. I refused but they insisted that I take the goats. So I agreed on the condition that they would be shared among the people who could eat meat at the monastery. So I picked two. To my surprise they loaded them alive in the Bishop’s vehicle. Their feet were tied but it did not prevent them from making a mess in the back. I thanked my hosts and returned to the monastery, worried the whole way about how the Bishop would react to these gifts who were leaving a great deal of evidence behind in the vehicle. But when I got to the monastery the Bishop asked me only how long I prayed. I said “about an hour.” “You should have prayed for two hours and we might have got a cow” he laughed.
The boys in the monastery seminary feasted on the goats that night. It was a happy feast. I thought about the kindness of the village that day. I was profoundly humbled by the experience of love and hospitality. Through their greeting of this stranger I discovered the Christ in me clearly and more deeply than ever before. Their recognition of Christ within pointed the way to a truer recognition of the underserved Grace to which I was a steward.
It was through hospitality, not only in that village, but among the many people who have hosted me over the years that I have come to discover the very essence of Christian practice. It has deepened my call to be the Host whenever I can and to be equally accepting of the grace of God as reflected in those who would host me.
For the past couple of years I have been in the Dominican Republic working with orphans, street children, and mostly organizing university students who come to volunteer for a week or two at a time to experience working among the poor. Last Spring a number of students did a modern street census of the Hatian children who were coming across the border into the Dominican Republic seemingly as economic immigrates. It turned out that many of the children had been forced to come and work for non-family members selling candy, shining shoes, or selling boiled eggs to the locals. If they did not sell enough during the day they often were not feed at night and often refused shelter by the people who were supposed to take care of them.
As I investigated this situation further I discovered a group of women prostitutes who were feeding these children at night. They had little money themselves as the men they were working for were constantly shaking them down for money. Nevertheless, I know they held back money to feed these children. I offered to help buy rice and beans so they could feed more kids. At first I did not trust the women. We were strangers. But as I would check on them to make sure they were not selling the rice out the back door, I discovered beautiful and compassionate hospitality. They were using some of the rice to feed themselves, but they used most of the rice and beans to feed the children. Any extra money they used to buy propane and water to cook the food. More than this they opened their house they were renting from their pimps to the children at night. One morning I found more than forty children sleeping on their cement floors.
Over the course of a couple of months, more than 100 children a night were being feed. I was giving them money for rice and beans which exhausted almost all the money I had. But I was so thrilled and full of joy to see this partnership between poor women and poor children. I truly saw the face of Christ and hospitality in a way that often moved me to tears.
Then suddenly the government came in a bulldozed down the building. The women were given a two hour notice. It was a tragic day. It was the end of this ministry in an instant. One of the children we had been feeding was laughing and delighting in the sound of buildings being crushed by a huge backhoe. I asked the boy how he could be so happy. He knows I am a priest, the one who is supposed to have the answers. “Don’t you know that we have no place to feed you at night?” He said to me in Spanish, “Don’t you know that God will provide?”
I was humbled and humored by the response. He was so right. I should have known better. It was the voice of Christ coming from this child, a voice on the foundation of hospitality. After all, God has promised not to abandon the orphan and this orphan knew the truth better than me.
Recently I spent time in a protestant community in Chelan, Washington, a Lutheran Retreat center that bears the same call to hospitality I have witnessed and experienced in so many places. Even though it is not a monastery, it has the same rhythm and sacred time I have often felt in monasteries around the world. The rituals of greeting and departing given to each visitor carry the same profound sense of the Holy I met in that mountain village in Turkey where I buried a believer.
