Face to face

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain where they could be alone by themselves. There in their presence he was transfigured: his clothes became dazzlingly white, whiter than any earthly bleacher could make them. Elijah appeared to them with Moses; and they were talking with Jesus. Then Peter spoke to Jesus. ‘Rabbi,’ he said ‘it is wonderful for us to be here; so let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’

Mark 9:2ff

There are moments in our lives that are totally transformative. They are moments of inspiration, realisation, acceptance, unveiling, creativity, or ecstasy. It is at these junctures that we move from one understanding or perception to another: the change may well be graduated, or instantaneous. But the effect is the same. The person I was before this change was effected is in some subtle or less than subtle way made anew.

Falling in love, seeing your newborn child, sending your children off to university, becoming a grandparent, losing a partner and even death itself generate that transition from one state to another. Our lives are punctuated and perhaps even measured by such experiences, they may equally be highlights or lowlights, full of pleasure or pain, self-revealing or disclaiming, gentle or explosive, tragic or comic. It can lead us to grow and it can lead us to withdraw. It is what we make of that moment, that experience, that learning that will enable us to truly be transformed.

The story of the Transfiguration appears in each of the synoptic Gospels. It is a story utterly saturated in images, symbols and metaphors. It is an encounter between man and God (akin to Moses on Mt Sinai), the bridging between heaven and earth, the present reality with the future expectation. It is not only about what happens to Jesus, it is about what happens to the disciples who are shaken from their weariness and most imperatively, about what happens to me when I am face to face with the glory of God. Thus the transfiguration becomes a deep, transforming experience for those disciples, for they have seen, but must now listen (Listen to him) and with this a revelation of Jesus’ ultimate mission, the breaking open of the kingdom here on earth with him as the bridge to eternal life. Moses’ and Elijah’s presence are the assurance that the faithful will be rewarded.

In our neighbours, in our streets and towns, in places far from our own we encounter the face of God. Not a God of glory, but most often a God of suffering and hurt, hunger and destitution. If I am called to anything in this transfiguration story, it is to allow others to be transformed through my actions, my faith in them, in my compassion – and allow others to see beyond the “me” and to look into the face of that God of glory.

Peter Douglas

EARLY ADOPTERS: TWO OF THE LEADING FIRST NATIONS TO EMBRACE CHRISTIANITY WERE ARMENIA & GEORGIA, WHERE TRACES OF THE EARLY FAITH ARE STILL VISIBLE

Simon Scott Plummer

Forming a passageway between East and West, Armenia and Georgia have been prey to attacks by the Romans, Persians, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, the Turkic Timur or Tamerlane, Ottoman Turks and Russians. Yet both nations have survived. The clue to their unlikely survival lies in their Christian identity.

These hauntingly beautiful countries became the first kingdoms to declare Christianity as their state religion. The Churches in both countries call themselves apostolic, the Armenian tracing its origins to the apostles Andrew and Simon, the Georgian to Bartholomew and Thaddeus. Armenia gives the date of national conversion as 301, after St Gregory the Illuminator had baptised King Tiridates IV. For Georgia it is 337, thanks to the preaching of St Nino the Illuminatress and the baptism of King Mirian III in what was then called Iberia.

Both dates are queried by historians but both at any rate fall well before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380. The faith was reinforced in both countries in the fifth century by the invention of their own scripts and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. In their medieval heyday they were the dominant powers between the Caspian and the Black Sea.

Under threat, Armenia and Georgia were willing to act together or to strike deals with outside powers; for example, to counter Persia, Georgia turned to Byzantium in the Middle Ages and to Russia in the eighteenth century. But the cost of survival has been huge. Georgia was reduced to becoming a Russian province in 1801, and the Armenians lost their heartland around Lake Van in eastern Turkey in the Ottoman genocide of 1915-22.

Today both countries are a paltry remnant of what they once were. Russian meddling has deprived Georgia of control over two wedges of its territory, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and, because of the intractable dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia’s borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey have long been closed.

There has also been a demographic cost. The Armenian diaspora, numbering around eight million, is roughly three times that of the population within the national borders. That has advantages for Armenia in both ecclesiastical and financial terms. But it represents a huge dispersion of native talent. In these reduced circumstances, the two apostolic Churches have played a key role since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 in helping to fill the vacuum created by the fall of Communism.

Under the constitution there is separation of Church and state but the Georgian Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church, to give it its full title, was granted special status by a concordat of 2002. In the One Holy Universal Apostolic Orthodox Armenian Church, the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos resides in Echmiadzin near Yerevan, but there are Patriarchs in Jerusalem and Istanbul and a Catholicos in Lebanon. Most members of the diaspora belong to the Apostolic Church, which gives it influence well beyond Armenia’s borders.

More than 80 per cent of the populations of the two countries belong to their respective Churches, although that figure is not matched by regular religious practice. In Georgia opinion polls show that the Church is the country’s most trusted institution and that its head, Patriarch Catholicos Ilia II, is the most influential person. There are risks to such privileged positions: corruption by too close an identification with the state, which provides funding, or political interference with the wishes of a democratically elected government.

After the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Church opposed President Mikheil Saakashvili’s opening to the West, which it saw as an endorsement of liberal values. Its preference was for alignment with Russia. The Patriarch spoke out against an anti-discrimination law that was required by Georgia’s association agreement with the European Union. The Church also opposed legislation that allows religious organisations other than itself to register as legal entities.

Tension within the Church has recently come to light with the bizarre and murky case of an archpriest who was sentenced in September to nine years in prison for attempting to poison with cyanide the Patriarch’s personal secretary. Criticism of the Church in Armenia centres on too close an association with politicians and oligarchs and arbitrary decision-making by its head, Catholicos Karekin II.

To most visitors to these two countries, such problems will not be apparent. They come, rather, to enjoy the splendid Christian legacy of 1,700 years, expressed above all in architecture and the liturgy. The spiritual heart of each country lies outside the modern Armenian capital of Yerevan and Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

In Armenia it is at Echmiadzin, where St Gregory had a vision of Christ descending to the earth and striking it with a hammer. On that spot he built what is known as the Mother Church of Armenia; speaking here in 2016, Pope Francis described Armenia as “a herald of Christ among the nations”. In Georgia it is at Mtskheta, where King Mirian raised a church after his conversion by St Nino. Since independence from the Soviet Union and the revival of Christianity, two huge new cathedrals have been built in traditional style in the two capitals.

At Odzun in northern Armenia the parish priest shows visitors fragments of stonework from the fourth century. The present building dates from the seventh and marks the transition from three-aisled basilica to domed church. From the same period are the ruins of Zvartnots Cathedral outside Echmiadzin, a circular structure destroyed by an earthquake in 930, and the noble St Hripsime Church within the city itself. Contemporary with these is the tetraconch Jvari Church, perched on a cliff edge overlooking Mtskheta in central Georgia. All testify to the wealth of ancient Christian architecture in the Caucasus.

For Georgia the golden age began in the eleventh century, two outstanding examples being the cathedrals at Mtskheta and Alaverdi. Georgian influence, in the form of decoration on the outer walls, is clear at the thirteenth-century monastery at Akhtala, just across the border in northern Armenia. Nearby, the large monastic complexes at Haghpat and Sanahin had their heyday during the same period.

Two phenomena demonstrate the threat that Christianity has faced in the Caucasus. The first is evident in the fortifications which surround many churches – Akhtala, for example, has a gatehouse worthy of a Norman castle; the second in the remote mountain sites, none more spectacular than that of the Holy Trinity Church beneath the snowy dome of Mt Kazbek in northern Georgia.

There are differences between the two Churches. Unlike the Georgians, the Armenians parted company with Rome and Byzantium over the definition of Christ’s dual nature made by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. They, and like-minded Churches such as those in Egypt and Ethiopia, are called Oriental Orthodox, as opposed to Eastern Orthodox.

Artistically, the visitor to Armenia is struck by the khachkars, stone steles whose flowery carved crosses illustrate the life-giving nature of Christ’s Passion, and the gavits, halls attached to monastic churches, of which Haghpat has a magnificent example. Distinctive characteristics of Georgian religious architecture are the great size of the buildings, their drums topped by a conical dome above a rectangular or cruciform lower structure, and elaborate decoration on the outer walls.

The Armenians have a curtain, drawn across at key moments in the Divine Office, rather than an iconostasis, and dominating the apse may be the figures of Mother and Child rather than the Pantocrator. At Akhtala, Mary’s and Jesus’ heads having been destroyed in an attack by the Seljuk Turks, your eye is caught on entering the church by her voluminous blue gown.

Those familiar with Russian Orthodox music will be struck by the rhythmic vitality and oriental sinuosity of the Caucasian varieties. The first was apparent in the responses to the priest’s chanting in Mtskheta Cathedral, the second during Divine Office in Geghard Monastery in Armenia. In both cases the singers were women, the Armenians graduates of the State Conservatory in Yerevan.

Those sounds remain one of the enduring memories of visits to the two countries. Their visual counterparts are Holy Trinity, over 7,100ft up amid the snows of the Greater Caucasus, and the fourteenth-century church at the Monastery of Noravank in Armenia, an exquisite double-decker with carvings to rival the finest contemporary work in Western Europe. Created by the architect and sculptor Momik, it stands against red-hued cliffs at the top of a gorge. Both buildings epitomise the wild beauty of these ancient Christian kingdoms.

Simon Scott Plummer is a former leader writer for The Daily Telegraph. This artcle first appeared in The Tablet 14 February 2018