A few decades ago, while chatting with a friend who grew up in a non-believing household in Dublin about, of all things, the crucifix, it became apparent she had a very sketchy understanding of what Easter is about. The agony in the garden, Pontius Pilate, Calvary, the story was as obscure to her as cosmological theory is to most of us. I was, and remain, gobsmacked.
I was reminded of this recently when reading Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, the 1957 book by the late American writer Mary McCarthy. Her description of her loss of belief, during adolescence, reminded me of mine. It just happened. Easily. And that was that. What I also found interesting was her appreciation for the way her Catholic childhood had introduced her to thousands of years of history. By the time she was in her teens, she had been introduced to lots of interesting stuff she might never otherwise have learned. For the rest of her life, she considered this a blessing. Which brings me to Greece.
I first went there in the late 1970s when, having spent the summer working in a German factory, I hitched-hiked down to Greece and spent a week or so drinking beer on the island of Ios. I don’t know if it was on that trip or a subsequent one that, on my way home, I got a cheap “Magic Bus” from Athens to London. There were two drivers. One would sleep in the baggage compartment under the bus while the other was driving so the bus never had to stop for anything but the shortest of breaks. The only time it did stop for any duration was in Rotterdam, where the two drivers temporarily abandoned the bus and their passengers close to a red-light district.
I’ve been back to Greece a few times since, but it was only this year that I stopped off in history-saturated Greek Macedonia, where a friend was staying in the port city of Kavala. One of the city’s claims to fame is that when St Paul first came to Europe two thousand years ago, he landed there. We know this because it’s in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, we are told, having landed at Kavala, went “from thence to Philippi, which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, and a colony: and we were in that city abiding certain days”. Colony in this context means a Roman colony.
READ MORE
[ Naoise Dolan on Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic GirlhoodOpens in new window ]
Ancient Philippi is 16km inland from Kavala and one day my pal and I went there on an early-morning regional bus. We got off at a small, sleepy rural town called Krinides where, in the few cafes already open, older men were drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and playing cards. We walked to one end of the main street and there they were, the ruins of Philippi, a city founded by Philip, father of Alexander the Great.
The city was destroyed by an earthquake in the 7th century. The ruins include the remains of an ancient open-air amphitheatre, where you can sit high up in the stone seats and look out over where the city used to be and the great plain beyond. There’s even an old ruin of a room where, it is said, Paul was imprisoned (according to the Acts, he escaped when an earthquake knocked the chains from his limbs and caused his cell door to pop open). Soon after arriving in Philippi Paul had met “a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination”, from whom he drove the aforesaid spirit. Men who used to make money out of the woman’s soothsaying powers were miffed because she instantly lost her profitable ability to predict people’s futures. They complained to the authorities, saying Paul and his mate, Silas, “being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city”.
After Philippi, Paul went to Thessaloniki, where he continued the work that had such a transformational effect on world history. Later again, most likely when he was imprisoned in Rome, he wrote to the people he’d met in Philippi, encouraging them, so to speak, to keep the faith. His Letter to the Philippians is one of the Letters of St Paul still read out in churches to this day. It felt special, sitting in the empty ruined amphitheatre, just my pal and I, and remembering being a child in a Dublin church listening to the priest read from the Letters of St Paul. Sometimes it’s just great to be alive.
