In Turkey “koinonia” ” “carries the scent of the origins ” “

Turkey, “a natural bridge between two continents and diverse cultural expressions” said Pope Francis during his recent trip to the country, today a Country of arrival for refugees and migrants. To date, “Turkey has generously welcomed a great number of refugees” from conflict areas, the Pope said. The immediate reaction, that might be plebeian but not abstract, when speaking of Turkey, is a significant indicator of our imagination, ranging from the beauty of the Bosporus to the dances of the dervishes, to its beautiful and bustling open markets. A Christian must, however, draw from deeper sources, from the Scripture and from the tradition of the early years of the nascent Christianity: the scent of origins. These are the signs that we need to perceive. How can it be done? In the land where we breathe the presence of the Apostle Paul, and where we are shown the first cave, now known as St. Peter’s Grotto, where gathered early Christians, links in the transmission of the faith, today we pause in prayer. Those footprints reveal not only beautiful sites, they indicate theological places, bearers of authentic theological life: the great evangelizers treaded on their soil and spread the Word of the Father, the Lord Jesus. Paul was born in Tarsus, Iconium, today’s Konya, he arrived with Barnabas; in Antioch, the Roman city of Pisidia, now Antakya, there, for the first time, the disciples of the Nazarene were called Christians. From the port of Pieria, Paul set sail for his first apostolic journey. He lived in Ephesus for three years. John brought Mary there, and today we know the Shrine of Meryemana (House of the Virgin Mary) while Pergamum is the city in Revelation. It is thus the land of our first big “paddlers” of the Word, as we learn in Scripture, traversed by the great faith witnesses. We could retrace the whole church of the Acts of the Apostles and proceed further, over the centuries, with the great flowering of monasticism in Cappadocia. Currently the land is veined by Islam, where Christians are a tiny yeast and a few are Jews. Three religions that appeal to the common Father Abraham and that must find their original transparency to acknowledge each other “as brethren and companions, dissipating incomprehension” so as to promote “collaboration and understanding”. Undoubtedly already on a human level, where each person is guaranteed the life and respect for individual choices but more profoundly because “freedom of religion and freedom of expression, effectively guaranteed to all, will stimulate the flourishing of friendship, thereby becoming an eloquent sign of peace”. Destiny – understood as a tension towards the providential plan of the Most High – of a land, intersected by three different roads, which, although starting from the one Father, depart and are reflected in different and even divergent patterns of life that should not be mutually assimilated but rather open up to spaces for communion. Turkey is the place of origin, that can serve as a constant fountainhead of the living water: not of tolerance, expression of paucity of sufficiency, but of authentic “koinonia”, capable of respecting individual consciences, stories in which are rooted the various communities so that the lived experience may be truly harmonious. This discourse is not based on economic benefits or social prestige, it does not seek rampant personalities. In fact, it caters to anyone who has experienced himself in the presence of the Highest, and knows how to look at others with fresh eyes generate a look that leads to Him. Not naive or vaguely balsamic words to soothe too many rifts or wounds, but certainties in a journey that cannot be reduced to a single force, even if it has to go through a personal willingness to face common everyday life without prevarications: places of worship that were previously Christians and then Muslim, or Jewish first and then Christian and again Muslim. We tend to appropriate what doesn’t belongs to us, regardless of our religious conscience, while it belongs only to the Creator who breaks into the heart of each and every one of us. Francis did not adjust to a standard protocol or pseudo etiquette, he withdrew in great reverence and left its silent cry burst out in the silence of the mosque. The embrace of the two brothers, Francis and Bartholomew, is not a pose, it is a seal and a hope. They gathered to walk together with a bowed head and an embrace of rediscovered brotherhood.