Bob's Guitars And Sami's Stoles

We St. John's pilgrims are shown the other morning on the roof of east Jerusalem's Holy Land Hotel, with the Dome of the Rock behind us and Herod's Gate on the right. First row: Damian, Brenna, Remy, Canon Iyad, and Steven; second row: Alexandra, Cindy K., and Allana; back row: Bob, Kathe, Christian, Shannon, Debbie, Fr. Mike, Fr. John, Kathy, Cindy D., Pastor Lisa, Ed, Cathy, and Jerry.

My t-shirt signified not me but a guitar brand. Later that day, at the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu on the eastern slope of Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, it enabled me to bond with an American pilgrim who said he was a colleague and friend of Taylor Guitars founder and CEO Bob Taylor. "I have guitar #200," he said. In the church dedicated to remembering Peter's denial of his savior, I wrestled with the sin of envy.

From Taylors to luthiers to tailors: One day last week, I took my friend and colleague the Very Rev. Canon Michael Bamberger to meet Sami Barsom, who's had the same shop on St. Mark's St. in the old city for over a half-century. In his customary fashion, he brewed and served coffee and spoke to us graciously while receiving the greetings of every third person who wandered by his shop -- Christians, Arabs, Jews. As lay leader of the local Syriac Orthodox community, his contacts are prodigious. He got out a picture Lord Snowdon took many years ago showing him with Jerusalem's legendary mayor, Teddy Kollek. And yes, Mike and I each bought one of his beautiful handmade stoles.

Pilgrims' Progress In The Church Of All Churches

You come to Jerusalem a few times, and you actually have people to look up. On Tuesday afternoon Kathy and I went first to the Armenian Quarter and Sami Barsom's tailor shop. He was making tea for a visitor, the Rev. Shemun Can, assistant to the Syriac Orthodox archbishop in Jerusalem, and he invited us to join them.

I'd met Sami twice before. He was gracious enough to say he remembered, if not my name, the shape of my face. While we sat and talked, he waved at two Orthodox Jews who walked past his shop and warmly greeted an Arab who came in to introduce his fiancee. When they left, Sami smiled and said, "He said he met me 10 years ago and asked if I remembered him."

The muchtar, or top lay leader, of Jerusalem's Syriac Orthodox, Sami prides himself on talking to everyone. A recently published collection of his articles for the Jerusalem diocese's magazine contains pictures showing him practicing his faithful personal diplomacy with prominent Israelis and Palestinians alike. "We follow Jesus Christ," Sami says, "and he calls us to be in peace with one another. So what else can I do?"

It isn't that he hasn't experienced the alternative. Both his and Fr. Shemun's families fled Turkish persecution in 1915, when, as Sami told us, Assyrians and other ethnic groups were engulfed in the Armenian Genocide. "The Turks said, 'They're all like the Armenians, they're all the same'," Sami said with a dismissive wave. His family settled in west Jerusalem and moved to the Jordan-controlled Old City, he said, in the aftermath of Israel's 1948 war of independence.

Fifty-one years ago, he opened his tailor shop right around the corner from St. Mark's Church, seat of Jerusalem's Syriac Orthodox archbishop and one of the places touted (as reliably as by anyone else) as the site of the Last Supper. Most of his customers, he said, are Anglicans and Episcopalians. Among the consequences of his abundant hospitality is that most of them probably abandon any thought they may have had about negotiating a price. We left with a handmade green stole (good for the whole season between Pentecost and Advent) and some extra gifts from Sami, including something for the St. John's Altar Guild as well as a postcard containing the Lord's Prayer as set down in Fr. Shemun's exquisite Syriac Aramaic calligraphy.

Our inevitable next stop was the irresistible Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where we watched an elaborate Epiphany mass at Christ's tomb that looked as though it was being overseen by none other than His Holiness Karekin II, supreme patriarch and catholicos of the Armenian Orthodox Church (that's he in the background in the above right photo, with the black hood and crosier).

After Kathy got another chance to say a prayer inside the Edicule, we ran across a procession of friars that was moving from chapel to chapel around this most mysterious and chaotic of churches. Among them was a distinguished-looking priest who put us in the mind of our two-year-old promise to try to say hello to the Rev. Fergus Clarke, Jerusalem-based buddy of my friend and church history professor Charlie Frazee. Making our way to the Franciscans' corner of the church, we asked about Fr. Fergus and learned that, sure enough, that was he in the holy procession. So we waited, listening as the Latin chant echoed through the church, coming closer minute by minute. Just as they swung toward the entrance of Christ's tomb carrying their candles and amid swirling incense, an organ began to play in support of their plainchant, as glorious a moment of liturgy as I've ever experienced.

The monks offered two more rounds of prayer, including a highly ritualized censing of the Mary Magdalene chapel and the veneration of the consecrated elements in the Chapel of the Sacrament next door. Fr. Fergus (at left in the above right photo) welcomed us graciously in the sacristy and cheerfully admitted he knew Charlie from his days as a parish priest at St. Joseph's in Placentia, California. Indeed he said he'd mailed him a letter that very morning. He said a blessing over us and my new stole and invited us back to see him, and we marveled again at how we felt so at home in this faraway place where God seems so close.

All About The Clothes, Even When It's Not

Instapundit spotted and featured this site, "Bad Vestments," which means that the political color for the moment is libertarian true blue. The site itself features photographs of lavish, odd, or, if I may, ugly liturgical clothing being worn by priests and bishops. The site's recurrent theme is "because Christian worship is not supposed to be about you." As far as I can see, its creator doesn't identify her- or himself, so one can only speculate about the coloration of their theological views. One hint is the persistent references to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, as Mrs. Schori, a commonplace on theologically conservative blogs, where some find her views objectionable and others, her gender, at least insofar as its being fit for the episcopacy is concerned.

No question that the site is a hoot. Yet ridicule is a questionable activity for Christians (mea culpa, he quickly adds), anonymous ridicule* even more so. It's in the paradox of Christ that when we fault others for acting as though it's all about them, it can mean that it's all about us. If the authors of "Bad Vestments" have an idol, it's liturgical exactitude. Like two of the folksingers in "A Mighty Wind," we prayer book-thumping Christians are tempted to worship color -- purple for Lent and the impending season of Advent, white for Christmas and Easter (and weddings and funerals), red for Pentecost (think the tongues of fire as the Holy Spirit descended on the church).

Many of the priests and bishops depicted at "Bad Vestments" are thinking well outside the basic Crayola box. One smiling bishop is arrayed in cathedral stone gray, which doesn't show up on any of the liturgical calendars I've seen. As for ordinary time, or, as some say, "after Pentecost," the long season between Trinity Sunday and Advent, green is called for, but surely not lime green, Holy Father. And yet what's the matter with a little variety within the confines of those all-too-familiar basic color groups? Suggesting it has to be a certain green is akin to arguing that God prefers the King James Version of the Bible.

To be fair, "Bad Vestments" doesn't seem to be making such a restrictive point. Creative is one thing. Hideous is, of course, another. The site's other targets are we pastors whose raiment sometimes screams, "Please look at me, and get ready for a homily about where this bizarre rig came from." As a matter of fact, I have some stoles (the long strips of colored cloth, a vestige of Roman senators' garb, that priests wear around their necks) that people have given me or that are meaningful for some other reason. This especially applies to those I've brought home from two Holy Land pilgrimages. The red stole shown here, a treasured gift from the Altar Guild of the Cathedral Center of St. Paul in the Diocese of Los Angeles, prevented me from being the most inconspicuously dressed new priest in recent history at my ordination in January 2004, for which I'd neglected to order a custom-made chasuble as my beloved colleagues had.

It makes me feel good to wear these items, and sometimes I'm tempted to talk about them during sermons, but I rarely if ever do. I'm not sure why. And then's there's the issue of wearing our own vestments at all. Before almost every service, and especially on Sunday, I remember advice from my mentor, the Rev. Canon Mark Shier, now enjoying the first months of a well-earned retirement as rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. A priest of God for over a third of a century, he had a sacristy drawer full of personal vestments that he wore for weekday services but almost never on Sundays. He told me that that it gives the congregation pleasure and perhaps even some comfort to see their priest wearing a stole from the same set, as the Altar Guild would say, as what they see on the altar and the ambo (the liturgically correct term for lectern).

Yesterday at St. John's, our church was dressed in white to help us remember Christ the King on the last Sunday in Pentecost. We don't get to wear white all that much, so I was tempted to reach for a white and gold stole from the heart of old Jerusalem, the handiwork of Sami Barsom, a Syriac Orthodox tailor I met in 2007. I've worn it often enough on Sundays that it's soaked in the water of a score of baptisms. But just before the first service began this week, for whatever reason I heard my teacher's voice, so I wore the beautiful white St. John's house stole instead. Yep. I matched. Even when it's not about the clothes, it is.

*Mea maxima culpa, because each post, I now see, is signed by Christopher Johnson. Sorry about that, brother.

Sami's Town

Sami Barsom, recently honored by his Patriarch for 50 years of service as a lay leader in Jerusalem's Syriac Orthodox community, has a small tailor shop in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City. On my first pilgrimage two years ago, I found Sami by chance and bought a beautiful white and gold stole he'd made. I've used it in a half dozen weddings and gotten water on it during 30 baptisms. Yesterday I wanted to introduce him to my elder daughter Valerie, but, well, I couldn't find him. Using my BlackBerry, we Googled "Sami, tailor, Jerusalem," and found this link -- the first one that popped up! -- but no address.

We finally made our way to the Syriac Patriarchate, where a helpful man showed us through a maze of back streets to Sami, who by then had closed for the evening. Kathy, Valerie, and I tried again today. He received us warmly and showed us the notes for his memoirs, including photos of him with Yasser Arafat and Israeli leaders alike.

Sami's so-called Oriental orthodox church, which has about 2.2 million adherents worldwide, broke from Roman and Greek orthodox Christians in the fifth century over Christology, or the nature of Christ. If my friend and church history professor Charlie Frazee, one of the world's leading experts on these matters, were here, I'd have him explain exactly what happened at the Council of Chalcedon, but since he isn't, here's Wikipedia's take:

[T]he Oriental Orthodox (Non-Chalcedonians) understanding is that Christ is "One Nature—the Logos Incarnate," of the full humanity and full divinity. The Chalcedonians understanding is that Christ is in two natures, full humanity and full divinity. Just as humans are of their mothers and fathers and not in their mothers and fathers, so too is the nature of Christ according to Oriental Orthodoxy. If Christ is in full humanity and in full divinity, then He is separate in two persons as the Nestorians teach. This is the doctrinal perception that makes the apparent difference which separated the Oriental Orthodox from the Eastern Orthodox.

There'll be a quiz tomorrow. In the meantime, if you're in Jerusalem and want to talk theology with Sami (or exquisite stoles and suits), he's at No. 26 St. Mark's Street. There's a Syriac Orthodox church in Orange, California called St. Mary's.