Barbara Brown Taylor

Excerpt
Two summers ago, I traveled to northeastern Turkey for a walk in the Kachkar Mountains, a stretch of land between the Black and Caspian seas where the kingdom of Georgia flourished during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During its brief ascendance in this part of the world, Georgia was a kind of Camelot, a Christian kingdom in which strong and benevolent rulers carved a culture out of the wilderness and defended it from its enemies. They imported Byzantine artists from Constantinople to adorn their public buildings and built an economy that prospered all their subjects. Two hundred years later it was all gone, torn to pieces by neighboring tribes. Now it is a wilderness again, although a beautiful one--a kingdom of mountains, tall pines, and rushing streams populated only by the handful of people who have found flat places to farm.

One afternoon in the middle of nowhere, a guide led a group of trekkers up a dirt road toward a small settlement hidden behind some trees. We turned a bend and the outline of a ruined cathedral appeared, a huge gray stone church with a central dome that dominated the countryside. Grass grew between what was left of the roof tiles and the façade was crumbling, but even it shambles, it spoke to us. The whole group fell silent before it, looking around for permission to enter, but no permission was necessary. It was a hull, a shell. No living thing remained inside, and we were free to explore.

Arriving at the main portal, I stepped through and was swallowed up by the sheer size of the space inside. Very little of the roof had survived, but the massive walls still held plaster frescoes with the shadows of biblical scenes on them. There were lambs of God carved on the stone capitals and medieval saints with their faces chipped away. Some of the best stones had been plundered for other purposes, but those that remained testified to the care and expense that had been lavished on this house of God.

Poking around, I found evidence of campfires in one side chapel. The other had been turned into a garbage dump, where rats prowled for scraps. From the transept I heard the sound of children and returned to find them playing soccer on the green lawn that covered the floor of the central nave, while a couple of sheep grazed under the apse. In the dome just above, it was still possible to see one outstretched arm of the Pantocrator who had presided over the eucharist; the rest of him had flaked away. Sitting down under what was left of his embrace, I surveyed the ruins of his church...