Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

One was looking at over a month on the road. The final location was, all things considered, central and the route well-traveled and more hospitable than some. It was the spring and some farther west might sail, at least part of the way, across the Mediterranean. The land route held the potential of meeting other attendees along the way, from farther south in Africa and more interestingly from farther east than the old Persian empire. The people coming in from Rome would be equally inconvenienced… possibly upsetting their self-righteous “Seat of Peter, First of Apostles” contingent was a silver lining. 

What is it like packing bags for a journey and conference that will take up a better part of a year? Thinking about how after Pentecost the Apostles traveled as far west as Rome and east into India and now centuries later, for the first time, the leaders of every church they started are being called together from across Europe, Africa, and Asia? To potentially meet Bishops from Pakistan, whom you have only encountered as quotes from a theologian you write to in Tehran, who you were connected to on account of a mutual friend in Jerusalem? To be in a room where some will be Confessors, arguing the points of faith that brought them to be tortured, speaking now with enfeebled limbs and scar covered bodies?

When Athanasius set out from Alexandria there was probably some thought about what he was going to argue regarding the nature of the Trinity, or the Divinity of Jesus, or the Mechanism of Atonement… but generations of intercontinental dialogue including scholars from every ethnic demographic within Christianity and from the men, women, and eunuchs who had dedicated their lives to the faith had already shown a consensus. There would be some arguments, sure, but most of the work would be the thousands of gathered theologians going through three centuries of theological work and figuring out how to state what was consistently affirmed by martyrs, confessors, scholars, and theologians. On this, his feast, it is this work of finding consensus across the greatest diversity of Proclamation of Christ Crucified we can gather, this work attempted at the Council of Nicaea, and especially all the human components of such work, we should celebrate and meditate upon.

Pax,

—Ben