Finding god in the ruins

I recently returned from a mini study abroad in Turkey at the end of May, and I have so much to share with you! So, if it’s alright, I’ll be dedicating my next several blogs to telling the stories and reflections from our time learning about the early church and the empire in which it grew.


It takes a bit of imagination to truly appreciate ancient ruins; just as it takes a bit of imagination to truly appreciate God. In both there is only so much we can see, feel, touch. There is only so much that is concretely in front of us, which we can point to and say, “yes, this is evidence of—“ The rest we are forced to fill in with our imaginations and dreamings. Admitting this takes a great deal of vulnerability and humility because we must hold our imaginings in an open hand, recognizing the thoughts and ideas born from imagination to simply be our best guess at a mystery unfathomable—that we could be wrong. Is our faith strong enough to withstand evidence contrary to what our imagination has told us is true? Can an archeologist undo years of work on a recreation when she discovers evidence that the layout of the city is not what she originally hypothesized?

​As we walked the ancient ruins of Ephesus and Pergamum, awed both by the grandeur of the original structures and by the archeological work to recreate such grandeur, I allowed my mind to wander and meander around these columns stretching to the heavens and under archways that seem architecturally impossible. My mind filled in the missing tiles from floor mosaics and painted over the cracks in the fresnos with vivid colors stolen from the fruits, flowers, and dirt all around us that would have been crushed into dyes. There is only so much you can take in sensorily, only so much that you can pronounce as accurate to a place’s original truth. The rest we rely on archeologists to use their knowledge, education, and intuition to fit stones one upon the other, to determine where the temple would have stood vs. the forum, and tell the story of what happened here. Why do we find it so easy to trust the archeologists of these ancient cities and so difficult to trust the theologians and translators of sacred Scripture? And what is it about us that causes us to believe that we are experts in knowing the Divine when we know we could never figure out how this pile of stones could be fit together to create a coliseum? Is not the Divine more complex, more nuanced, more unimaginable than that which was made by human hands?

This reflection is crushing if we hold rigidly to the collective imaginings of humanity as Truth about the Divine. It may lead to a complete dismantling of our faith when faced with a situation that casts doubt on what we believe about God from human interpretation. Faith is about holding loosely to the mystery and allowing ourselves to just be (in awe) in the midst of God, content with the gaps in the mosaic stories of Their identity—I Am Who I AM; יהוה, the tetragram with missing vowels, impossible to pronounce. When God names God’s self, God purposefully invites mystery. Archeologists, even in the fullest recreations of these ancient sites, still leave holes for us to fill in with our dreamings. For how can we truly appreciate mystery, how can we truly have faith, if there is not room for questioning?