Hello, my friend. Come in, sit down. I'm glad you're back.
Last time I told you about Ludwig Haetzer --- a man who could not stop asking questions, even when the questions were dangerous. Even when the answers cost him everything. I have always had a soft spot for people like that. The ones who pull at a loose thread just to see what unravels.
Today I want to take you somewhere older. Much older.
I want to take you to a place where the thread doesn't unravel --- where it holds. Where it has been holding, quietly, stubbornly, for longer than most civilizations have existed. Where people have been praying in the same language, in the same geography, through invasion and empire and fire and silence, and are still --- still --- praying today.
It's a story about a man named Simon. You won't have heard of him. Almost no one has. But Simon is not really the story.
The story is the place he came from. And what that place has endured. And what it is still, somehow, carrying.
Come with me.
I want you to hear something before I tell you anything else.
Close your eyes if you can. I know that's a strange thing to ask when you're probably driving, or walking, or folding laundry. But stay with me for just a moment.
Imagine a sound. Low and resonant, coming from somewhere deep in the chest. Not Latin --- you'd recognize that. Not Greek --- I know that sound better than almost any other. This is older than both. This is a language that was spoken in the markets of Mesopotamia two thousand years ago. In the villages along the Tigris. In the streets of cities that were ancient when Rome was still young.
It is called Aramaic. And it is still being sung today.
I have heard it in cold stone rooms in the mountains of northern Iraq. I have heard it in diaspora churches in Chicago and Sydney and Stockholm --- communities that carried it with them when they had to leave, tucked alongside whatever else they could grab in the hours before everything changed. I have heard it sung by very old people who learned it from people who are now gone, passing it forward like a lamp held carefully in the wind.
Every time I hear it, something in me goes still.
Not because it is mystical. Not because it is exotic. But because I know what it survived. I know the fires it passed through. I know the names of the people who kept it alive when keeping it alive was the most dangerous thing they could do.
You are about to meet one of them. A man named Simon, from a small village near a city called Karka, in the heart of Mesopotamia. He died on the twenty-seventh of August, in the year 447.
He was not a bishop. He was not a scholar. He was not a general or a king or anyone history was inclined to remember.
He was simply a man who would not stop being who he was.
And that, it turned out, was enough to get him killed.
But before I tell you that story --- I want you to hold the chant for just one more moment. Because that is where this story ends, as much as where it begins. With a sound that is still in the world. Still carried. Still alive.
Everything I am about to tell you is the story of how that happened.
Let me tell you about Karka.
Not the Karka of 447 --- I'll get there. I want to tell you about Karka the way I knew it long before Simon was born. Because this city has a depth to it that most places simply don't have. Layer upon layer upon layer of human life, going down so far that even I lose track of where it begins.
The city sits in northern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, in a region called Beth Garmai --- a Syriac name meaning something close to "the land of bones." I always thought that was apt. Not morbid --- just honest. This is ancient ground. People have been living and dying and building and burning and rebuilding here since before history had a name for itself.
By the time Christianity arrived in Mesopotamia, it did not arrive as a foreign import. It spread east from Jerusalem along trade routes, carried by merchants and wanderers and people with news they couldn't stop telling. By the second and third centuries, there were Christian communities all through this region --- worshipping in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, rooted in the soil rather than transplanted from elsewhere. The Church of the East, as it came to be known, was not Rome's church. It was not Constantinople's church. It had its own bishops, its own liturgy, its own distinct and ancient character. It was, in the truest sense, at home here.
And for a time, that was complicated but manageable. The Sasanian Empire --- the great Persian empire that ruled this region --- was officially Zoroastrian, and Christians were a minority under its rule. There were periods of tension and periods of tolerance. Communities learned to navigate. They built churches, trained clergy, raised children in the faith. Karka became one of the centers of this world --- a city with a Christian bishop, Christian monasteries, Christian families going back generations.
Then the world shifted.
In 313, the Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan. Christianity became not just tolerated in Rome but favored. And within a few decades it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
For Christians in Mesopotamia, this was not entirely good news.
Because now they were citizens of a Zoroastrian empire, praying to the same God as the enemy. Every Christian community in Sasanian territory suddenly looked, to suspicious eyes, like a potential fifth column. Like people whose deepest loyalties might lie across the border, with Rome.
It was not true. These were Mesopotamian people. They had been here for generations. Their Aramaic prayers had nothing to do with Roman politics. But suspicion does not require truth. It only requires fear and power and a story that is easy to tell.
Yazdegerd II came to the Sasanian throne in 438. He was a committed Zoroastrian and he was at war, off and on, with Rome. The logic of persecution assembled itself the way it always does --- quietly, bureaucratically, until it wasn't quiet anymore.
In 445 and 446, the killings began. Karka was at the center of it. The metropolitan bishop, Yohannan, was among the victims. The clergy was decimated. A sixth century text called the History of Karka records what happened there --- the names, the methods, the scale of it. Thousands dead. An entire hierarchy gone.
And then, on the twenty-seventh of August, 447, in the small village of Bet-Titta just outside the city, three men were brought forward. Simon. Abraham. Ma'na.
We don't know what they did for a living. We don't know if they had families, or what their houses looked like, or what they said to each other that morning. The tapestry is very thin here --- just a few threads, barely holding. Their names survived because someone, somewhere, wrote them into a martyrology. A list of the dead kept by the living so that the dead would not be entirely forgotten.
Their eyes were destroyed with hot iron. Then they were shot with arrows.
I was there, though no one saw me. And I have never forgotten their names.
Simon. Abraham. Ma'na.
I want to be careful here.
It would be easy --- too easy --- to frame what Simon and Abraham and Ma'na did as heroism. To dress it in the language of courage and sacrifice and glorious martyrdom. That language exists. The Church used it, and I understand why. When you are trying to hold a community together after something terrible, you reach for words that make the terrible mean something.
But I was there. And what I saw was not glorious. It was just --- human. Deeply, quietly, stubbornly human.
These were not men who had chosen a dramatic end. They were not theologians who had argued themselves into a corner they were too proud to escape. They were villagers. Bet-Titta was not a great city. It was a small place, the kind of place where everyone knows which family lives in which house, where the same families have farmed the same land for generations, where the rhythms of life are older than memory.
And in that small place, they had grown up praying in Aramaic. They had learned the shape of their faith from their parents, who learned it from theirs, going back further than any of them could trace. Their faith was not an ideology. It was not a political position. It was simply the texture of who they were --- woven in so deep that pulling it out would not have left them freer. It would have left them with nothing left to be.
I think about that a lot. What it means to be asked to renounce something that is not a belief you hold, but a person you are.
The Sasanian authorities were not, in their own minds, asking for something unreasonable. Convert. Adopt the state religion. Swear loyalty to the empire and its God. Live. It was a practical offer. People accepted it. I don't judge them --- survival is not cowardice, and the pressure on these communities was crushing. Some people bent. Some people ran. Some people found ways to practice quietly, invisibly, in the space between compliance and resistance.
But some people simply could not do it. Not out of stubbornness, exactly. Not even out of courage, exactly. Out of something harder to name. A kind of integrity so deep it didn't feel like a choice. It felt like the only thing left.
I watched Simon. I don't know what passed through him in those final hours. I don't know if he was afraid --- I imagine he was, because he was human, and humans are afraid when they should be. I don't know if he prayed, or wept, or went silent, or spoke to Abraham and Ma'na in the low voices of people who have run out of words.
What I know is that the faith these three men carried was not the faith of empire. It was not backed by armies or enforced by law. It had no political protector, no powerful patron, no bargaining chip to offer. The Church of the East in that moment was simply a community of people who believed something, gathered in small places like Bet-Titta, keeping the liturgy alive with their own voices.
That kind of faith is its own thing entirely. It doesn't need power to sustain it. In some ways, power would have changed it beyond recognition. What sustains it is simpler and more durable --- the sense that this is real, this matters, this is worth being.
Worth being, even at the end of everything.
I have watched a great many people die for a great many things across a very long life. I do not say that lightly or coldly --- each one of those deaths has stayed with me, the way I imagine they stay with the people who loved them. But there is something particular about the deaths of ordinary people who simply refused to stop being ordinary people of faith. No grand gesture. No final speech for the record. Just --- this is who I am. I cannot be otherwise.
The Church would remember Simon and Abraham and Ma'na as saints. It would assign them a feast day, include them in the martyrology, weave their names into the fabric of collective memory. That is a kind of love, and I'm glad for it.
But I think what they actually were, in that village on that August morning, was simpler than sainthood.
They were just themselves. All the way to the end.
Here is what the empire got wrong.
Yazdegerd II believed that if you removed the leaders, scattered the clergy, killed enough of the visible faithful, you could cauterize a community. Stop the bleeding at the source. It was a theory that made sense if you thought of faith as a structure --- something with a roof and walls and load-bearing pillars that, once demolished, would leave nothing standing.
But the Church of the East was never really a structure. It was a practice. It lived in the mouths of ordinary people. In the way a mother taught her children to pray. In the muscle memory of a liturgy sung so many times it no longer required thought. In the Aramaic words that passed from one generation to the next like water passed hand to hand across a dry distance.
You cannot kill a practice by killing its leaders. You can wound it terribly. You can scatter it. You can drive it underground, or into exile, or into silence so deep it looks like extinction from the outside. But if enough ordinary people carry enough of it in their bodies and their memory and their love, it does not die.
It goes somewhere else. And it keeps going.
I watched what happened after Karka. The Church of the East did not collapse. It grieved --- deeply, collectively, the way communities grieve when they have lost too many people too fast. It rebuilt its clergy slowly, carefully, from what remained. And then --- and this is the part that still catches me off guard, even after all this time --- it turned east.
Not west toward Rome, which had its own complicated relationship with these eastern Christians and their distinct theology. East. Into Persia proper. Into Central Asia. Along the Silk Road, carried by merchants and monks and wandering priests, the Church of the East spread further and faster than almost any other Christian tradition in history. By the seventh and eighth centuries there were Church of the East communities in Persia, in India, in Central Asia, and --- remarkably --- in China. The Tang Dynasty had a Christian community. There were Syriac inscriptions on stone in the heart of the Chinese empire.
I saw that. I walked those roads. And I thought of Simon, in his small village, and I wondered if he could have imagined it --- that the faith he would not put down would one day be carried to the far edge of the known world.
Probably not. He was not thinking about the far edge of the known world on the twenty-seventh of August, 447. He was thinking about the next few hours. But that is how the thread works --- the people who hold it rarely see where it goes. They just hold it.
The centuries that followed were not kind to the Church of the East. They rarely were. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were devastating --- communities that had survived Sasanian persecution and Arab conquest were swept away or scattered by Genghis Khan's armies moving west. The Ottoman period brought its own waves of violence. The twentieth century --- and I say this with a heaviness I don't have words to adequately carry --- the twentieth century was catastrophic. The Assyrian genocide of 1914 to 1918 killed somewhere between a quarter and three quarters of the entire Assyrian Christian population. Whole villages. Whole lineages. Gone.
And still the community survived. Smaller. Wounded in ways that do not fully heal. Scattered across a diaspora that stretches from Iraq to Australia. But alive. Still carrying the liturgy. Still singing in Aramaic.
There is something I have learned across a very long life of watching human communities under pressure. The ones that survive are not always the most powerful. They are not always the most numerous or the most politically connected. The ones that survive are the ones who have found a way to carry their essential thing --- whatever makes them them --- in a form small enough to fit in a single human heart. Because empires can destroy buildings. They can silence institutions. They can scatter populations across the face of the earth.
But they cannot reach inside a person and take out what lives there.
Simon of Bet-Titta knew that. He didn't know he knew it --- he was not a philosopher or a strategist. He was just a man from a small village who held onto the only self he had.
And fifteen hundred years later, the sound he died for is still in the world.
I find that extraordinary. I always will.
I have been alive for a very long time.
I say that not to impress you --- you already know it --- but because I want you to understand the weight behind what I'm about to tell you. When I describe a pattern, I am not speaking theoretically. I am not drawing on research or analysis or someone else's account. I have watched this particular pattern assemble itself, again and again, across more centuries than I care to count.
It goes like this.
A community. Usually small. Usually old --- rooted in a place for generations, sometimes centuries, sometimes longer. They have a way of praying that is their own. A language that carries their history inside its grammar. Customs and songs and stories that have been passed from hand to hand like something precious and fragile and absolutely irreplaceable.
And then a larger power looks at them and decides --- for reasons that always sound reasonable from the inside, reasons about loyalty and security and the natural order of things --- that this community's existence is a problem. That their prayers are suspicious. That their difference is a threat. That the solution is to make them into someone else, or to make them gone.
The machinery that follows is always recognizable. I could describe it to you in my sleep. The restrictions come first --- on worship, on language, on gathering. Then the pressure to renounce, to convert, to conform. Then, when that doesn't work completely, the violence. Quiet at first. Then not quiet at all.
I watched it in Karka in 447. I watched it in the same region, in the same geography, in the summer of 2014.
That summer, ISIS swept through the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq. The Assyrian and Chaldean Christian villages that had stood there for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen centuries --- communities that were the direct descendants, spiritually and culturally and in some cases literally, of Simon's people --- were emptied in days. Families fled with what they could carry. Churches that had been built when Europe was still in its early medieval darkness were looted and burned. Some of those families have not gone back. Some of those villages are still empty.
I walked through one of those churches not long after. The candles had burned down to nothing. But you could still see where they had been.
And just a few miles away, on that same Nineveh Plain, the Yazidis --- an ancient people with a faith older than Islam, older than Christianity in that region, rooted in a cosmology that goes back to the very earliest layers of human spiritual imagination --- were being destroyed with a deliberateness that the world was slow to name and slower still to stop. Their shrines were demolished. Their women were taken. Their men were killed. A people who had survived every previous empire that had passed through that land came closer to extinction in a few weeks than they had in all the centuries before.
I cannot tell you I was unmoved. I was not unmoved. I am never unmoved by this. The length of my life has not made me numb to it --- if anything it has made me more tender, not less, because I know what is being lost each time. I know the depth of what those communities carry. I know that when an ancient tradition is extinguished, something goes out of the world that cannot be relit. Not exactly. Not ever quite the same.
Across the mountains in Afghanistan, the Hazara --- a people who have carried their Shia Muslim identity through centuries of Sunni dominance, through Soviet invasion, through Taliban rule and fall and return --- have watched the pattern reassemble around them with a terrible familiarity. They know what it looks like. They have always known. Knowing has not protected them.
And in the far west of China, in a region called Xinjiang, more than a million Uyghur Muslims have been disappeared into a system of camps and surveillance and enforced re-education --- a system designed, with bureaucratic thoroughness, to separate a people from their language, their prayers, their sense of who they are. The machinery is modern. The intention is ancient. I recognize it immediately.
I want to be honest with you. After everything I have seen, I do not have a clean answer for why this pattern persists. I wish I did. I have watched humanity make extraordinary progress in so many directions --- in medicine, in understanding, in the slow expansion of who counts as fully human and therefore worthy of protection. And yet this particular cruelty keeps finding its way back into the world, wearing new clothes, speaking new justifications, doing the same terrible thing.
But here is what I also know.
The chant is still being sung.
In diaspora churches in Chicago and Detroit and Sydney, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians are still singing the liturgy in Aramaic. The language that was spoken in the streets of Karka when Simon was alive is still alive in human mouths, still carried forward by people who learned it from people who learned it from people going all the way back further than anyone can trace. Those families who fled the Nineveh Plain in 2014 carried it with them. They are still carrying it.
The Yazidis who survived are still practicing. Still gathering. Still keeping the flame --- literally, in their tradition, a sacred flame that is never allowed to go out --- burning in whatever space they have been given.
Every time a community survives what was designed to destroy it, something important is demonstrated. Not just about that community's resilience --- though that is real and worth honoring --- but about the nature of the thing they are carrying. Something that lives inside human hearts and human voices and human hands passing a tradition to a child is harder to kill than any empire has ever fully understood.
And I will tell you something else. Something I hold onto, carefully, the way you hold something that could break.
Each time the world names this pattern --- really names it, looks at it clearly, calls it what it is --- something shifts. Slowly. Imperfectly. With far too many failures along the way. But the naming matters. The witnesses matter. The people who refuse to look away matter. Because a pattern that is seen and named and refused is a pattern that is, however haltingly, being unlearned.
I have watched that too. Across a very long life, I have watched that too.
So I will keep listening for the chant. In whatever language it comes. In whatever small room or ancient church or diaspora living room it rises from. I will keep listening, because it means something is still here that was meant to be gone.
And as long as it is still here, there is still something worth protecting.
That has always been enough to keep me going.
I hope it is enough for you too.
I want to ask you something before you go.
Not a hard question. Not a question with a right answer. Just something to carry with you, the way you carry a stone in your pocket that you picked up somewhere meaningful and keep finding with your fingers without meaning to.
Here it is.
What does it mean to be a witness?
I have been thinking about this for a very long time. Longer than I can easily account for. And what I keep coming back to is this: witnessing is not a passive thing, even though it looks like one from the outside. It is not simply seeing. It is seeing, and then holding what you saw. Refusing to put it down. Refusing to let it blur into the comfortable vagueness of things you once knew but don't quite remember anymore.
Simon of Bet-Titta would be entirely unknown to you today --- unknown to almost everyone --- except that someone, somewhere, in the wreckage of that community in the years after 447, sat down and wrote his name. And the name of Abraham. And the name of Ma'na. They wrote the date. They wrote what happened. They tucked it into the collective memory of a grieving church and somehow, across fifteen centuries of invasion and exile and catastrophe, it survived.
That person --- that anonymous, careful, grieving person with a stylus and a piece of parchment --- was a witness. They had no power to stop what happened. They could not bring Simon back. They could not dismantle the empire or reverse the edict or undo the morning of August the twenty-seventh. But they could do one thing. They could say: this happened. These were real people. They will not be nameless.
And here you are, fifteen hundred years later, knowing his name.
That is what witness does. That is its reach. That is its stubborn, unassuming, extraordinary power.
So I am asking you --- gently, without pressure, the way I ask all my questions --- to consider what you are a witness to. You don't have to travel to the Nineveh Plain. You don't have to write a letter to a government or carry a sign or know the right words to say in the right room. Those things matter, and if you can do them, do them. But witnessing begins smaller than that. It begins with seeing clearly. With learning a name. With refusing the comfortable amnesia that makes it easier to get through the day but leaves the world a little more alone.
The Yazidis. The Assyrian Christians. The Hazara. The Uyghurs. You know their names now. That is not nothing. That is the beginning of something.
Hold them the way that unknown scribe held Simon's name. Carefully. Persistently. As if it matters.
Because it does.
It always has.
Before I let you go, I want to tell you who we're visiting next time.
His name is Philip Neri. He was born in Florence in 1515, right in the blazing heart of the Renaissance, and he eventually made his way to Rome --- a city that was, at the time, thoroughly exhausted by its own corruption and desperately in need of something it couldn't quite name.
What it got was Philip.
He was a priest. He was also a prankster. He once prescribed a penance for a particularly vain nobleman that involved walking through the streets of Rome for a week with a live monkey tied to his shoulder. He shaved half his beard and walked outside like nothing was wrong. He danced. He made faces during serious meetings. He gathered people around music and friendship and laughter in a small room above a church and somehow, without anyone quite noticing how it happened, renewed the spiritual life of an entire city.
He is known to history as the Apostle of Joy. And I have been looking forward to telling you his story for a very long time.
Because I think --- especially after everything we've sat with today --- you deserve to laugh a little.
I'll see you then.
And now --- before you go back to your day, your laundry, your drive, your life --- I want to leave you with one last thing.
Somewhere tonight, in a church that might be in Detroit or Sydney or Stockholm or a small apartment in a city you've never visited, someone is singing in Aramaic. An old language. An ancient prayer. Carried through fire and empire and exile and loss, passed from mouth to mouth across sixteen centuries, still alive in the world because ordinary people like Simon of Bet-Titta held onto who they were, all the way to the end.
That sound is still here.
So are we.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.