Another brick in the wall…

Crossing through the “separation barrier” into Bethlehem is a depressing experience. Passport checks, metal detectors and x-ray machines are a daily chore for the Palestinians that cross the barrier each day to work. This inconvenience pails into insignificance though when we face up to the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians cannot get permits to travel thought the wall and so are effectively trapped, unable to visit family, seek medical treatment or work in Israeli territory.

We visited the Holocaust museum at Yad vashem a few days ago, a profound place that has probably the most comprehensive collection of holocaust information in the world. There was a gallery there documenting life in the Warsaw ghetto and how harsh life was for those imprisoned within its walls… Its hard to imagine how a people who have survived such a thing as this can now effectively be perpetrating the same thing on others … for many Israeli’s the barrier its seen as a necessary evil that has brought some measure of peace to their land. That is as may be, but surely there must be some other way?

Images from the barrier wall

The Fifth Gospel…

No I haven’t gone potty in the heat and decided I have discovered a whole new book of the bible, rather it’s what some people round here call the land of Israel.
We were told this when we first arrived and I must admit I didn’t get it… but I think a week in I may just be starting to…

There is something about being here, being in this place, seeing for yourself the places that are talked of in the bible that brings a whole new perspective to what we read. There is a real sense that we can never read it in the same way again.

An example… on Friday we went down to Jericho and on the way we stopped on the hill leading down to the city at a place called Wadi Quelt. Here, in this dried up river valley, runs the ancient road down to Jericho from Jerusalem. It was here that the Good Samaritan cared for the pilgrim in desperate need whilst everyone else crossed to the other side. When you are there and you see the absolute desolation of the landscape, the total barrenness that stretches for miles around you suddenly realise the utter peril that that pilgrim was in, this is not a landscape to tarry in and anyone injured would not survive long. The other thing you realise is the large effort people would have had to make to avoid the injured man. This is no two lane highway with a convenient pavement on the other side to cross to – this is a narrow track at the bottom of a dried up gully. To “cross over to the other side” would have meant scrambling up a dry and dusty slope and climbing along it for some distance, a difficult and uncomfortable task. This was a very deliberate and telling act. This is what is meant by the “fifth gospel” it is the one that alters how we read the other four.

On another note entirely I was very impressed by the Palestinian authorities facilitation of us all to sin – Thanks to American grant money a cable car has recently been built at the Mount of Temptation… no more must we struggle up the mountain to our temptations, rather we can be whisked there in a matter of minutes in air conditioned comfort and they even sell ice creams at the top – isn’t modern life wonderful!

Jesus Wept…

Today was a day when we visited some of the sites of Jesus’ grief.

We began the day at Bethany, at the tomb of Lazarus were Jesus wept for his friend. Of course, you guessed it, there is a church that’s been built on the spot! just above the tomb. Ironically the weight of the churches over the years has caused the tomb below to collapse and so the tomb that you can now go in to is shored up with modern stone and there is little of the original left!

From Bethany we went to the Mount of Olives were of course Jesus wept for Jerusalem. You get really great views over the city from here and from this angle particularly you can really appreciate just how vast the temple complex would have been. For travellers who approached the city they would have crested the hill to see the city laid out before them dominated by this vast temple complex at the centre of which was the Holy of Holies. This was totally sheaved in Gold leaf, shinning so brightly that trying to look at it was like trying to look at the sun. It must have been totally awe inspiring!

We walked down the mount following the road that Jesus would have taken. It was pretty steep in places and I was grateful for the tarmaced surface and stout walking sandals. It was very moving to be walking down the route that Jesus himself used. Though of course it would have been rocky then and he was on the back of an untrained colt – literally trusting his life to the sure footedness of that animal. At the bottom of the hill we entered the Garden of Gethsemane a place where again he trusted his life another. I had such a sense this afternoon of how perilous his life was and yet how much he trusted – it was a humbling.

The garden was lovely – the olive trees were about 1000 years old and there was a real sense of history and antiquity there. Sadly you can’t go into the garden – how wonderful would it be to sit in peace under one of these trees but you could sit around the edge in the shade which was a lovely place to reflect.

Next stop was the pools at Bethesda. For some reason I had always imagined that these were fairly small, sort of like a large garden pond – don’t ask me why! But in reality these pools were vast. There were two main pools which served as resevoirs for the temple, each incredibly deep and wide. The current church on the site is a lovely simple church with the most amazing echoes. We sang “Amazing Grace” in the church and it sounded wonderful – apart from the verse where we all mumbled because we couldn’t remember the words! Its funny how natural doing such things seems, normally I would be embarrassed by doing such things in public but here, in the Holy Land, these things seem somehow very normal!

From Bethany we went to the Garden Tomb – the second site that claims to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus. The guide we had was well versed and was incredibly passionate about the garden and it clearly meant a great deal to him that this was the place. In many ways I wanted this to be the place as this fitted my stereotype of what I thought the tomb should be, a peaceful place, a hill, a garden an empty and un-adorned chamber that has been left in its natural state. Was this the place? It doesn’t have the following that the Holy Sepulchral has that’s for sure and its “pedigree” is much more recent but does this mean its not? and does it matter anyway? Whether this was the tomb or not it certainly gave us a better idea of how the place that Jesus died would have looked, something that isn’t possible at the Holy Sepulchral church.

So we have four contenders for the shepherds fields and two for Golgotha, thank goodness there is definitely only one Sea of Galilee!

It’s Wednesday so it must be…

Its only day 3 and I am already behind myself… The program is so packed with visits and lectures that finding time to think and reflect is at the moment hard to come by.. so I was intending to combine day 2 and 3 into one post but it was getting way to long so I shall have to get back to day 3 later,,,

Day 2 saw us head into Bethlehem. This of course required us to pass through “the wall” – the 8 meter (24 feet) high security barrier that separates the Israeli and Palestinian territories. This was in itself a profound experience, and one I want to blog about at a later date when I have had a chance to re-visit it both in terms of thinking about it more and physically going back through it.

Our first stop of the day was Bethlehem Bible College were we had a chance to look around and to talk with some of the people that run it. This was a fantastic opportunity to get a real insight in to what life is like for the Palestinian Christians who live in the West Bank. The Christian population, once 70% of those living in Bethlehem is now only 30% and forms only 2% of the population of the Palestinian territories as a whole. The college aims to support those who continue to live in the territory through education, the provision of public services such as a library and through job creation schemes to try and help people who want to stay in the territories but have no way of earning a living. It’s an amazing place, full of committed people and full of hope. We were fortunate to have the chance to talk to some of the people that work there and to hear a Palestinian perspective on what is happening in Israel. Again this needs to be a separate post, as I want to wait until we have had a chance to hear all sides of the story as we will later in our stay have a chance to speak with Jewish and Muslim people.

From the college we went to the shepherd’s fields, or should I say one of the shepherd’s fields – for there are at least four claimants to that particular title, each promoted by a different religion and each, of course, with a church attached! We went to the Greek orthodox one and jolly nice it was to, though singing “while shepherds watched…” on a boiling hot July day was somewhat surreal, even if we were supposedly standing on the spot that the events described took place!

The tour proceeded ever onwards at a pace and we were duly dispatched to manger square and the Church of the Nativity. Again a nice old church and it was good to see that the tiny door that you have to enter by really does exist and is not just a preachers construct to make a point in a sermon!… but I was struck by the same problem I had at the Holy Sepulchral church that the elaborate ritualisation of these sights leaves me spiritually cold. They are interesting and I am really glad that I have a chance to see them, but I feel like a tourist, not a pilgrim when I visit them and that makes me sad…I am at the (supposed) birthplace of Christ – should I not feel something?!?

Day 3 was a little better on this score, perhaps because it involved some of the smaller pilgrimage sites and it was easier to reflect in the simpler, quieter places? But that’s a tale for another post….

It’s another sign I tell you…

Apologies for yet another sign but I saw this on the portico of the Gethsemane church and couldn’t resist bloging it… Fill in your own jokes about Gafcons recent “pilgrimage” in Jerusalem, the Lambeth conference or any church you know…

Its a sign I tell you.....

Do you think the wise men had trouble getting their camels up there??

Israel – first days

Being back in the Holy Land is in many ways familiar, walking through the Jaffa Gate into the old city on the first morning was instantly recognisable from my trip here in 1998. At the same time it’s very different. In 1998 I was here on a Guide and Scout conference, my focus was secular and when we visited the old city it was as tourists. Now we are here as a pilgrims. Our days start and end with prayer, we read the scriptures at various points and 10 years and half a theology degree later I look at things through different eyes.

That said I am wary here of thinking that I have any clearer picture now then I did then. In our first lecture – where we were introduced to some of the cultural and political issues you come across in this land – it was rightly said that the longer that you are here the less you know, and I am conscious of that fact especially as I will be blogging as I go along. So I start my musings with a health warning (or should that be a reality check?) that what I say at the beginning may differ from what I say at the end – but then I suppose that that is what this trip is all about :o)

So the first morning we went to the old city and among other things we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is a real eye opener and is a great introduction to the myriad differences that exist within the Christian community. It’s a great sadness that, at this most holy of sites, the church that is believed to encompass the place of Jesus’ crucifixion and his tomb, division is one of the things that hit me first. We came into the church through the back way, over a low roof where the Ethiopian Orthodox monks live, having been kicked out of the main church several centuries ago, in a disagreement that is somehow is still relevant and ongoing many generations later… then into the body of the church where each of the five Christian groups that are guardians of the church have their own areas and chapels, that they guard jealously. Worst of all though is that the keys of the church are in the guardianship of two Muslim families, because the various Christian factions cannot be trusted to deal with access fairly…. whatever the rights or wrongs of this situation, the witness it is to those looking in is anything but positive about the Christian faith.

Inside the church are several holy sites – The hill of Calvary, with the hole in ground into which Jesus’ cross was placed, the slab on which his body was anointed and of course the tomb in which he was laid.

To be honest these sites don’t do a great deal for me, I struggle to find any sense of Jesus through the vast ornateness of these monuments. I think that a lot of this is tied up with my Anglican and British sensibilities that looks for God in silence and simplicity, that can’t quite get away from the fact of questioning how do they know that was the actual hole where the cross was? or Indeed that this was even the hill of Golgotha? What you can see however is how much these sites do mean to other pilgrims there, especially those from the orthodox Christian communities. Everywhere around the church you see people reverently touching the artefacts, rubbing photos on them (to bless those who couldn’t make the trip perhaps?) and in the tomb of the Christ emotions run especially high. Kneeling before the stone slab said to be where Jesus body lay many people weep and in some cases sobbed in an almost hysterical manner, there was a real sense that, to be there, to be able to physically experience these places was the pinnacle of their lives. It was both humbling and moving to be among these pilgrims but also to some extent sad, sad because somewhere along the way in the western church we have lost the sense of the physical in worship. This is particularly so in the protestant churches and I think, based on what I witnessed, we are in some way lesser for it.

So something for me to ponder, the first of many things no doubt! It remains to be seen what effect they may have on me and my thinking over the coming weeks and months…