I got up early on Saturday morning to go back by myself to the Church of the Resurrection and had a wonderful visit, arriving a little before seven and finding the church quiet and largely empty except where services were being held in some of the chapels.  I wandered through the entire place, spending time on Golgotha while a Latin priest celebrated Mass in English with a faithful few as a Greek priest looked on in a gruff but generally friendly manner from his neighboring chapel, ensuring pilgrims made their venerations before the bedrock without dawdling too long in their devotion.  I touched the rock once more through the opening under the Greek altar, then went to wait outside the edicule, where a service was in progress inside the tomb.  I had to wait through a second mass afterward (they follow in close succession throughout the morning, with only a few minutes in between when lucky or determined pilgrims may be able to visit the interior), but was able to enter the holy space at its end.  I knelt before the marble slab that covers the believed resting place of Jesus, kissed it, and laid the items I’d brought with me on it to be blessed–the silver cross I wear around my neck, my favorite icon from Russia of Christ the Pantocrator, and the olive wood crucifix I’d bought on Thursday afternoon from a hospitable man named Adnan only a few doors down from the Resurrection itself.  I probably had about sixty seconds to spend in the inner tomb chamber, along with only two or three other pilgrims, before we needed to move out so that the next mass could begin.  It was a brief, but unhurried, happy time.

Afterward I went back to the borrowed Syrian chapel of St. Nicodemus and found myself alone.  I had the chapel to myself for a few minutes of prayer, with only one other visitor coming into the beautiful, completely neglected, unfurnished, ragged space.  He visited the rock tombs as I sat quietly, then after he was finished, I visited them again, with only the light of a candle I’d bought from the tiny Coptic chapel behind the edicule to light the narrow passageway.  I left the candle burning outside the edicule in prayer for the peace of Jerusalem as I went back out into the beautiful light of the still-beginning day.

We spent the day on the Mount of Olives, stopping first at the “Palm Sunday church”–a Franciscan church at Bethphage, a town just next to Bethany from which Jesus begins his entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.  We then walked down the side of the hill to visit the chapel of Dominus Flevit (“the Lord wept”–commemorating Jesus’ tears over the sufferings and wars of Jerusalem, a moment that remains just as poignant and just as applicable 2000 years later).  Dominus Flevit is also the site of an ancient cemetery which some scholars have identified as belonging to the extremely early Christian community at Jerusalem when it was still entirely Jewish.  We have much less textual or archaeological information about this Jewish-Christian layer of the early church than about the Gentile believers who soon vastly outnumbered them, and it was fascinating to see some of the symbols incorporating the cross in unusual ways which have been attributed to their burials.

We stopped at the Garden of Gethsemane–a beautiful place, but thronged with visitors, more than even Dean Stephen had seen and probably due to the upcoming visit of the pope.  Our time there was short; it was easy to imagine Jesus in prayer there on a quiet night two thousand years ago, but spending too much time there on that loud, traffic-choked morning would have been pretty rough.  We made another stop just around the corner at the traditional site of Mary’s Tomb, which has apparently been venerated there since well before Constantine and may well preserve some authentic ancient tradition.  What I found particularly fascinating was the tomb structure itself, which had been cut out of the rock wall in a way very similar to what is supposed to have been done to create the edicule at the Church of the Resurrection.  Here, though, the original living limestone of the tomb is clearly visible, though parts of it have been covered over to construct the shrine.  It helped me a great deal to envision what the edicule might have looked like in its original form (and, of course, it makes one wonder whether there might be any living rock from the original tomb left in the edicule today despite its ruin by Hakim and its many reconstructions through the years–maybe we’ll learn more when it is finally renovated).

We paid our respects to Mary and the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches that now have custody of the site, and then after lunch we visited the Lithostratos–a stone pavement in the Muslim Quarter near the beginning of the Way of the Cross.  This has been traditionally identified as the Stone Pavement (Gabbatha) where Pilate tries Jesus in the passion story of John’s gospel, although it more likely dates to a century or two afterward.  At any rate, Roman gameboards have been found etched into the stone, which brings to mind the stories about the soldiers throwing dice with Jesus’ garments as the stakes.  It is a good place to contemplate the relationship between God and empire, divine power based on love and human power based on coercion.  I had the opportunity to offer a reflection on that topic there at the site, and used some ideas from my senior sermon at GTS two years ago–which happened to use my Pantocrator icon as an illustration.  It felt providential that I had it there with me, and had blessed it only that morning at the tomb of the resurrection.  Jesus’ commandment to the disciples in the book he holds in my icon is “A new commandment I give to you: Love one another.”  The only thing that cannot possibly be coerced, is the one commandment given to us by this king.  How different that is from the kings and rulers of this world …

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One of the brief stops on the Dead Sea itinerary Friday was at the oasis of Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea shore. This is a famous oasis mentioned in the Old Testament when David hides out there from the vengeful king Saul (1 Samuel 23-24) and then in the poetry of the Song of Songs.  Song of Songs is the most erotic part of the Bible.  It’s love poetry.  Very physical love poetry.  Commentators have often spiritualized it as symbolic of the love of God for Israel, the love of God for the church, etc., etc.  There’s nothing wrong with those interpretations, I guess, but that certainly wasn’t what the author had on his–and/or her–mind.  Go read it, if you haven’t, and see if you can get through chapter 5 with a straight face.  But it’s in the first chapter that Ein Gedi shows up, when the young woman compares her lover to a cluster of henna blossoms “in the vineyards of Ein Gedi.”

Anyway, the Renaissance composer Palestrina set the Song of Songs to music, and I sang a set of them with the Atlanta Choral Artists, Rob Burlington’s choir, back in my Atlanta/St. Bart’s days.  It was a fun concert and beautiful repertoire, and one particular line of one of the motets stuck with me for no particular reason except that the tenors in particular sing a very satisfying, very un-Renaissance
4-5-1 cadence on the phrase “in vineis Engadi”–”in the vineyards of Ein Gedi.”  If you’ve ever had a random snatch of music stick in your mind, you know what it’s like.  So I was curious and interested to see Ein Gedi.

In the event, we ended up seeing it from a lookout point probably a third of a mile away, and it was less fabulously lush than I’d hoped–or, rather, it was lush, but skinny–a strip of green with a beautiful waterfall spearing down the side of a cliff, but surrounded by the forbidding Judean desert on all sides.  I guess when you’re surrounded by the forbidding Judean desert on all sides, even a wadi a few yards wide that’s filled with water and greenery is well worth singing about.

Anyway, I happen to have a recording of the Palestrina (not by us–by the Hilliard Ensemble) and took the liberty of putting the clip in question together with a few seconds of video of Ein Gedi itself that I shot on the digital camera while we were there.  The hope was that getting some motion by using video would let you actually see the waterfall, which really was beautiful but pretty far away.  In reality?  It’s still pretty far away.  Oh well … it’s the thought that counts.  Enjoy.

We got up early Friday morning to walk the Stations of the Cross in the Old City before the path became completely crowded with merchants, tourists, less-savvy pilgrims, residents, and the general population of a bustling modern souk.  We left the college at about 6:00 and finished at about 7:30.  It turned out to be a rich experience of prayer for the life of the whole world, although I’ll admit neither Julia nor I was particularly looking forward to the experience–we’ve just been through Lent, and the idea of a heavily penitential walk through the suffering of Christ at 6 in the morning sounded a little dark and difficult.  But in the end, it was a beautiful day, the city was peacefully waking up around us, and our prayers at each station were heartfelt and well-thought-out, and we walked the Via Dolorosa with the joy that can make even that way a Via Gaudiosa.

After breakfast, we had a free day on our schedule.  However, almost our entire group had opted to go on a tour organized by some of our number to Masada, Qumran, and the Dead Sea–really the only things any of us could think of that we would love to do in Israel/Palestine that weren’t included as part of the course.  Masada was imposing and stark, a massive clifftop palace/fortress.  Qumran was imposing and stark, a sectarian desert refuge.  And the stop at the beach at Qalya, a Dead Sea beachfront spot, was just plain fun.  Everything they say about the Dead Sea is completely true.  It is literally impossible to sink.  It’s fun to just float around and enjoy the different sensation (and smearing the mud all over yourself is apparently part of the agenda too, judging from what we saw around us).  I’ve never tasted anything quite like the water–it goes beyond salty to have an extremely intense, acrid tang.  Very strange.

I didn’t taste much.

It was a good day.

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On  Thursday we spent the day around Mount Zion–the hill just to the southwest of the current old city, but which was part of the walled city of Jerusalem throughout most of its history (Suleyman the Magnificent left it out when he constructed the current walls in the 1600’s).  Zion is a name with countless biblical resonances, especially in the Psalms, and it really refers to the entire city of Jerusalem most of the time, but this one particular rise is the hill identified specifically by that name.

We began with a visit to the Syrian Orthodox church of St. Mark in the Armenian Quarter (not actually on Mt. Zion).  According to the Syrian tradition, this was the real location of the last supper, in a house belonging to Mary the mother of St. Mark.  The church is also identified as the location of resurrection appearances and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.  They also are the custodians of an icon of Mary and the child Jesus said to have been painted by St. Luke himself.  All these traditions, as you might guess, are something of a minority report, but they are deeply precious to the tiny Syrian Orthodox community in Jerusalem–the same community that borrows my beloved Chapel of St. Nicodemus in the Church of the Resurrection from the Armenians.

The highlight of the visit to St. Mark’s was really our hostess, Justina, a charming and glowing woman who was once a math teacher and now volunteers (or perhaps works?) as a general caretaker for the church building.  She had us rapt as she told elaborate stories of the healing miracles she had witnessed in front of the holy icon, as well as appearances of Jesus in the “upper room down” (the room identified as the upper room is actually downstairs in the crypt of the church, and the house itself is apparently even farther down in an archaeological layer of the past).  I admit I’ll have to remain reverently agnostic about the facticity of some of the finer details of the stories, but her joy and devotion in telling them were enough to make any of us chime in with her repeated exclamations of “Glory to our God!”.  At the end of her time with us, she offered to let us hear some of the language of Jesus (a version of Aramaic is still the liturgical language of the Syrian Orthodox church), and we sat entranced as she sang a hauntingly beautiful Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 150 in the ancient tongue.

From St. Mark’s we went to the Cenacle–the more widespread traditional site of the Last Supper on the grounds of the current Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, just outside the Zion Gate from the Armenian Quarter.  Constantine built a basilica here, and the Crusaders later built a chapel which they identified as the cenaculum (supper room).  On the same site is a cenotaph traditionally associated with Kimg David; this may actually go back to the early Jewish-Christian community who honored David as part of their observances on this site, but for the past few centuries it has been venerated by people of multiple faiths as David’s Tomb.  This became a holy Jewish site of particular importance between 1948 and 1967, when Jews were not permitted into the Old City under Jordanian administration and thus couldn’t pray at the Western Wall.  Today it’s still a Jewish place of prayer.  Our visit to the cenacle and David’s Tomb was mostly distinguished for being crowded and short, and I admit I didn’t find it particularly noteworthy other than for the sake of completeness–even if the historical Last Supper is somewhat more likely to have happened here, St. Mark’s turned out to be an easier place to remember and commemorate it for our group.  The eternal tradeoff of pilgrimage …

We had lunch in the Old City and returned to Mt. Zion to see the Dormition Church, a Roman Catholic community established in the early 1900’s.  In an ecumenical gesture of friendship, it was named after the Orthodox doctrine of the Dormition (falling-asleep) of Mary, mother of Jesus–rather than the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Assumption (that Mary was “assumed” body and soul into Heaven at the end of her life).  Pope Pius XII would later go on to infallibly enshrine the Assumption as Catholic dogma in 1950 (it’s good to be the pope!)–but the Orthodox name remains, and the church is beautiful.

We closed the day with a visit to the nearby church of St. Peter in Gallicantu–Latin for “St. Peter of the Cock’s Crow.”  Built near where the high priest Caiaphas is believed to have lived, it commemorates Jesus’ trial before Caiaphas and more specifically Peter’s denial that he knows Jesus.  It’s a poignant part of the passion narrative and a beautiful church on the edge of the hillside, looking out over the Kidron Valley toward the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives.  Its grounds also contain a remarkable find: a Roman-era staircase descending from Mount Zion into the Kidron which was more or less the only route from the Mount Zion area down toward the Mount of Olives in the time of Jesus.  If the tradition that the Last Supper was held in the Mount Zion area is at all true, this staircase was almost certainly the route he and the disciples took after supper when going out to pray at the Garden of Gethsemane.  There are not many literal “footsteps-of-Jesus” moments in the Holy Land, though many “somewhere-near-here” moments.  But this was one of those footsteps moments, and descending the staircase while looking out across the beautiful city toward Gethsemane was a remarkable time.

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Roman Catholics are called Latins here–apparently the Byzantine Greeks already had the name “Roman” locked up by the time the Western Catholics made it back to Jerusalem.

Anyway, I took some brief video footage on our camera during the Latin procession around the edicule on Wednesday (see the previous post for all the details).  Enjoy.

Wednesday was, for me, a much-anticipated day. We have been in Jerusalem for nearly a week now, not counting the trip to Galilee, and had plenty of free time. But up through Wednesday, Julia and I didn’t spend much time in the Christian Quarter of the Old City–largely, at least for me, intentionally. Making a visit to the Church of the Resurrection has been one of the things I have been most looking forward to, but haven’t wanted to rush into. This is a place I have long thought about, studied, read about, and hoped to see.

The Anastasis (Greek for Resurrection) is the Eastern Orthodox name of the church Westerners usually know as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The latter was what the Crusaders called it and has passed into Latin use, and from there to the rest of us Westerners. But if you ask me, the Eastern name is a better fit. It describes the real point of the church, after all. As people at St. George’s point out, this is the only church in Christendom that claims the tomb it is built around is actually empty.

The resurrection is pretty much by definition an event impossible to pin down historically, physically, or descriptively, even if you believe in it. Take two Christians and ask them to describe what they think happened in the small hours of a silent Saturday night/Sunday morning, and you may get two completely divergent answers–and both may be equally faithful. On the other hand, the judicial execution and burial of a political criminal is well within the purview of archaeology, history, and science. And what we know about the site of the Church of the Resurrection is fascinating. It is clear that it is built on the site of a limestone quarry which had fallen out of use by the time of Jesus. On one end of the site, rock tombs of the type sealed by rolling stones and used in the first century AD (and only in a very narrow window between about 50 BC and 50 AD, apparently) were carved into the hillside. Partway down the site, a rocky outcrop stands out above the rest of the quarried-out pit, having been rejected by the stonecutters because it was composed of flawed, cracked stone. The site itself sat a couple of hundred yards outside the city wall to the west during the time of Jesus (about fifteen years later, Herod Agrippa’s expansion of Jerusalem brought it within the walls). From what we know of Roman executions, the site would have made a fine spot for a crucifixion: outside the city walls, but close enough (and prominent enough, thanks to the rocky outcrop) to provide an effective public deterrent. From what the Gospels tell us of a rocky place called Golgotha, the associations are evocative.

That’s what archaeology has told us. There is some evidence that the site was venerated liturgically by the underground Jerusalem church up through AD 66 (at least according to Jerome Murphy O’Connor, who draws his info from Eusebius and Socrates Scholasticus). At any rate, it is the site which the Christians at Jerusalem, just emerging from persecution, insisted upon when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, came looking to build a basilica on the site of the tomb of Jesus. In the mid-100’s AD, the emperor Hadrian filled in the quarry site with dirt and covered it with a temple to Aphrodite (quite possibly as a way of squelching Christian veneration of the site). This was the situation in 325 when Constantine came to power, embraced Christianity (out of political reasons perhaps as much as faith commitment), and embarked on a church-building campaign. Although other sites might well have been much more convenient to build over, given the need to demolish a temple and contend with the uneven quarry site, Constantine’s builders acted on the identification of the Jerusalem community and excavated the site. Eusebius, writing during the lifetime of Constantine, describes the excavations with pious excitement and reports that the original memorial/tomb was discovered as the dirt was dug away.

Is it the tomb of Jesus, the place where he died, was buried, and then had whatever happened to him early on Sunday morning, happen?  There’s no way to positively verify anything of the kind, so we have to be content with possibilities and likelihoods.  In the Oxford Archaeological Guide to the Holy Land, Jerome Murphy O’Connor writes, “Is this the place where Christ died and was buried? Very probably, Yes.”  In the more measured words of Dan Bahat, former city archaeologist of Jerusalem, “We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus’ burial, but we have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of the site.”  (For citations for these quotes and a more detailed summary of the background, visit this site.)

At any rate, once the tomb had been unearthed, the rest is history: Constantine built a massive basilica on the site (in the process, carving the tomb out of its rocky wall and enclosing it in a freestanding structure called the edicule–something most of us moderns who prefer things au naturel might wish he hadn’t felt the need to do). A piece of wood discovered in a deep cistern at the edge of the quarry was identified as the True Cross of Christ (later its finding was attributed to Helena, Constantine’s pious mother, who was present to dedicate the church). The descriptions of the Holy Week liturgies in Jerusalem during the late 300’s which have come down to us through the pilgrim nun Egeria describe a rich array of rites taking place in the precincts of the church.

Obviously, Jerusalem has changed hands many times, and during one of those times the caliph Hakim destroyed the basilica (in the 11th century). It was rebuilt, but only in the areas of the rotunda around the edicule itself and what had been the courtyard adjoining Golgotha. The main church nave was never rebuilt, though the Crusaders added some chapels and assorted architecture, and various church communities have put up monastic buildings, etc. on the complex. Today the Church of the Resurrection is the dictionary definition of a patchwork place. It’s shared by six communities–Latin (i.e. Roman Catholic), Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian. A complex document drawn up by the Ottomans governs how they share the space–different chapels are the turf of different communions for custodial purposes, and they all get out of each other’s way for various ceremonies at different times around the edicule and other common property. The keys are held by two Muslim families to ensure access by all. Occasionally a couple of monks will have a random squabble over who moved whose curtains or who is sitting too close to whose chapel. There’s a famous ladder above the main entrance which was put out there sometime in the early 1800’s and has sat there ever since: the Armenians own the windowsill it’s leaning against, the Greeks own the ledge it stands on, and whose responsibility it is has never quite gotten resolved. It’s all very, well … byzantine.

All this means that the Resurrection can be a crazy, chaotic place; it’s not particularly visually beautiful and certainly about as far from architecturally unified as a building can be; it’s a living illustration of the sad divisions in Christ’s body the church; and it can be pretty confusing to visit, especially for the uninitiated pilgrim who just wants to visit the place where Jesus died, was buried, and was raised.

And yet with all this, it is a profoundly special place to me.  In part I think this is because I’ve been steeped virtually since birth in the stories–and the liturgies–of Holy Week and Easter, and have found them full of deep, life-orienting meaning almost throughout life.  Added to that, I think I’ve long had a certain fascination with being in the place where something happened.  As a teenager I remember leafing through a book of photos from 20th-century Russian history and being mesmerized by a black-and-white picture of Stalin standing on top of Lenin’s tomb as triumphant soldiers of the Red Army cast the captured standards of various Nazi army regiments to the ground in front of his feet at the end of World War II.  I’ve stood there–there, on that spot, right in Red Square where I go all the time–this happened THERE. Even as a ten-year-old kid in Korea when we went on vacation for the second time to Cheju Island and revisited the aquarium we’d stopped at two years before, I found myself captivated by having returned to the same site, sitting in the same row of seats where we’d been the previous time, thinking about my younger self sitting in that very spot two long years ago (a duration of time which, for a ten-year-old, counts as nostalgia-inducing).

We’ve visited a lot of holy sites on this trip.  Most of them don’t carry much of that this-spot fascination for me because my rational self just can’t get into the idea that the cute baby Jesus was born right here and laid in a manger, or that John the Baptist was brought up in this anonymous Judean village instead of another.  But the evidence for this site is strong enough that I can let that side of my mind take a rest and dwell instead on the heart side of things.  And this is the center of the story–the crux of it all (literally)–the place where the mysterious events we commemorate as the paschal mystery likely happened, and the place where they’ve been commemorated without interruption for seventeen and perhaps twenty centuries.

It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve had some exposure to the crazy idiosyncratic nature of this particular building thanks to the church history courses of the esteemed Rev. Canon J. Robert Wright at General, whose fine article on the church’s history, layout, and features I reread and carried with me on our visit.  This church building is one that repays study and familiarity.  It’s a lot like the Bible.  Flip it open randomly expecting to have a meaningful spiritual experience, and you might get lucky, but you’re more likely to end up vaguely confused, or downright disillusioned.  Study it, learn about it, come to see it as a library or compendium rather than a single story, learn to find the high points hidden within the rest, and it gets richer and richer as you spend more time with it.

At any rate–I love this church.  It feels friendly, fascinating, and holy to me, hallowed by the rites and pilgrimages of millennia as well as by the original events that I’m able to allow myself to believe happened here.  And, as with everything in the spiritual life, your mileage may vary.  Julia’s experience with the church is quite different from mine, not negative I think, but certainly not carrying the great weight of mystery and love I feel for the place.  I think her response is more representative of most of our group than mine is, and that’s OK.  In fact, that’s part of the richness of it all.

And so we visited it on Wednesday.  Here’s how the day went.  We had the morning free, and Julia and I spent it in the Jewish Quarter visiting two archaeological sites, the Wohl Archaeological Museum and the Burnt House.  The Wohl preserves a neighborhood of mansions thought to have belonged to priestly families during the time of Herod.  The Burnt House is just that–a similar priestly house which was destroyed and burned during the Roman raid on Jerusalem in AD 70 when the Temple was destroyed and the city sacked.  Both had interesting artifacts to see, but the Burnt House includes an imaginative video reenactment of the life of the family that might have lived there which, though a bit low-budget in the acting department, brought to life the tensions among classes, Jews of different political persuasions, and of course the Roman occupiers of the time in a heart-wrenching way (it won’t give much away for me to tell you the family ends up killed in the Roman assault).  What struck me even more was the spin the video offered on today’s situation.  “In 1968, the Israeli Defense Force liberated the Jewish Quarter.  Today, Jewish children are again playing in the streets of Jerusalem in safety …” etc.  The  upshot was very much a “never again” advocacy of military might as a way of ensuring safety and peace.  I’m growing used to being ambivalent about so much of what I experience here, and I can rejoice in the emergence of an Israeli life and culture, the Hebrew language, the Jewish people of many backgrounds coming together in a homeland, and so much else about the state of Israel.  And yet I’m also so conscious of Palestinians who feel very much like the Jews of AD 70 and see Israel as today’s Rome, who feel that their own children can’t play in the streets in prosperity or safety because of their own occupying power, and some of whom hope to see victory through violence of their own.

I found George Carlin’s quote about fighting for peace running through my head after the visit.  (Google it if you don’t know it–R-rated warning.)

J and I walked back to the College with a stop at the Austrian Hospice, an amazing Viennese-style pilgrim house with a fabulous cafe and lovely rooftop views of the Old City, reached by an unimposing-looking gate in the most crowded part of the Muslim Quarter.  After lunch, our group set out for the Resurrection, in the company of the Rev. Canon John Peterson.  John is currently associated with the National Cathedral in Washington and was formerly the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.  He was also the previous Dean of St. George’s College, so he’s been around Jerusalem a time or two.  With Dean Stephen Need still unavailable with a nasty virus, John was asked to lead our trip, and stepped up to the challenge in style, giving us a thorough tour.

The visit was, for me, wonderful.  We began with a stop in the Ethiopian chapel; it belongs to the very poor monastic community of the Ethiopian church attached to the complex.  We then entered the church proper.  We ascended to the twin chapels built on top of Golgotha (one Latin, one Greek; the Latin one commemorates Jesus’ being nailed to the cross, while the Greek marks the site believed to be that of the crucifixion itself) and were able to touch the rocky surface through an opening under the altar in the Greek chapel.  The bedrock is also visible from the Chapel of Adam, which is directly beneath the chapel of Golgotha.

After the stop at Golgotha, we turned right and went down to the Armenian-administered Chapel of St. Helena, located in what was the crypt of the Constantinian basilica.  This chapel is already well below the level of the main church, but a second staircase leads even further down to the cistern which is now the Chapel of the Finding of the True Cross.  We were surprised by a solemn evensong service in progress down there which blocked our ability to enter.  As it turns out, our timing was impeccable–it was the eve of the Feast of the Finding of the True Cross, and the Latins were in the midst of a major celebration in the eponymous chapel which culminated in a procession around the entire church.

After we saw much of the rest of the building, we finally arrived at the rotunda of the edicule itself.  The edicule is frankly a rather weird-looking building, dating from the 1800’s when it was last renovated, and it is in a terrible state of disrepair, held together by metal scaffolding until the four major communities agree on a plan to renovate it again.  (To their credit, over the past couple of decades much of the rest of the church has been restored quite wonderfully, with new mosaics on previously dilapidated walls, and the glass windows showing the rock of Golgotha uncovered where they had been previously blocked.)  Still, ugly or beautiful, weird or not, it’s the most sacred site in Christian pilgrimage, and it was a thrilling moment to lay eyes on it for the first time.

We ended up laying eyes on it for quite a while, as the Latin procession arrived while we were making our way past the edicule and we had to stop in the midst of a massive throng while they circumnambulated it three times, with full songs and prayers.  It was both fascinating and beautiful for me to watch, though it made life tougher as we tried to get where we were going.

Where we were going was one of the most wonderful places in the entire church: the chapel of St. Nicodemus, located at the end of the Rotunda, on the far side of the edicule.  This chapel is owned by the Armenians, but not having enough clergy to staff it, they haven’t restored it in what looks like forever.  They do allow the even poorer Syrian Orthodox church to use it, though.  So each week the Syrian Orthodox Christians bring in linens, vestments, candles, and everything else and celebrate their liturgy in the midst of what looks like a bombed-out space with a poor falling-apart wooden altar.  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a functioning liturgical space that looks this dilapidated, and it’s a poignant place in the midst of Christianity’s most glorious monument.  But that’s not all.  In the side wall of this chapel is an opening big enough for two or three people to go in.  The opening proves to be the antechamber for a series of kokh tombs–the tombs of the first century, the rolling-stone tomb of the time of Jesus.  There are at least five of them opening off the antechamber; three are bricked up, and two are open and empty.  Tradition has identified these as the tombs of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, the righteous men who help bury Jesus in John’s gospel.  What they indisputably prove is that this site was in use as a burial site in the time of Jesus.  It is not difficult at all to imagine a catacomb of similar tombs stretching from here the few yards over to the site of the edicule.  To step from the beautiful, ill-treated liturgical space of the Syrian Orthodox into this antechamber is an experience of awe.

After visiting the chapel and the tombs, we continued to the other side of the edicule, where Cn. Peterson regaled us with stories of the annual Easter ceremony of the Holy Fire.  You can read about this with any quick Google search, so I won’t describe it in this already-novel-length post, but it must be a pretty remarkable thing to experience, to say the least.

I freely admit I haven’t had enough time in the Anastasis yet to suit me.  I’m getting up early tomorrow and going in, hoping to be able to enter the edicule before the line is too tremendous, and to make my own visit to the tomb, something we didn’t do on Wednesday.  We will see.

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Here are the photos to accompany J’s commentary on our day of exploration today.

The photos from yesterday are up, too–you’ll need to look back before J’s post from today to see my comments about yesterday’s trip to the Temple Mount.

Tomorrow we have a free morning–our first real free time without scheduled activities since the program began!–followed by something I’ve been anticipating with awe: our first visit to the Church of the Resurrection.

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We talked to a real, live resident of the city of Jerusalem today. Did you know that there are people other than tourists in the Holy land? Oh yes! They live here, some of them right within the old city. And we found one to talk to. It was our assignment today.

Actually, I could imagine Stephen giving this same kind of assignment to a group of kids on a mission trip. All the adults in the course were split into nine teams of four, and we were assigned a certain quarter of the old city – Jewish, Christian, Armenian, or Muslim – to explore. But not a sort of namby-pamby, wander around a couple of streets and then go back to the college for a cup of coffee and a nap kind of exploration. No no, we had questions to answer, and at the end of the day we had to report back to the rest of our group what our experiences had been. A sort of Holy land scavenger hunt, if you will.

I’ll drop the sarcasm, because it was actually a pretty cool way to get to know a quarter of the city we had never been in before. Our team happened to get assigned the Armenian quarter, which was fabulous because it was the quarter I knew least about, and also the people I knew least about. In fact, in reading about the quarters beforehand, I couldn’t figure out why the Armenians had an entire quarter all to themselves in the old city. I mean, it seemed like a pretty niche group.

In brief, our assigned questions were as follows: we were to map out the perimeters of our quarter, and determine whether these were clear or fuzzy boundaries between ours and others’ quarters. We should find a high point from which to observe our quarter, and make notes about prominent observations from there. We should make some observations about the residents; could we tell their religious or ethnic identity very easily? Was there a mix or was it homogenous? We needed to find the major religious shrine in the district, and then try to find another type of religious shrine in the same area and visit it. We should bring back a small token that we felt was representative of our quarter. And, finally, we should TALK TO A RESIDENT. Not a tourist, a resident. The college staff made this very clear. So no shooting the breeze with some pilgrim group from Sweden.

You all know me rather well, I should think, so you have probably guessed that this last part was NOT something I particularly wanted to do. Converse with a stranger, explain that I was on this weird exploration journey with a bunch of other American tourists, and ask them random questions about how life in their quarter was going? No thanks. But fortunately, Stephen and I were paired with another couple, one member of which had a particular talent for striking up just such random conversations with complete unabashedness, and doing so in a disarming-enough manner that the abruptness of our curiosity didn’t seem quite so intrusive. And if we had done it my way (the silent, invisible way), we would have definitely missed out on the most interesting part of the afternoon. This is where we meet John.

It’s funny how meeting just a few people who actually live in a place can do the most to turn your image of that place from a historical, spiritual fantasy-land into a – well, a place where people live. Of course we all know to some degree or other the tensions that exist in Jerusalem, and the political difficulties, and all this. But to talk to someone who makes it their home…much, much more valuable. Now all that vague talking/reading/studying materializes into a context of real life.

John is the very friendly shopkeeper that we met in the Armenian quarter, after we had observed the quarter from the city wall ramparts, and had pretty well paced out the perimeter. We actually stopped into a small grocery store before that, and the nice young man there – who seemed a little befuddled by the questions but was perfectly friendly – told us that we ought to go see his friend, and that if he had a few minutes he could tell us a lot about the history of the place. We told John who had sent us, so he can go yell at his friend later =). But did he have a minute? John had almost an hour to answer question after question for our group. He was in the middle of painting when we came in – he is an artist – but cordially set aside his work when we tumbled into his shop and cheerfully asked us what we wanted to know.

I asked about the history of the Armenian quarter. Apparently, the Armenians have their own quarter here because they have been in Jerusalem basically uninterrupted from the 300’s. They were the first country to convert en masse to Christianity (beating the Roman Empire by a couple decades) and Armenian pilgrims soon came flowing into Jerusalem. And so by virtue of being there they carved out a section of the old city for themselves, and have stayed for the last 2000 years. Their ranks in Jerusalem swelled somewhat in 1915 when the Turks enacted a massive genocide on Armenians in the Turkey/Armenia region, but unfortunately their population here has been in serious decline since then, mostly due to emigration out of the city. John explained that the Armenian Christians have remained where they are by not really taking sides, not yelling too loud, but keeping their heads down and quietly going about their business in a city and a land fraught with conflict. He feels that they have fairly cordial relations with the other faiths in the city; a sort of “you don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you” mentality. But they are suffering a shrinkage in their numbers, and there is a danger of disappearing altogether. Apparently there used to be 100 Armenian convents in the Holy land, and now there are fewer than 10. The entire population of the quarter numbers only about 500 residents.

Next, after this awesome history lesson, John essentially took off time from his workday and volunteered to personally escort us around the grounds of the Armenian church and convent, which were just across the street. This was an outstanding offer from our point of view, because the whole quarter itself was pretty sleepy, and we felt like we weren’t going to learn a whole lot by just wandering around. And of course, we couldn’t go into the convent compound without a guide. But John spontaneously offered to be our tour guide, and tell us about the building and its inhabitants. Can you imagine anyone in America greeting foreign strangers off the street, entertaining questions for twenty minutes, and then inviting them on a private tour of, say, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco? This is true friendly hospitality, taking precedence over maximum productivity. We could learn something here.

Then we learned why the rest of the quarter seemed so sleepy. Many of the Armenians lived right in the convent compound itself. They are allowed to live there rent-free, and the complex has a health clinic, a library, and a school as well as the church. The Armenian church had the clever idea a while back to buy up a whole bunch of property around Jerusalem, and now they make a tidy sum from rental fees. So they can afford to upkeep the compound without the benefit of rent from their people. John explained that this church feels a responsibility to care for its own.

Standing in the pleasant courtyard between the school and the library, we learned a little more about what John thinks about living in Jerusalem. He actually lived in North America for a few years, which is probably why his English is so excellent, but says he cannot imagine living anywhere other than Jerusalem despite the difficulties that the city has. And he has certainly experienced some of these firsthand. For example, because he lives in what was part of Jordanian lands before 1967 (that is, East Jerusalem, to the East of the green line), his ID card is issued from an office that identifies his residence as “Jerusalem – East”. This apparently makes him suspicious as a possible Arab in the eyes of anyone who looks at it, despite the fact that he has no Arab roots and all, and is a native of Jerusalem, born and raised there. There is so much baggage that hangs on ethnic identity and where one lives, that even that suggestion is enough to cause difficulties; different treatment, maybe, or some tougher security screenings. In John’s words, “The government is happy to talk about ‘Jerusalem as an undivided city once again’ when it suits them, and when it doesn’t, then it’s ‘Jerusalem West’ and ‘Jerusalem East.’”

Although John imagines he will always stay here, he would like his children to be educated overseas. They attended the Armenian school for awhile, but then he chose to send them somewhere where they would have more exposure to the vast array of different people that call this city home. Their current school hosts Christians, Arabs, Muslims, Israelis…certainly more diverse than where they were before. This gives me great hope, that this man wants his children to understand that the world is not a homogenous secluded quarter where everyone speaks the same language and worships at the same church. “They learn about being Armenian from me”, he said. “I want them to learn about the world.” Developing understanding through shared experiences – like school, for example – is the first step in moving towards tolerance, and discussion of conflict rather than violent acting-out of one’s passions.

I am so grateful that we met this man, that he treated us so graciously and taught us so much, and that he is raising a family that will hopefully contribute to a prospering, more peaceful, society. I feel great sadness for the difficulties that he faces living among people that distrust each other, so that even though cordiality exists on the surface, suspicion is quick to surface at the slightest hint that something might be threatening.

John certainly exemplified Christian hospitality to us today, and helped strip away a little more of my confusion about the situation here. Each story, each face, makes the picture a little clearer. It is not a pretty or a hopeful one right now, but because it is made up of people like John, perhaps there is hope that at some point, they will look each other in the face and listen to the stories from the Other.

Yesterday was spent on and around the holiest site on earth for one faith, the third-holiest for another, and a significantly fraught one for a third. For the first time, we ascended to the top of what is called Haram esh-Sharif (Arabic: the Noble Sanctuary) by its custodians, the Muslim Waqf. Of course, it is called the Temple Mount by many others. And therein lies the holiness, and the tension.

The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem’s signature architectural jewel, was constructed in the late 600’s atop what had been the site of the Jewish Temple until its destruction by the Romans in AD 70 after a Jewish revolt. The Temple site lay in ruins for half a millennium under first a Roman pagan, then a Roman/Byzantine Christian regime. When Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem for the Muslim empire, he ordered the sacred mount to be cleared and a house of prayer built there. Within a few decades, the site was occupied by the Dome of the Rock on the central platform and the Al-Aqsa mosque on the southern end.

Much earlier, the mount was the holiest and central site in Israelite/Jewish religion, with two different incarnations of the Temple standing there at different periods. It is where Jesus taught and where Jews made pilgrimage and sacrifice. The Western Wall which Jews now venerate is a remnant of the Second Temple-era retaining wall. The Temple Mount itself is banned to Orthodox Jews because the ground is too sacred–since no one knows exactly where the Holy of Holies was located on the mount, it’s forbidden to risk treading on it. (Secular or less-rigorous Jews may visit the Mount freely.)

The aura there is one of powerful weight. Holiness, mixed with tension, I would say–except to the grade-school age kids in the Muslim schools lining the northern edge, for whom every day is just a regular day of whiteboards and soccer and shouting and lining up, even if it’s in the shadow of this most fraught and solemn place.

We spent the rest of the day visiting the archaeological dig at St. Anne’s church in the Muslim Quarter, which houses the excavation site of Bethesda–the pool where Jesus heals a paralytic man in John 5. When archaeologists discovered the five-grottoed pool, matching the description in John quite closely, it revolutionized many scholars’ view of the gospel of John, which had previously been thought to contain little in the way of actual geographical knowledge of Palestine. We also sang a couple of hymns inside the stunning acoustic of St. Anne’s, which is open for pilgrim groups to sing as well as visit the reputed birthplace of the holy Virgin (the Greek Orthodox have a competing birthplace next door).

We finished the activities of yesterday with a visit to the Western Wall, which Julia and I had seen for the first time last week, and then to the archaeological park at the southwest corner of the Temple Mount (but at the base, and firmly ensconced in the Jewish Quarter–a cultural and religious universe away from the utterly Muslim environment 20 feet away and 200 feet straight up). Here a first-century street is preserved, still buckled under the weight of the colossal stones hurled to the ground when Roman soldiers destroyed the Temple in AD 70. I’ve seen many moving sights in Jerusalem–too many to name or even begin to rank. But this was among the deepest.

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Julia has shared some reflections already and it’s late, so I won’t write an extended reflection tonight. Oh, to be able to put down on, well, not paper but screen, all the things that actually go through my head on a trip like this! But at the very least I want to share where we’ve actually been. So, what follows is an unromantic but hopefully-helpful quick rundown.

Thursday (April 30)

Left Jerusalem in the morning for Caesarea Maritima, Herod the Great’s coastal capital and shining Gentile-style city by the sea, the St. Petersburg of Herod’s Russia (um, that analogy will only make sense to people who have been to Russia, sorry). In the afternoon after an amazing visit to Caesarea we drove up to Nazareth and visited both the Basilica of the Annunciation and the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Gabriel which is located on Mary’s Spring, the natural water source which has fed Nazareth from ancient times to now.

Friday (May 1)

This was the Sea of Galilee day. Our first stop was the Church of the Beatitudes, a beautiful garden setting with a chapel high on a hillside overlooking the lake itself. This is in Tabgha, an area with seven ancient springs (Greek: Heptatapegon, Arabic: Et-Tabgha) where a cluster of churches commemorate events in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. Afterward we visited the ruins of the town of Capernaum, Jesus’ base of operations. There is a large Latin church (20th-century) built poised directly over the ruins of a “Holy House” traditionally identified as Peter’s house. This one actually has some serious claims to authenticity, because the room in question shows signs of having been used exclusively for worship (oil lamps, graffiti of pilgrims naming Peter and Jesus, etc.) dating back close to the first century. Capernaum also has a striking fourth- or fifth-century synagogue which may have been built on the site of the synagogue of Jesus’ time where he preaches in the gospel accounts. Next we drove down to the lakeside and celebrated the Eucharist at an outdoor complex run by a Catholic order of monks on the grounds of the Church of the Primacy of Peter–commemorating the resurrection-appearance story in John 21 where Jesus appears to the disciples in the early morning after they’ve been out fishing, gives them a miraculously huge catch of fish, cooks them a bread-and-fish breakfast, and rehabilitates Peter after his denial. I got to preside at the Eucharist, a tremendous experience, and afterward we all spent some time splashing and wading at the lakeshore. Twenty centuries of time passing changes buildings, streets, trees, and almost everything–but the sea is still the same as it was then, and contemplating that story in that place felt incredibly easy. We visited a third Tabgha church, the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, which has a famous and beautiful fifth-century mosaic of bread and fish in front of the altar, and had some quiet reflection time in another nearby garden retreat center before heading back to Nazareth.

Saturday (May 2)

In the morning we drove northeast through the Upper Galilee and into the (disputed/occupied) Golan Heights area to visit Banias, the modern Arabic name for the Gentile town that was once called both Paneas and Caesarea Philippi. It’s the scene of Peter’s identification of Jesus as the Messiah, which Jesus praises (and, in Matthew’s gospel, confers the name “Peter,” or rock, on him and says he will build his church on Peter) but then goes on to stun his disciples by telling them that what it means to be the Messiah will be to suffer an unjust condemnation and execution. What I had never known is that it was a major site of devotion to the Gentile god Pan (the one with the pipes and the half-goat body), as well as the major source of the river Jordan. Check out the pictures of the stunning springs. Returning back to the Lower Galilee area (a distance of no more than 45 minutes’ drive–distances here are amazingly short, yet the terrain changes as much as the states of California, Nevada, and Arizona put together) we visited Kibbutz Ginosar, the site of a museum containing an amazingly preserved first-century fishermen’s boat discovered in the mud a few decades ago. We then took a boat ride of our own across part of the Sea of Galilee, ending at the town of Tiberias for lunch.

In the afternoon we visited the Jordan River just as it leaves the Sea of Galilee to the south at a site called Yardenit, a huge baptismal complex. The place is, well, rather cheesy and Disneyfied. Hundreds of people get baptized here every day, and there’s a significant fundamentalist vibe to its ecumenism. The exit is, yes, through a gift shop, and you can get a frameable “I got baptized in the River Jordan” certificate. Nonetheless, it was moving despite all the silliness to stand in the river as a group and go through the prayer book’s rite of renewal of baptismal vows and have our chaplain Lois sprinkle us with the water of the river itself. One of our group members actually went through a more extensive renewal of his baptismal vows and was immersed in the river by another member, a priest, who had agreed to lead it.

That night we had a tremendous experience back at the convent as we visited an archaeological site located directly under the Sisters of Nazareth guesthouse where we were staying. Discovered by the sisters in the late 1800’s as they built their house, it contains one of only seven known first-century rock-cut tombs of the kind wealthy people used–the kind of tomb described in the burial accounts of Jesus in all four gospels. It actually has a rolling stone, still intact. There is some speculation, not totally ungrounded, linking the tomb with Joseph, the father of Jesus–but things like that can only be speculation. What’s known is that there was a Byzantine church constructed directly over the tomb; the seated remains of a bishop were discovered in the church. Later the Crusaders also built a church on the same site. When the sisters built their convent they were told the piece of land they were buying contained the tomb of “a just man.” It’s remarkable how oral tradition can preserve things.

Sunday (May 3)

We left early after an even earlier Sunday morning eucharist at the convent and visited the gorgeous Church of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, one of the traditional possible sites for the transfiguration story (another is Mount Hermon, the much higher peak located near Banias in the Golan Heights). We then drove east and south through the West Bank, going through a checkpoint with no difficulty on the way down, taking the Israeli highway which parallels the Jordan River (and the border with Jordan). Jericho, our destination, is an oasis city which is considered the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. We had lunch and toured the tell, an ancient mound containing layer upon layer of civilization (and destruction). The city itself, under Palestinian Authority administration, is beautiful but tangibly economically depressed.

On the way back to Jerusalem, as J mentioned, we had a bus breakdown and waited 30 minutes for a replacement to be sent from Jerusalem. Not much but a hiccup in today’s modern world, but the forbidding desert of the Judean Hills made the story of the Good Samaritan come alive in a way it never had before. An amazing change from the lush green of Galilee.

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