And so the pilgrimage began to unfold.
Utterly unexpected.
Blessings where I'd predicted nothing but a tourist circus, disappointment in spots that I had been certain would be deep in holiness.
Thankfulness every single day.
On that first day, like pretty much every other pilgrim, we stood on the Mount of Olives and looked across the valley seeing history, faith, culture compacted together into indissoluble layers which it will take a life-time to understand. Shining golden domes and towers. Ancient stones rediscovered, sometimes "enhanced" but always significant.
The serried ranks of the dead in the Jewish cemetery that spreads over the hillside, - ensuring, apparently, poll position for their occupants, come Judgement day. This is my first encounter with the power of stones...a theme that was to become very much part of my experience. I wonder about the people each stone represents...how many years these memorials have endured...Most memorials have their own pile of smaller stones, marking a visit to honour the dead.They lived and loved, Did they know that they would be included among the company of those who would lie within plain sight of the Holy City? Did that gladden their hearts on departure? And that today it is the cumulative impact of their memorials that was truly significant. "So many. I did not know death had undone so many"
Down the hill, along the Palm Sunday route. Hard to imagine a joyous crowd gathering along this way, though the observation of our guide that given the sheer and slippery path, it would make good sense to cover the stones with cloaks, to give donkeys a wee bit of purchase for their hooves. I'm intrigued and delighted to be here, but have no sense of the sacred here...nor, to my sorrow, in Gethsemane. It is so SMALL! Even allowing for the ground that is now covered by the Church of All Nations, surely this space is too small to accommodate such intensity. I wonder why this was Christ's safe space. It wasn't the spacious, peaceful haven I had imagined, with quiet corners behind many a tree...yet here Jesus wrestled and came to terms with the huge reality of his calling. I had hoped to stroke the olive trunks, to whisper something of my own hopes and fears among their branches...but this, though beautiful, was tidy, even regimented...a perspective from afterwards, with nothing of the darkness and terror of Maundy Thursday.
The church was filled with a joyful crowd of Nigerian pilgrims whom we were to encounter again and again over the next few days. Mass was just beginning as we were shephereded away, - my first taste of a vague wistfulness that accompanied me around the city.Travelling with a group of not-yet-friends, there was often a sense of looking through the windows of the spiritual homes of others, watching their party from outside, hoping, perhaps, for an invitation.
Jerusalem is a place that calls forth the most visible expressions of spiritual allegiance, from ringlets and skull caps to cassocks, monastic habits and the amazing headgear of Orthodox priests...It is a place where it became very important to me to practice embodied prayer, as again and again the thought that this, THIS was the space inspired genuflection, though I longed, often, to stay kneeling, pause in that space where prayer had been valid.
Leaving Gethsemane, we find ourselves, (after the first of an apparently endless succession of the most wonderful salad selections) on the other side of the valley, looking at the place where we had previously been standing. We are on the site of the house of Caiaphas and Annas, a church now marking the spot...but downstairs is an ancient prison cell. Was this where Christ was held that night? This the place where Peter denied his master and heard the dawn heralded by an uncaring, oblivious cockerel? Layers of history weigh me down. Maybe this was the place, this the moment when fear and faith collided for Peter and mid the multi-lingual comings and goings of a public space at festival time. For us too, the church of St Peter in Gallicantu is awash with different voices, competing in their prayers and exclamations, with the call of the muezzin summoning the faithful drifting over all. It's bewildering, unsettling - until suddenly, we are brought up short by a flight of steps. Steps positively dated as 1st centure. Steps leading up Mount Zion from across the valley. The only route that would make sense for soldiers bringing a man arrested in Gethsemane, among the olives. Steps that Jesus walked on. God, with a weary human body, dragging his aching human feet up the hill just a few inches from where I stood.
Time stopped for me, as it surely did for Peter, when he caught his Master's eye amid the crowd as the cock crowed.
Jesus looked at me.
I looked at Jesus.
The world held its breath.
Utterly unexpected.
Blessings where I'd predicted nothing but a tourist circus, disappointment in spots that I had been certain would be deep in holiness.
Thankfulness every single day.
On that first day, like pretty much every other pilgrim, we stood on the Mount of Olives and looked across the valley seeing history, faith, culture compacted together into indissoluble layers which it will take a life-time to understand. Shining golden domes and towers. Ancient stones rediscovered, sometimes "enhanced" but always significant.The serried ranks of the dead in the Jewish cemetery that spreads over the hillside, - ensuring, apparently, poll position for their occupants, come Judgement day. This is my first encounter with the power of stones...a theme that was to become very much part of my experience. I wonder about the people each stone represents...how many years these memorials have endured...Most memorials have their own pile of smaller stones, marking a visit to honour the dead.They lived and loved, Did they know that they would be included among the company of those who would lie within plain sight of the Holy City? Did that gladden their hearts on departure? And that today it is the cumulative impact of their memorials that was truly significant. "So many. I did not know death had undone so many"
The church was filled with a joyful crowd of Nigerian pilgrims whom we were to encounter again and again over the next few days. Mass was just beginning as we were shephereded away, - my first taste of a vague wistfulness that accompanied me around the city.Travelling with a group of not-yet-friends, there was often a sense of looking through the windows of the spiritual homes of others, watching their party from outside, hoping, perhaps, for an invitation.
Jerusalem is a place that calls forth the most visible expressions of spiritual allegiance, from ringlets and skull caps to cassocks, monastic habits and the amazing headgear of Orthodox priests...It is a place where it became very important to me to practice embodied prayer, as again and again the thought that this, THIS was the space inspired genuflection, though I longed, often, to stay kneeling, pause in that space where prayer had been valid.
Leaving Gethsemane, we find ourselves, (after the first of an apparently endless succession of the most wonderful salad selections) on the other side of the valley, looking at the place where we had previously been standing. We are on the site of the house of Caiaphas and Annas, a church now marking the spot...but downstairs is an ancient prison cell. Was this where Christ was held that night? This the place where Peter denied his master and heard the dawn heralded by an uncaring, oblivious cockerel? Layers of history weigh me down. Maybe this was the place, this the moment when fear and faith collided for Peter and mid the multi-lingual comings and goings of a public space at festival time. For us too, the church of St Peter in Gallicantu is awash with different voices, competing in their prayers and exclamations, with the call of the muezzin summoning the faithful drifting over all. It's bewildering, unsettling - until suddenly, we are brought up short by a flight of steps. Steps positively dated as 1st centure. Steps leading up Mount Zion from across the valley. The only route that would make sense for soldiers bringing a man arrested in Gethsemane, among the olives. Steps that Jesus walked on. God, with a weary human body, dragging his aching human feet up the hill just a few inches from where I stood.
Time stopped for me, as it surely did for Peter, when he caught his Master's eye amid the crowd as the cock crowed.
Jesus looked at me.
I looked at Jesus.
The world held its breath.
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