Bethesda...on a beautiful morning, with blue skies and warm sunshine, so easy to imagine the waiting invalids, hoping that today the waters would be stirred and healing come. The depths of the cistern suddenly makes sense of the reluctance of the paralysed man to risk those depths without help...
This feels like the place to pray for some friends who are dealing with tough health issues...and later I leave their names pushed into a crevice in the wall in the house where, maybe, - just maybe, Our Lady spent her early years. We try the glorious acoustic of the church of St Ann, our polite English voices turning out to be in no way a disappointment after the joyous exuberance of our Nigerian friends who have sung and danced in full gospel delight immediately before us, then in the silence go down to the 1st century house where Joachim and Ann could perhaps have made their home (this travelling down in to the past is a recurrent motif of the journey. Layers of history, hopes, fears and memories pressed The truth is actually deeply irrelevant. The prayers of generations of pilgrims have hallowed the place and I find myself deep in conversation with the Mother of God, my rosary settling comfortably into my hand where it remained almost throughout the pilgrimage.
I ask the elderly Franciscan on duty in the church for a blessing on the rosary - and he blesses not only the beads but the pilgrim. Out into the sunshine in a state of quiet joy...It's my turn to follow the Via Dolorosa.
Even in this off season, when again and we are repeatedly told that the city is "very quiet", it's hard to find the narrow thread of prayer, to follow it through the narrow alleys and up the acieht steps between the shops and food stalls, the purveyors of holy tat and pomegranate juice. Cats dart ahead of us into the shadows. They must have been there then...
Our journey is heavy on history, light on the sacred silence I crave, but nonetheless it brings us to the place we need to be, to the heart of everything, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where death and resurrection rub shoulders amid the competing worship of a fractured Church.
Somehow, despite all the hubbub and the anxiety of Dahoud, our guide, who is determined that we will make the most of every opportunity to take short cuts, see all that we need in record time, this is the place where everything makes sense. I kneel to kiss the "Stone of Anointing", - blessed by the love of so many pilgrims, their prayers blending with the sweet oils that are rubbed into the stone day by day in remembrance of the precious Body that almost certainly was never prepared for burial there...I join a queue, snaking around the sepulchre, passing the Orthodox Chapel with its holy icon...candles kindling warmth and drawing me briefly into loving contact with the face of Christ...then it's my turn to bend and enter the tomb, to fall to my knees and kiss the place where Jesus lay for three days before rising to change the world forever. I close my eyes, laying my head on the marble slab that protects the tomb itself...and feel the weight of prayer almost overpowering me. In that loving darkness the presence of crowds is irrelevant, the truth of history unimportant. I am at the heart of the Christian journey, the place where love and hope triumph always, and that love overwhelms me too.
Appropriately enough, that was Friday.
On Sunday, while it was yet dark, we women returned to the tomb. We were promised that things would "feel different" when the Church was only open to worshippers. Covering my head I knelt at the back as a Franciscan priest chanted Latin Mass within the Sepulchre itself..the place so changed by the absence of crowds and queues that it took me a little while to re-orientate myself. He was, incredibly, saying those words, praying that prayer in the place where Christ's Body had lain. Oh my!
Around me the sounds of other liturgies swirl, the bells on the thurible marking the route of Armenian monks censing the holy places as they do regularly throughout the day. We chant the Lord's Prayer together, the Agnus Dei, "Dominus non dignat..." "Lord, I am not worthy" and this is not my branch of the family - yet when I reach the front of the queue and bow my head for a blessing, the priest lifts my chin and places the host on my tongue.
Brokenness, human mess and muddle, and God's risen life all miraculously present in a moment of unexpected grace.
I kneel in my place again, Mass ends and within seconds the space is cleared, the clergy, stripped of vestments, taking lectern, candles, Missal away to replace them with the metal barriers that will later keep jostling pilgrims at bay. It's like the stripping of the altars on Maundy Thursday, but at double speed...Maybe that's how it is here. Each Mass the Triduum in minature...Would it be greedy to have another moment of Easter? The queue is so short, and God knows, I have plenty of work to do on my knees there.
This time, I keep my eyes open for long enough to allow the golden letters over the stone to burn themselves onto my heart.
"Anesti"
He is risen.
Not all the madness of a broken Church, intent on masking the truth it exists to proclaim by wrapping it in layers of ritual reverence can for one moment disrupt the work of Resurrection.
I walk back alone through a city full of golden beauty.
On my Ember card 15 years ago I included words whose truth hits me all over again now
"One thing have I desired of the Lord. This is what I seek. That I might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his Temple".
Please can I stay here?
This feels like the place to pray for some friends who are dealing with tough health issues...and later I leave their names pushed into a crevice in the wall in the house where, maybe, - just maybe, Our Lady spent her early years. We try the glorious acoustic of the church of St Ann, our polite English voices turning out to be in no way a disappointment after the joyous exuberance of our Nigerian friends who have sung and danced in full gospel delight immediately before us, then in the silence go down to the 1st century house where Joachim and Ann could perhaps have made their home (this travelling down in to the past is a recurrent motif of the journey. Layers of history, hopes, fears and memories pressed The truth is actually deeply irrelevant. The prayers of generations of pilgrims have hallowed the place and I find myself deep in conversation with the Mother of God, my rosary settling comfortably into my hand where it remained almost throughout the pilgrimage.I ask the elderly Franciscan on duty in the church for a blessing on the rosary - and he blesses not only the beads but the pilgrim. Out into the sunshine in a state of quiet joy...It's my turn to follow the Via Dolorosa.
Even in this off season, when again and we are repeatedly told that the city is "very quiet", it's hard to find the narrow thread of prayer, to follow it through the narrow alleys and up the acieht steps between the shops and food stalls, the purveyors of holy tat and pomegranate juice. Cats dart ahead of us into the shadows. They must have been there then...
Our journey is heavy on history, light on the sacred silence I crave, but nonetheless it brings us to the place we need to be, to the heart of everything, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where death and resurrection rub shoulders amid the competing worship of a fractured Church. Somehow, despite all the hubbub and the anxiety of Dahoud, our guide, who is determined that we will make the most of every opportunity to take short cuts, see all that we need in record time, this is the place where everything makes sense. I kneel to kiss the "Stone of Anointing", - blessed by the love of so many pilgrims, their prayers blending with the sweet oils that are rubbed into the stone day by day in remembrance of the precious Body that almost certainly was never prepared for burial there...I join a queue, snaking around the sepulchre, passing the Orthodox Chapel with its holy icon...candles kindling warmth and drawing me briefly into loving contact with the face of Christ...then it's my turn to bend and enter the tomb, to fall to my knees and kiss the place where Jesus lay for three days before rising to change the world forever. I close my eyes, laying my head on the marble slab that protects the tomb itself...and feel the weight of prayer almost overpowering me. In that loving darkness the presence of crowds is irrelevant, the truth of history unimportant. I am at the heart of the Christian journey, the place where love and hope triumph always, and that love overwhelms me too.
Appropriately enough, that was Friday.
On Sunday, while it was yet dark, we women returned to the tomb. We were promised that things would "feel different" when the Church was only open to worshippers. Covering my head I knelt at the back as a Franciscan priest chanted Latin Mass within the Sepulchre itself..the place so changed by the absence of crowds and queues that it took me a little while to re-orientate myself. He was, incredibly, saying those words, praying that prayer in the place where Christ's Body had lain. Oh my!
Around me the sounds of other liturgies swirl, the bells on the thurible marking the route of Armenian monks censing the holy places as they do regularly throughout the day. We chant the Lord's Prayer together, the Agnus Dei, "Dominus non dignat..." "Lord, I am not worthy" and this is not my branch of the family - yet when I reach the front of the queue and bow my head for a blessing, the priest lifts my chin and places the host on my tongue.
Brokenness, human mess and muddle, and God's risen life all miraculously present in a moment of unexpected grace.
I kneel in my place again, Mass ends and within seconds the space is cleared, the clergy, stripped of vestments, taking lectern, candles, Missal away to replace them with the metal barriers that will later keep jostling pilgrims at bay. It's like the stripping of the altars on Maundy Thursday, but at double speed...Maybe that's how it is here. Each Mass the Triduum in minature...Would it be greedy to have another moment of Easter? The queue is so short, and God knows, I have plenty of work to do on my knees there.
This time, I keep my eyes open for long enough to allow the golden letters over the stone to burn themselves onto my heart.
"Anesti"
He is risen.
Not all the madness of a broken Church, intent on masking the truth it exists to proclaim by wrapping it in layers of ritual reverence can for one moment disrupt the work of Resurrection.
I walk back alone through a city full of golden beauty.
On my Ember card 15 years ago I included words whose truth hits me all over again now
"One thing have I desired of the Lord. This is what I seek. That I might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his Temple".
Please can I stay here?
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