When Fergus Encounters Richard Again

Rev. Fergus Clarke, an Ireland-born Franciscan priest, was pastor at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Placentia, California, where he became fast friends with Charlie Frazee, my seminary church history professor and a longtime St. Joseph's lector and teacher. Around that time, Fergus felt called to the Franciscans' traditional ministry of caring for Christian sites in Israel and the West Bank. These days he's the ranking Roman Catholic at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where millions line up every year to kneel in the tiny chapel built several meters above what remains of Jesus's tomb. Thanks to Charlie's good offices, when St. John's folk are in the Holy Land they get Fr. Fergus's generous behind-the-scenes tour of the world's holiest church.

Last Friday, as we stood in the friars' spare kitchen and dining room at the beginning of an astonishing two hours, Fergus pointed at a doorway behind a refrigerator. "I'm bringing you here not because our refectory and kitchen are much to look at but because they are built in the same area where, in the middle of the fourth century, Helena had her quarters," he said. Queen Helena was Constantine the Great's mother. She came to Jerusalem, found what was thought to be Jesus Christ's cross, and resolved to build one of her three churches over Golgotha and Christ's tomb (which most authorities now agree were indeed within sight of each other). "That door was once the window through which Helena would look down on Cyril of Jerusalem as he gave his sermons," Fergus said. Cyril was a great bishop, catechist, and defender of Christian orthodoxy -- heady company when you're having your morning oatmeal.

Fergus's equally riveting accounts of the politics, diplomacy, and intrigue that ensue when Catholics, Copts, Ethiopians, and Greek, Armenian, and Syriac Orthodox make decisions about everything from plumbing to liturgy -- alas, all off the record. I'll risk this much: He said that Catholics have to keep chanting and celebrating in Latin during their beautiful services in the Holy Sepulcher since, if they switch to the vernacular, the other denominations might well claim that the friars no longer represent the Latin church referred to in 19th century and subsequent agreements and try to revoke the Catholics' rights and privileges. Among these is that Fergus and his colleagues (the only clerics who live in the Holy Sepulcher) are locked in every night by the church's Muslim doorkeeper. If that sounds weird, welcome to Jerusalem and a church that brims with mystery, ritual, and periodic controversy.

Fergus insists that the latter's been overblown and overstressed by the media. He says that every family living in close quarters has its bad days and stresses all the things that go smoothly in spite of the six denominations' vast doctrinal differences and centuries of hurt feelings. For instance, Raymond Cohen's Saving the Holy Sepulcher: How Rival Christians Came Together to Rescue Their Holiest Shrine details a half-century-long cooperative effort to restore and rehabilitate the church that kept it from crumbling to dust. What made that work possible, Fergus told us, is the denominations' shared belief in an indispensable first principle. "Bill Clinton was famous for saying 'It's the economy, stupid' in one of his campaigns," Fergus said. "For all of us here, it's the Resurrection, stupid."

Fergus's vocation and infectious passion are themselves signs of Easter power. He's a charming, hospitable, fun-loving man who's willing to get up at two in the morning for the first service of his day, negotiate endlessly with Copts over restroom rights, and submit to being padlocked nightly inside his place of business only because he believes with all his heart in the scandalous reality that Jesus Christ spurned his tomb, walked fully alive into the Jerusalem sunshine, and in doing so destroyed the power of death, sickness, injustice, oppression, and everything else that fiendishly masks the abundant potentiality of our God-drenched lives.

Clinton was Fergus's second presidential reference, by the way. The first was to none other than Richard Nixon. He recalled his visit to Nixon's Yorba Linda gravesite in the 1990s and also 37's comment in July 1969 that two Apollo 11 astronauts' moon walk was the greatest event in the history of humankind. Our host begged to differ, since that event would, of course, have been the Resurrection. I reminded him that pilgrim Kathy (shown here stooping to touch Golgotha) and I had both worked for 37. He actually said the Apollo mission had occurred during "the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation." That's an even more reckless statement, unless you submit to the logic of Nixon's comparison. When the comment became controversial at the time, he said that he'd been naturally drawn to the seven-day (actually six) Creation since Apollo 11 also lasted about a week (actually eight days).

There's also the matter of the Yorba Linda Quaker's lifelong skepticism about the bodily Resurrection of Christ -- about which, I'm sure, Fergus will bring him around in good time, if circumstances and conditions have not done so already.

Last Friday afternoon at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, from left to right: St. John's pilgrims Ed, Kathy, Christian, Shannon, Debbie, Remy, Alexandra, Fr. Michael, and Brenna; Fr. Fergus; pilgrims Allana, Steven, Pastor Lisa, Kathe, Cathy, Jerry, and Bob. Missing: Pilgrims Cindy D., Cindy K., Damian, and John (the photographer)

This version of my post, updated on July 4, includes two corrections graciously provided by Fr. Fergus.

More Rungs On Jacob's Ladder

Even in the digital age, a group of pilgrims in Israel and the West Bank is likely to end up feeling set apart from the world – hermeneutically sealed, you might say. Are those Crusader or Byzantine ruins atop Mt. Tabor in Galilee, or a combination of both (which is usually the right answer)? The cassocked monk who just brushed by us in Jerusalem's old city -- Armenian or Greek Orthodox? Does any of Queen Helena's 4th century building remain in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (yes, or so we were told; the center arch in the photo above)?

It's not that we didn't go on-line. But when we visited Wikipedia, it was to learn more about the history of the Freres Blanc, custodians of St. Anne’s Church and the pools of Bethesda, and to try to figure out which of the eight purported sites of the biblical Emmaus we had actually visited on Saturday morning.

We weren’t totally hermetic in our coenobiticality. News of pastoral crises quickly reached us – two friends’ unplanned hospital visits, another’s home being threatened by fire in Colorado Springs. We also heard in real time about the political firestorm sparked by the Supreme Court's health care opinion. But what I didn't learn until we were en route to LAX (and I opened the new issue of the Economist that had materialized on my Kindle) was that the walls bordering one of the sites we visited last week in Nablus on the West Bank, Jacob’s Well, had recently been shot up, the result of internecine Palestinian tensions.

The incident notwithstanding, I'm glad we didn't skip our Jacob's Well stop, which proved to be a favorite for several of our St. John's pilgrims. Because of Palestinian Authority reforms and improving economic conditions, the West Bank has been peaceful for the last few years. When there is talk these days of a third intifada, or popular uprising, it's about the chances of an armed struggle within the Palestinian movement between Fatah, which is working constructively with Israel, and Hamas, still officially dedicated to Israel's demise:

“There is no political horizon,” say disgruntled Palestinians. They increasingly question the point of the PA. It has failed to usher in a Palestinian state, and appears powerless to prevent Israeli military incursions or the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. “All the windows are closed, and the political elite has no keys to open them,” says Raid Nairat, an academic. The West Bank’s 30,000 security forces seem unkeen on a recent quest for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that would force them to share power. Their recent round-up of 150 Hamas men helped dampen hopes of a deal.

So there are some more roadblocks on the peace highway, more rungs on Jacob's ladder. It's hard to imagine Fatah and Hamas sharing power (until their goals converge), Israel making a deal with just Fatah (since it would reasonably assume that Hamas would undermine it), and Israel making a deal with a united Fatah and Hamas (unless Hamas permanently renounces jihad against Israel). A Palestinian civil war might actually be welcomed by those who think it would take the pressure off Israel to make peace. Better to hope that Hamas will be pulled to the center by its ongoing nation-building work in Gaza and the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt who is fully committed to the peace process.

Divine Polyphony

On Thursday, as the sun set over Jerusalem, we pilgrims gathered on the roof of the Holy Land Hotel for an abbreviated service of evening prayer. "O gracious light," we said, "pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven...Now as we come to the setting of the sun, and our eyes behold the vesper light, we sing your praises..."

But this was Jerusalem, so we weren't praying alone. No one ever is. When the time came for the Lord's Prayer, our voices were blending with those of muezzin calling Muslims to their sunset prayer (7:55 p.m. in Jerusalem, or about ten minutes after our service had begun). I could distinguish at least two chants, and there may have been three. Our hotel in east Jerusalem had three minarets within sight. So we joined hands and joined our voices to those of the muezzin and chanted the Our Father using one of the settings from the Episcopal hymnal.

You could say the moment was holy polyphonic. We weren't arguing or trying to drown out theological competitors. There's more than enough of that in Jerusalem without our adding to the mayhem. Something similar happens every day during scheduled worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where we got a behind-the-scenes tour on Friday afternoon from Rev. Fergus Clarke, one of the Franciscan priests who work with five other denominations -- Greek, Armenian and Syriac Orthodox, Coptic, and Ethiopian -- to operate and care for Christianity's holiest place. Fergus reminded us that his is the only church in the world where denominations worship simultaneously in different languages -- for instance Coptics and Roman (or Latin) Catholics at opposite ends of Christ's tomb, within 20 feet of each other.

I've heard it, and it's beautiful. While agreeing by and large on just one thing -- that in the tomb they preserve and adore, our God in Christ destroyed death and saved the world -- these Christians all worship differently, and so have we on our 10-day pilgrimage.

The Rev. Canon Michael Bamberger (shown here with pilgrims Brenna and Steven Hayden) and I took turns celebrating Holy Eucharist -- Mike on Saturday morning in the ruins of a Crusader church at Emmaus Nicopolis, I a few days earlier on a stone altar overlooking the Sea of Galilee. But when it came to our non-Eucharistic services, we mixed it up considerably, taking turns organizing our pilgrim worship.

One evening Fr. Mike borrowed a moving Compline, or close-of-day, liturgy from our Diocese of Los Angeles colleague Canon Randy Kimler. The next night, pilgrim Christian Kassoff, co-leader of an emergent Christian community in Huntington Beach called Thom's, invited pilgrims to reflect about their first few days in Jerusalem. Christian and his son, Damian, took turns anointing them at the end of the service. I did the honors with the holy oil after the Rev. Lisa Rotchford, knee-deep in the Jordan River, presided at a reaffirmation of our baptismal vows (that's pilgrim Ed Alosio with Pastor Lisa).

It was back to the rooftop when we gathered in Nazareth one evening by the light shining from the cupola of the nearby Basilica of the Annunciation. Another Thom's minister -- Christian's wife and Damian's mother, Shannon -- led us in yoga and guided meditation. During one of my turns, I stretched liturgical propriety even further than yoga instructor Shannon stretched our pilgrim hamstrings when I offered some doggerel to be sung to the tune of "Pray For The Peace Of Jerusalem," which our Galilean friend the Rev. Fuad Dagher taught us at St. John's back in 2010. I hoped to illustrate the pilgrim virtues of patience, flexibility, tolerance, and unity:

When we set out for Tel Aviv
Our departure time was a slidin'
We pilgrims has to sit and wait
The runway was reserved for Joe Biden

Cucumbers and yogurt and olives with pits
Like no breakfast we've ever seen
We knew we weren't in Kansas no more
When we saw that the orange juice was green

Muslims and Jews, Christian orthodox
For all kinds, Jerusalem's the place
We walk the ancient streets of this town
Amazed by diversity of faith

In Bethlehem we reached and touched
The rough stone that sheltered the Christ
His love proclaims such unity
That mocks all our conflict and strife.

We pilgrims also shared perhaps 25 scriptural readings connected to the sites we visited and 50 prayers and blessings, almost all in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I remember just two exceptions. After we'd heard a talk by a religious Jew and peace activist who elected to stay for our closing prayer, Fr. Mike left out the reference to Christ. Saying grace over our Saturday lunch at a shawarma restaurant on Salah al-Din in east Jerusalem, where we were surrounded by pious Muslims, I prayed in the name of the Creator, not to deny Christ but avoid disappointing him by excluding any of God's beloved non-Christian creatures who may have been listening.

Innocent Bystanders For Christ

Responding to false reports emanating from a man of God that Jews were planning to desecrate Muslim holy sites, 50 Muslims stoned Christians tourists who were visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the LORD's day. Covering the incident, Israel Today magazine reports:

Because of the constant threat of Muslim violence, and despite the fact that the Temple Mount is the most holy place on earth to Jews and many Christians, the Israeli police comply with Muslim demands for harsh restrictions on non-Muslim visitors to the site. For instance, Jews and Christians are forbidden to carry Bibles atop the Temple Mount or to utter even silent prayers within its walls. Jews and Christians are regularly detained for violating these conditions.

Competing holiness claims about the Temple Mount create an unholy mess, including during arguments over where a new nation of Palestine's capital should be. It's the holiest place for observant Jews because of the First and Second temples, though some Palestinians argue, against all evidence, that they never existed. It's usually described as the third holiest place for Muslims because Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from the foundation stone, though some insist that Muhammad never ascended to heaven. As for Christians, Israel Today has overreached a bit. We do consider the Temple Mount a vital part of our narrative. Jesus was presented at the temple as an infant, studied there as a boy, preached there during his public ministry, predicted its destruction, and performed some housecleaning that helped get him killed.

If there's one site in Jerusalem that Christians agree is the holiest, though, it's the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, whose original structure was built in the fourth century over the place Jesus was and is thought to have been crucified, buried, and resurrected, perhaps in a quarry located outside the walls that Herod the Great built when he expanded the Second Temple in the first century before Christ. Christians have battled one another over that church, and still do, but they wouldn't go to war over the Temple Mount -- making their getting stoned for Jesus this morning weirdly ironic.

In Fairness To The Monks

After reading about Rod Dreher's blog for years, I'm a little embarrassed that it took a nudge from David Brooks this morning to pay closer attention. He has a fascinating (and, for a political blog, exceptionally civil) discussion thread about the post-Christmas Day monk mash at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I left this comment:

As a three-time pilgrim, I try not to be too critical about the occasional clashes at churches in the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher [shown here], where, as you may know, six denominations have been co-managing the premises (with a Muslim family controlling the keys) for over 150 years. I actually think we could learn something from them. How would any of us do, coexisting with our arch rivals in incredibly close quarters for the sake of a shared goal (in the case of the Holy Sepulcher, preserving and venerating the place all six agree was the site of Jesus Christ’s death and Resurrection)?

Christians do take their faith and doctrinal differences seriously in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, which makes the long days and nights of uneasy peace and cooperation between these well-publicized incidents all the more remarkable — even beautiful if one has a chance to see the intricately scheduled and sometimes overlapping worship that occurs almost constantly around Christ’s tomb.

Some of us can't take a ten-minute drive without getting mad at another motorist. Twelve members of a congressional super-committee with a combined 220 years of education couldn't agree on a budget. U.S. bosses spend millions of hours a year mediating employees' squabbles over turf, office supplies, and who was mean to whom first. (I made that statistic up, but I'll bet it's true.) Find one on-line debate about the Middle East that doesn't descend into ad hominem attacks, and we don't even live there. We're really going to make fun of people who've dedicated their live to preserving our LORD's birthplace because they sometimes have a bad day, too?

How The West Lures Palestine's Christians Away

Less than a century ago, Khaled Diab writes, 10% of Palestine's population was Christian. Today, the Christian population is four percent in the West Bank, 2.5% in Israel, and one percent in Gaza. Diab says they're leaving not because of persecution but as the result of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and also because, according to one of the authorities he quotes, Christian faith often trumps national identity. Their Western partners and friends are evidently playing a role:

“I think that an awful lot of well-meaning Christians in the West, whether they are in America, Britain or other places, have poured a lot of money into the West Bank, and specifically into the churches and ministries here,” observes Richard Meryon, director of Jerusalem’s Garden Tomb, which is locked in a spiritual/territorial dispute with the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the exact location of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

This outside aid, he notes, “is causing a hemorrhaging of Palestinian believers,” because many are given assistance to move to the West to study but, once there, decide never to return.

As for the validity of the Garden Tomb's claims, which date from the 19th century, check here and draw your own conclusions. The preponderance of modern scholarship favors the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (photo above by Kathy O'Connor). During our St. John's pilgrimages we've found that evangelical Christian groups tend to favor the Garden Tomb. The ancient, ornate Holy Sepulcher, where monks chant and incense billows, is run by the Roman Catholic and five orthodox churches. The Reformation ain't over till it's over.

Peeks And Peaks Of Jerusalem

From pilgrim Kathy's holy memory stick, a couple of her favorite images from our January 2011 pilgrimage to the Holy Land. That's pilgrim Andy at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, looking enigmatically from the men's into the much smaller women's section of Judaism's holiest place. The orthodox rabbis who run the Western Wall insist on gender segregation -- and also give the women the smaller part.

Near the end of our 12 extraordinary days, Kathy took this photo of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which encloses the site of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

Sunday Sermon: "Paul's Pilgrimage"

The six denominations in charge of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher feud and bicker not because they're Christians but because they're human. They achieve an uneasy coexistence because they agree on only one thing: That Jesus died and rose from the dead somewhere on the rough stones buried a few meters under their feet. What's the rock that unifies our homes and communities despite the disturbances and conflicts inherent in the human experience? My Sunday sermon, in honor of our patron, St. John Proparoxytone, is here.

Pilgrims' Progress: A Last Morning In Jerusalem

Beginning before dawn Saturday, we walked along the Via Dolorosa through the Old City of Jerusalem, ending in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Each of us had one more moment to touch the rock of Golgotha and hear the chants and the organ and smell the incense and meet the lively eyes of pilgrims from all over the world and come as close as we could to our God in Christ. For that, there are no words, and the best pictures are the ones we can't quite show you. To experience it yourself, ask for God's grace, and if you can, come to Jerusalem. As our guide, we used A Walk In Jerusalem: Stations Of The Cross by John Peterson, former dean of St. George's Cathedral and secretary general of the Anglican Communion.

Fr. Fergus Clarke, a Franciscan assigned to the Holy Sepulcher, told us yesterday that, based on what we know about the first century role of women, if Mary Magdalene hadn't been the first witness to Jesus Christ's resurrection, nobody would have gone to the trouble of making up a culturally incorrect story claiming that she was. Imagine that: Proof both that Jesus rose again and that men are wrong to keep women down in the church. This sculpture hangs behind the altar in the Holy Sepulcher's Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene.

If anyone tells you that Christians can't agree on anything, tell him this: We agree that Jesus rose from the dead at a spot about 20 paces behind pilgrim Andrea. The building, called the Edicule, and the slab it encloses are relatively new. Beneath them is the rock of the tomb itself, which people have venerated since the resurrection moment. Fr. Fergus told us that when the Romans tried to obliterate it in the second century and built a Roman temple in its place, Christians dug a secret tunnel under the temple and found the tomb.

Pilgrim Kathy met a friend at the Holy Sepulcher this morning: Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, D.C. You may remember him from the memorial service at Washington National Cathedral following the Sept. 11 attacks. Kathy knows him through her work as former President Nixon's last chief of staff. While the cardinal had been to the Holy Sepulcher many times, this was his first visit to the Adam Chapel, where the split rock of Golgotha is visible through a window behind the altar.

Sepulcheral Secrets

The view of the Edicule, which encloses Jesus Christ's tomb, from the Latin balcony of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. On Friday morning pilgrims DJ, Duane, and I got the friar's tour from the Rev. Fergus Clarke, friend of my friend Charlie Frazee and one of the priests who helps care for the church.

Six Christian denominations govern it under a 19th century arrangement brokered by the Ottoman Turks called the status quo. While the churches agree about little other than that this was the place of Jesus's resurrection, it's enough to keep them cohabitating in what Fr. Fergus variously called a delicate ecosystem or, even more fraught with peril, a long marriage. Just as a couple can have a crisis if a spouse leaves the dental floss out every night, things can go terribly wrong in the Holy Sepulcher if a sewer pipe breaks or someone starts a service too early, leaves a chapel door open when another denomination is processing past, or moves a chair.

Reporters often make fun of the monks for clashing over seemingly trivial things. "But 360 or 363 days a year, it's usually fine," Fergus said. I'm going to be learning more about how this community manages to subsume its permanent and likely irresolvable theological differences under the higher interest of remaining in relationship for the sake of serving the risen Christ.

Calling Crosses

In St. Helena's chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, 12th and 13th century crusaders and other pilgrims carved thousands of crosses in the walls.

Pilgrims' Progress In The Church Of All Churches

You come to Jerusalem a few times, and you actually have people to look up. On Tuesday afternoon Kathy and I went first to the Armenian Quarter and Sami Barsom's tailor shop. He was making tea for a visitor, the Rev. Shemun Can, assistant to the Syriac Orthodox archbishop in Jerusalem, and he invited us to join them.

I'd met Sami twice before. He was gracious enough to say he remembered, if not my name, the shape of my face. While we sat and talked, he waved at two Orthodox Jews who walked past his shop and warmly greeted an Arab who came in to introduce his fiancee. When they left, Sami smiled and said, "He said he met me 10 years ago and asked if I remembered him."

The muchtar, or top lay leader, of Jerusalem's Syriac Orthodox, Sami prides himself on talking to everyone. A recently published collection of his articles for the Jerusalem diocese's magazine contains pictures showing him practicing his faithful personal diplomacy with prominent Israelis and Palestinians alike. "We follow Jesus Christ," Sami says, "and he calls us to be in peace with one another. So what else can I do?"

It isn't that he hasn't experienced the alternative. Both his and Fr. Shemun's families fled Turkish persecution in 1915, when, as Sami told us, Assyrians and other ethnic groups were engulfed in the Armenian Genocide. "The Turks said, 'They're all like the Armenians, they're all the same'," Sami said with a dismissive wave. His family settled in west Jerusalem and moved to the Jordan-controlled Old City, he said, in the aftermath of Israel's 1948 war of independence.

Fifty-one years ago, he opened his tailor shop right around the corner from St. Mark's Church, seat of Jerusalem's Syriac Orthodox archbishop and one of the places touted (as reliably as by anyone else) as the site of the Last Supper. Most of his customers, he said, are Anglicans and Episcopalians. Among the consequences of his abundant hospitality is that most of them probably abandon any thought they may have had about negotiating a price. We left with a handmade green stole (good for the whole season between Pentecost and Advent) and some extra gifts from Sami, including something for the St. John's Altar Guild as well as a postcard containing the Lord's Prayer as set down in Fr. Shemun's exquisite Syriac Aramaic calligraphy.

Our inevitable next stop was the irresistible Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where we watched an elaborate Epiphany mass at Christ's tomb that looked as though it was being overseen by none other than His Holiness Karekin II, supreme patriarch and catholicos of the Armenian Orthodox Church (that's he in the background in the above right photo, with the black hood and crosier).

After Kathy got another chance to say a prayer inside the Edicule, we ran across a procession of friars that was moving from chapel to chapel around this most mysterious and chaotic of churches. Among them was a distinguished-looking priest who put us in the mind of our two-year-old promise to try to say hello to the Rev. Fergus Clarke, Jerusalem-based buddy of my friend and church history professor Charlie Frazee. Making our way to the Franciscans' corner of the church, we asked about Fr. Fergus and learned that, sure enough, that was he in the holy procession. So we waited, listening as the Latin chant echoed through the church, coming closer minute by minute. Just as they swung toward the entrance of Christ's tomb carrying their candles and amid swirling incense, an organ began to play in support of their plainchant, as glorious a moment of liturgy as I've ever experienced.

The monks offered two more rounds of prayer, including a highly ritualized censing of the Mary Magdalene chapel and the veneration of the consecrated elements in the Chapel of the Sacrament next door. Fr. Fergus (at left in the above right photo) welcomed us graciously in the sacristy and cheerfully admitted he knew Charlie from his days as a parish priest at St. Joseph's in Placentia, California. Indeed he said he'd mailed him a letter that very morning. He said a blessing over us and my new stole and invited us back to see him, and we marveled again at how we felt so at home in this faraway place where God seems so close.

Epiphany, Again

For Armenian Orthodox Christians, Tuesday was the feast of the Epiphany. This photo shows a priest saying mass inside the Edicule in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of Jesus Christ's burial.

Pilgrim's Progress, Day 2: Transfigured

Hey, preachers! You might consider hanging some ostrich eggs in front of the pulpit, as in one of the ornately decorated Greek Orthodox chapels in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. We St. John's pilgrims learned from the man in charge that ostriches don't incubate their eggs after laying them. Instead, they watch over them from a certain distance. Accordingly it's thought that ostrich eggs hanging in front of the iconostatis compel the congregation's attentiveness to the preacher.

More modern knowledge about ostriches is considerably more harrowing if also, perhaps, still ecclesiastically helpful. Ostriches do incubate their eggs, though in communal nests, with females (after removing the eggs left by weaker females) sitting on them during the day and males doing the honors at night. So it actually sounds like another good argument for women's ordination.

Ostriches also don't stick their heads in the sand. Nor could we pilgrims this morning, after we had begun our day with breakfast (plentiful pita and humus!) and morning prayer. Our guide, Canon Iyad Qumri, asked each of us to say what we'd left behind and what we hoped to take home from the Holy Land. Some moving stories were told and tears shed. One pilgrim worried about a chronically ill relative. Another said she'd come because this time last year, she collapsed in her home, where she might've died if an attentive church friend hadn't checked up on her.

Shared stories and experiences are already helping our pilgrims, who come not just from California but Iowa (pilgrim Debbie) and Florida (pilgrims Carl and Virginia), bec0me a family -- or at least a highly mobile new congregation. Just today we explored a first-century excavation beneath the Damascus Gate, worked our way through the Muslim Quarter, heard the Book of Acts read out by an Ethiopian priest, lunched at a Lutheran guest house on a sturdy meal of schnitzl, potatoes, and beans (our last meal without humus for the next ten days), left our prayers in the Western Wall, caught a glimpse of the the latest Israeli demolition project roiling the politics of east Jerusalem, said evening prayer in the chapel of historic St. George's Cathedral, and heard a young Nazareth-born Arab-Palestinian-Israeli priest, the Rev. Canon Hosam Naoum, talk about his four-square identity and the challenges of being one of 170,000 Christians left in Israel and the West Bank.

So much more to say about our first day of pilgrimage, and so many extraordinary days to come. The happy obligation of leading compline in a few moments and the lead weight of jet lag tugging on my eyelids prevent my writing more -- except to add that my wife, Kathy, has once again been transfigured by the Holy Land.

Pilgrims' Progress, Day 1: Safe At St. George's

While Farid, a member of the staff at St. George's pilgrim guest house in east Jerusalem, always welcomes me (and everyone, I imagine) with a bear hug, this is the first time I stopped and asked where he's from. "Zababdeh, in the West Bank," he said -- and that was a Holy Spirit moment, because we 30 St. John's pilgrims will visit his home town a week from tomorrow. Farid's a Roman Catholic. We'll meet his Episcopal friend and colleague, the Rev. Nael Abu Rahmoun, at St. Matthew's in Zababdeh and get a tour of the Penman Clinic, a ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, the hosts of our 12-day pilgrimage.

The spirit has surely been with us so far. Because of the storms in the southeast, nearly 2,500 U.S. flights were canceled Monday, mostly in Atlanta. For us to make it to Jerusalem tonight, three Delta flights into or out of Atlanta had to operate -- the two we were on and the one supplying the 777 for our outbound flight to Tel Aviv. Above you'll see a concourse the busiest hub in the world at 8 p.m. Sunday evening. The airport was so empty that the security guard in our part of the terminal spent an hour in the lounge, watching the Oregon-Auburn game with pilgrims Andy and Duane. Sure, we left Atlanta nearly four hours late, which included a noisy, hour-long chemical baptism for the 777, aka a deicing. But it's pretty amazing under the circumstances that we even made it out of California.

Our guide and friend Canon Iyad Qumri met us at Ben Gurion airport and joined us in reading Psalm 87 as we began to make our way by bus up to Jerusalem. It's the psalmist's miraculous vision of a city embodying the fulfillment of God's vision of perfect unity for his people: "Of Zion it shall be said, 'Everyone was born in her'." Within two hours of our arrival in Tel Aviv, we were gathered over a late-night snack in the St. George's dining room, marveling at the practical miracles that had brought us so far against such odds. Pilgrims Kathy and DJ even ventured onto the roof for a glass of pilgrim Chardonnay.

We'll spend tomorrow getting our bearings in the Old City, whose Damascus Gate is a 20-minute walk away down Nablus Rd., past the U.S. Consulate. We'll be the Lutherans' guests for lunch and get our first look at the ineffable Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It will be hard for days 3-12 to top that -- but remember, as people here always say to explain every surprise, ambiguity, and sheer wonderment they encounter: This is the Holy Land. We anticipate a great pilgrimage, and not just because God and Delta Airlines expended a considerable amount of energy getting us here.