With The Sisters And Savior In Nazareth

All Holy Land pilgrims enjoy imagining that they're walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. A privileged few, including our recently returned St. John's cohort, can also say that they just may have stood in his living room.

On four trips since 2007, I and my fellow pilgrims have stayed at the guest house of the Religious Sisters of Nazareth, French nuns who began their ministry in Mary, Joseph, and Jesus's home town in 1855. As they began to build their convent, they discovered remnants of an Crusader-era church or monastery as well as a tomb with a rolled stone (like the one that would have been used for Jesus's burial in Jerusalem) that dates from the sixth century before Christ or even earlier. It's shown below with some of our pilgrims. Periodic excavations in the years since have uncovered cisterns, mosaics, and other features, including some from Byzantine times, which is to say from as early as the fourth and fifth centuries.

But the most intriguing finds are now thought to be from the first century, during Roman times -- street surfaces and a portion of a doorway that may have been an entrance to the kind of cave dwelling that would have been common in Jesus's day, when as few as 200 people lived in Nazareth.

That's pilgrim Brenna Hayden above, with the doorway over her shoulder. She's standing in a first-century dwelling in the holy family's tiny home town. You begin to get the picture. Did Jesus visit or perhaps even live in this space?

Let's start with Mary and Joseph. Luke's gospel says they hailed from Nazareth and returned home soon after Jesus's birth. Matthew implies that they were from Bethlehem and says that they took the holy child to Egypt to escape Herod the Great's killers. Returning to Israel after Herod's death, Joseph was warned in a dream to take his family to Galilee (Matt. 2:22), where the Holy Spirit seems to have thoughtfully lined up work. In his archaeological history The Holy Land, Jerome Murphy-O'Connor writes that Joseph's arrival in Nazareth precisely coincided with Galilean tetrarch Herod Antipas's recruiting drive for artisans for a new capital he was building about three miles away, to be called Sephoris.

That would have given Joseph and eventually his young apprentice a way to afford a tidy little cave dwelling for themselves and Mary. But is it the spot under the Sisters? Perhaps not, or so we might conclude just from consulting Murphy-O'Connor. In his entry on the convent, he mentions the Second Temple-era tomb and Crusader ruins (circa 11th century) and also writes that the site was used by Muslims for worship after the Crusaders were driven out. But he doesn't mention any first-century ruins.

But all is not lost. During our visit in June, our guide, Canon Iyad Qumri, tantalized us by reading an excerpt from a seventh-century text describing the experiences of a pilgrim much like us that the Sisters take as evidence of the site's provenance:

The city of Nazareth, as Arculf who stayed in it relates, is situated on a mountain. It is, like Capharnaum, unwalled, yet it has large houses built of stone, and also two very large churches. One of these, in the middle of the city, is built upon two vaults, on the spot where there once stood the house in which our Lord the Saviour was brought up.

The convent and guest house's central location (next door to the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation) and the description of the vaulting character of the site have inclined experts to believe that Arculf could have been talking about the Sisters' spot, whose excavations are over two stories high. The reference to a church could account for the Byzantine ruins modern archaeologists have identified.

Who told Arculf that it had been Jesus's house? No one knows. Here's what we do know. We pilgrims were seeing, in one place, first century, Byzantine, and Crusader ruins. Add the mosque for good measure (remember that Muslims honor Jesus and his mother), and you have overwhelming evidence that the spot has been considered holy for 1500 years or more.

I asked the mother superior, Sister Stephania (shown here with pilgrim Debbie Bamberger), if she had more information about Arculf. She graciously provided a link to the full account of his visit to the Holy Land, which is thought to have taken place around 670.

My next stop was a volume I've rarely cracked since seminary. It turns out almost everything we know about Arculf comes from the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he completed in 731. Bede writes that Arculf was a French bishop who dictated the account of his travels in the Holy Land and around the Mediterranean to Adamnan, abbot of the famous monastery at Iona. Though he doesn't mention Nazareth, the meticulous Bede devotes three chapters to a summary of Arculf's pilgrimage, obviously considering it a document of considerable value.

So one of the church's greatest scholars put his blessing on a report that his era's Nazarenes were safeguarding the place Jesus grew up. It's a small-to-midsized leap of faith to believe that we were standing there, too. You know what? The place simply feels holy. In the end, if it's good enough Bede and the Sisters, it was good enough for Brenna and the pilgrims.

Out On the Palestinian Streets

St. John's pilgrims Ed and Cathy Alosio are pictured on the streets of east Jerusalem near the Holy Land Hotel, headquarters for a week during our recent pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank.

It was a considerable change of pace compared to my three prior trips, when our groups stayed at the pilgrim guest house of St. George's Episcopal Cathedral. This time we stepped easily into the bustling life of what Palestinians hope will be their capital someday. The main drag, Salah al-Din, was around the corner, which meant we were a few steps from newspapers, the post office, a cafe with cappuccino and croissant, a florist (where pilgrim Kathe Hayden made friends with the proprietor by showing him some arrangement tricks), soccer courts (where Bob and Steven made friends playing baseball), shops selling pistachios and za'atar (a tasty blend of herbs, sesame, and salt; try it on fresh warm bread in the morning), and delicious shawarma (think Arab gyro).

St. George's, which is finishing up with some renovations, has considerable charms. Our friend Canon Iyad Qumri took us by one morning for a visit with the new cathedral dean, the Very Rev. Canon Hosam Naoum, and our LA diocese friend, Deb Neal (pictured with the Rev. Lisa Rotchford, at left), now serving as secretary to the bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem. The beautiful cathedral close, on a quiet stretch of Nablus Rd., was a longer walk than our hotel from the Damascus and Herod gates, which we pilgrims used for our daily and nightly excursions to the Muslim, Christian, Armenian, and Jewish quarters.

At the comfortable Holy Land, presided over by its courtly Muslim owner, Zuhair Al-Amad, and his good-humored and patient reception director, Fawaz Takrouri (whose young assistant tore himself away from watching the Euro 2012 tournament in the hotel bar long enough to show me some card tricks), we couldn't help feel more connected to the city and encouraged to explore and rub shoulders, observe the pace and style of commerce, and indulge our curiosity about varying styles of women's dress according to Muslim tradition (a preoccupation of all western pilgrims) as people walked to and from jobs and shopping.

One night Kathy and I and pilgrims Christian, Shannon, and Damian Kassoff were exploring when, shades of Greenwich Village, we encountered an art happening -- a group of young people wheeling a projection system along the sidewalk looking for blank walls for their screen. We also organized a pilgrimage to the historic American Colony Hotel, where $130 bought a round of drinks and the privilege of imagining we had spotted the ghosts of Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens drinking and laughing at a table in the corner of the garden.

Cross Beam

On Saturday morning, the rising sun pierces the cross Canon Iyad Qumri is carrying as he leads St. John's pilgrims toward the Herod Gate of Jerusalem's old city, where we'll walk the stations of the Cross.

Unity And Alienation And Unity

If you go to a Roman Catholic church in Anaheim, but you're not a Roman Catholic, the priest might not want to serve you Holy Communion. While he's not allowed to refuse if you insist, it's technically against canon law. And yet on Saturday in Bethlehem, all we St. John's pilgrims, though most are Episcopalian, were communicated without any hesitation by an Italian priest during a solemn early-morning mass in the grotto associated with Christ's birth that is sheltered by the Church of the Nativity -- a moment of unity in Christ that felt, at least to me, every bit as powerful as the first Pentecost.

The church is one of three constructed in fourth-century Palestine under the direction of Helena, mother of Constantine the Great. You can still see her workers' beautiful mosaics preserved a meter or two beneath the church's modern floor. Today Roman Catholic and Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians share its care and administration. It's generally in the news when people are shooting at each other or on Christmas. We St. John's pilgrims celebrated our Christmas early by singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" in the St. Joseph Chapel near the grotto, where pilgrim Damian had a contemplative moment.

Then thanks to our friend Iyad Qumri's peerless contacts, the Franciscans, Rome's traditional stewards in the Holy Land, invited us to attend mass with some pilgrims from Italy. The priest (was he visiting, or based here? I don't know. I didn't ask. This is the Middle East) celebrated in Italian, but the forms of the Holy Eucharist liturgy are familiar enough that we could follow along and say the responses in English. We weren't sure about the gospel reading until the priest said, "Non vi preoccupat (don't be worried)," when we realized we were hearing Jesus's teaching in Matthew 6 about the lilies of the field. Pilgrim Mike, whose fluency in Spanish gives him a good feel for Italian, could tell the first reading, which a nun proclaimed as pilgrims Alexendra and Brenna looked on, was from 2 Corinthians. So we all understood God's saving word, each in our own language. Did the priest know we weren't Catholic? Did he care? What would Benedict XVI think? I don't know. I didn't ask. This is the Middle East!

After the closing prayers, we each touched the star in the floor that stands for the Birth and Incarnation and creation's radical unity under God's perfect, evil-destroying love. This unforgettable moment of Christian unity happened in a town whose Christian population has dwindled to as little as 20% owing to falling birth rates, the second Palestinian intifada in 2000-04, and diminished economic opportunities. God's love may defy alienation, but the region's politics sometimes appear to defy God's love. Edward Tabash, an Arab Catholic merchant whose family have been Bethlehemites for centuries, told me that Israel's separation wall (shown here surrounding and cutting off a single Palestinian home) has devastated the local economy and driven thousands of Bethlehem's ablest, best-educated people to greener pastures, often abroad. So in one morning we experienced the chasm between what God wants and what we deliver. But that's okay, because after our meal in the grotto, we were invested with the power to move mountains and even walls.

Three From Day Two

Our first full day of pilgrimage in Jerusalem? Priceless. Summing it up at the end of the day in a blog post? Thanks to jet lag, impossible. I've posted a raft of photos over on Facebook. If we're not friends, friend me. The sky above the Western Wall below was the first of three favorite sights of the day (not including the curious, sometimes transfigured visages of my fellow pilgrims).

These crosses were made centuries ago in the soft Jerusalem limestone deep inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, carved by crusaders and other pilgrims. The arrangement of smaller crosses nestled in the quadrants of the larger, known as the Jerusalem cross, has been taken to stand for the four evangelists, four points of the compass, and four European nations that participated in the first Crusade in the 11th century. Our friend Canon Iyad Qumri, who's showing us around between now and July 1, offered the best explanation of all. The smaller crosses may stand for pilgrims' family members who couldn't make the expensive, arduous trip.

And these girls were heading for school this morning in east Jerusalem. If we can't make peace for ourselves, then for them.

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.

Au Revoir, Jerusalem

An iPhone photo of the group photo of our 30-member St. John's Episcopal Church pilgrim band, taken at the beginning of our pilgrimage outside St. George's Cathedral in east Jerusalem, with Canon Iyad Qumri, our friend and guide, at left in the first row.

After walking the Stations of the Cross beginning Saturday morning at 5:45 and having our final Holy Eucharist service at one of the places associated with the biblical town of Emmaus, we'll have a final few hours to pack and drink in the Old City before our departure at about midnight from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. We arrive at LAX Sunday morning, each of us, in some way, changed.

As the French say, we'll be back.

Pilgrims' Progress in Nazareth: Why We Came

"This is why I came," said a St. John's pilgrim as we drove along the western edge of the Sea of Galilee on Saturday morning. It was as Christ-drenched a day as we'll have during our 12-day pilgrimage, beginning with the renewal of our baptismal vows in the Jordan River (pilgrims Melinda, Deb, and Cheryl are above) and culminating, sacramentally, at least, with Holy Eucharist served around a stone altar high above the lake.

Before I said the mass, I asked our pilgrims to preach the sermon by calling out two or three words that they associated with our trip so far. The one I heard the most was peace. If you yearn for peace, if you want to feel close to the historical Jesus, if your faith in God's saving and infinitely loving power is bolstered by the feel of solid ground under your feet that Jesus's may have touched first, then come to Galilee.

For one thing, you'll find a church built in remembrance of one New Testament event after another -- Jesus's healing work at Simon Peter's house in Capernaum as recounted in the action-packed first chapter of Mark's gospel, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, even the meal the risen Christ prepared for his disciples as recounted in John 21.

All these miracles and mysteries notwithstanding, our pilgrim hearts were also touched by moments of sheer humanity and common sense. In Nazareth, at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, our guide, Canon Iyad Qumri, pointed out his favorite fresco, depicting the
Holy Family's flight to Egypt as described in Matthew's gospel. Usually we see the patient Joseph leading a mule carrying Mary and her child. But wouldn't we be just as likely to see the lad riding on Joseph's strong shoulders?

Joseph would probably have been singing as they walked along, and we've been singing up a storm, too. In Bethlehem, a few feet from the grotto remembered as the site of Jesus's nativity, we sang "O Come All Ye Faithful." We did our best approximation of the Blind Boys of Alabama's "Wade In The Water" as I used olive branches to sprinkle my fellow pilgrims with Jordan River water. We sang hymns and the Taize "Gloria in excelsis" during our hillside Holy Eucharist and "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" (what else?) during a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee. And on Sunday morning in Christ Church in Nazareth, we belted out hymns in English (you can see that pilgrims Dale, Phyllis, and Bob were holding up their end) while our local Episcopalian brothers and sisters sang in Arabic.

On Saturday evening, we were blessed by a visit to our pilgrim guest house by a dynamic Nazareth-born priest in the Diocese of Jerusalem, the Rev. Fuad Dagher, whom we'd welcomed at St. John's in August while preparing for our pilgrimage. He told us about the child care center he's launching at his church in Shefa-'Amr, St. Paul's, with the support of the Diocese of Los Angeles and some $40,000 in local contributions.

Over dinner, Fr. Fuad waxed pessimistic about prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, chalking up most of the problems to the Israeli side. A couple of pilgrims pushed him back on issues such as the U.S. war in Iraq (which he said was a disaster for all concerned).

I'll write later in our pilgrimage about politics, the leitmotif of almost everything we see and do in the Holy Land. For now, I can't help tarrying a little more over the sights, sensations, and sacraments of our two rich days in Galilee.

Dr. King And The Good Samaritan

Early one morning last week, we St. John's pilgrims visited a spot about halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho for a few moments of meditation. Invited to say a prayer by our guide and friend, Canon Iyad Qumri (shown below, pointing down to the old Jericho road), I mentioned that Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King had once visited the same place, or one nearby. He mentioned their pilgrim visit in his last speech, on April 3, 1968, the day before he was murdered in Memphis. He was trying to persuade the city's pastors to come out of their pulpits and offer direct support to striking sanitation workers:

I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Pilgrims' Progress, Day 3: Birth To Death To Life

Visiting Bethlehem from Jerusalem means that pilgrims see beautiful and ugly things the same day -- the face of pilgrim Loreen beholding the sights in the Church of the Nativity, for instance, and the forbidding face of the Israeli security and separation wall hemming in the city of David.

It's been an even busier day than we expected, the result of pilgrim Pam slipping on a sidewalk this morning and suffering a small fracture in her left tibia. Treated by doctors in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Pam was back among us at St. George's by dinnertime, with a bright red cast (she picked it to match her toenails). The good news is that she'll still head to Nazareth with us tomorrow.
Pam's accident notwithstanding (we give thanks it wasn't worse), a day in the Middle East is full enough if it encompasses the birth and death of Christ. We reached the Church of the Nativity early enough that, thanks to one of Canon Iyad Qumri's famous and ubiquitous cousins, each pilgrim was able to visit the grotto where the church believes Jesus was born.Iyad could only accomplish this by asking us to crowd onto the steps leading to the grotto and wait for a young man who was purposely blocking the way to decide to let us through. He was protecting the prerogatives of the Greek Orthodox priest who was celebrating mass in this, the heart of the Church. The Armenian Orthodox were planning a service immediately afterward, so Iyad wedged the pilgrims through the tiny space in under five minutes. From the other side, we watched the Armenians get under way.
Then we went to the nearby St. Joseph chapel, read from Luke's birth account, and sang "O Come all Ye Faithful." After taking care of Pam, we returned to Jerusalem and Easter: A glimpse at the magnificent model of Second Temple Jerusalem at the newly renovated Israel Museum, which shows, experts believe, an exhausted rock quarry that was used both for Mt. Calvary and Jesus's burial and which became the site of his resurrection. Here a pilgrim points at the spot.

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.

Epiphany In The Land Of Light

From our newly digitized St. John's parish newsletter (thank you, Cindy!), my Advent anticipation of an Epiphany adventure with 29 friends in faith:

As our Vaya Con Dios experiences the flowering of new life, the latest group of St. John’s pilgrims is getting ready to say vamos a Dios. We’re going to God, or, at least, to the place where God did his most mysterious, magnificent work by the Resurrection of our LORD Jesus Christ. We’re heading for the holy city of Jerusalem in January to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and his family and followers, experience the quiet majesty of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Sea of Galilee, and leave the prayers of our church and school community tucked into the ancient crevices of the Western Wall.

It will be the second pilgrimage for St. John’s Church and the third for your vicar. We’re taking a group of 30 this time. We’ll divide our time between Jerusalem and Nazareth, with plenty of side trips along the way.

We’ll see ancient sites, and modern ones. We’ll imagine ourselves walking the hills of Palestine in Jesus’s time, and we’ll experience something of the tension and anger between Israelis and Palestinians today.

Why do we go? What’s the most special part of making a pilgrimage? Each pilgrim, you’ll find, will have a different answer. When I visited the Holy Land for the first time in the summer of 2007 with a group of seminarians and fellow priests, I had a feeling of belonging, almost of homecoming. Within a few days, I knew I’d be back – and I was pretty sure I could talk Kathy and some of my St. John’s brothers and sisters into coming along.

Sure enough, about 20 of us visited in the summer 2009. If you saw the presentation in the multipurpose room on our return, you know that we floated in the Dead Sea, touched the damp rock in the Bethlehem cave where the Church believes Jesus was born, and even walked along first-century streets (literally, perhaps, in the footsteps of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) that had been excavated deep beneath our pilgrim guest house in Nazareth.

Our Epiphany 2011 pilgrimage will be in the Middle Eastern winter, which, we’re told, is a lot like a Rancho Santa Margarita winter. It may be a little chilly at night, and we could get some rain and even snow. Each day, we’ll worship and pray and experience moments of deep fellowship and profound silence. We’ll enjoy quiet evenings in the garden of St. George’s Cathedral in East Jerusalem and explore the labyrinthine streets of the Old City. We’ll laugh, shop, eat and sleep well, and spend a lot of our time with our mouths hanging open as we say to my fellow guide, Canon Iyad Qumri, “Wow!” (He says that’s the word Americans use most often in the Holy Land.)

And when we return, we’ll tell you all about it, and ask when you’d like to go!