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.

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.

Nazareth Sky, Sunday Morning, Bells Ringing

Pilgrims' Progress, Day 4: On To Galilee

That's pilgrim Leslie leading the way at the Israel Museum yesterday afternoon. This morning we leave early for the Judean desert and some time of prayer and contemplation while looking down on the Jericho road, where, as Jesus told his followers, a good man from Samaria was walking along one day, minding his own business. We'll visit the Mount of Temptation and then head north to Galilee.

For our two nights as guests of the Sisters of Nazareth, we'll be without easy access to wireless. I'll check in as often as I can, and our other pilgrims will post on Facebook to the extent allowed by the gracious mercy of their international data plans. In the meantime, pray for us, as we shall for you this evening, in the Basilica of the Annunciation, in the home town of our LORD. And pray for the peace of Jerusalem!

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!

Episcopalians The Same Everywhere

At St. John's, the kids rush to the youth group's donut table after church. At Christ Episcopal Church in Nazareth, the beeline is for cookies. Same sticky fingers and adorable faces. As for the grownups, it's...What else? The official hot- and cold-weather beverage of the worldwide Anglican Communion: Coffee.
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Holy Astonishment

This sculpture depicting Gabriel's appearance to Mary is on the grounds of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth.
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Local Heroes

While Nazareth has 65,000 people today, Joseph and Mary had perhaps 300 neighbors, most living in caves in the hillsides. Beneath the guest house of the Religious Sisters of Nazareth, where our St. John's pilgrims have arrived for three nights, excavations have revealed a section of first-century street and a doorway that the young Jesus may well have walked through while visiting neighbors, friends, or cousins.

Yesterday we visited three churches, including the magnificent Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation. The plainest was built to commemorate the quiet heroism of the man who went through with his marriage to a pregnant girl so she wouldn't be exposed to scorn or worse. We are used to seeing Jesus cradled in his mother's arms, but in the Greek Orthodox Church of the "Announciation" a ceiling mural's depiction is equally natural: A toddler riding on his legal father's strong shoulders during the family's flight to Egypt.

The small church, built over the spring where Mary is said to have gone for water when she had her world-changing encounter with the angel Gabriel, is filled with icons that glow in the light of candles and multiple hanging fixtures. As pilgrim Mary read Luke's account of the fateful conversation in which a Nazareth teenager learned she would be what the Greeks call God-bearer, her voice cracked when she got to the words of her courageous namesake: "Let it be with me according to your word."
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This post initially overstated Nazareth's population.