Pilgrims' Progress: Well Done, Daphne

We St. John's pilgrims saw this painting of Jesus Christ and the Samaritan woman along with other breathtaking images in the West Bank city of Nablus today, in a church built over Jacob's well, where the encounter described in John 4:1-30 occurred. We've visited no more sacred a place so far. Abraham visited here when it was called Shechem. Joshua gathered the tribes of Israel here and called them to renew their worship of God in sincerity and faithfulness (Josh. 24:14). For the Samaritans of Jesus's time, Shechem was as sacred as the Second Temple was to Jews in Jerusalem.

As for the gospel story, which the evangelist said occurred as Jesus made his way from Jerusalem to Galilee, this is the only place known as Jacob's well. There's plenty of ambiguity about the actual location of the Upper Room and Emmaus, for instance, but none whatsoever about this spot. Pilgrim Daphne (shown outside the church with her mother, pilgrim Ellie) lowered a bucket 150 feet down and raised it filled to the brim, and we drank from the same spring that the evangelist says nourished our Lord.

Photos weren't allowed. But we'll remember.

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.

At The Center Of The World

During two Holy Land pilgrimages and the 18 months in between, pilgrim Andy and I have been carrying on a conversation about the Middle East. It hasn't really been a debate, since we're both strong supporters of Israel who are working to deepen our appreciation of the immense complexities of the issue and of the necessity for a just provision for Palestinians' right of self-determination.

We rarely have the opportunity we did today to conduct our discussion at the epicenter of the crisis. We were standing with our fellow pilgrims inside the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, on steps leading to a walled-up spot that was once an entrance to the Second Temple. The towering wall at our back faces south. You can see Herodian (which is to say time of Jesus Christ) stones at the bottom and the windows and blue dome of the al-Aqsa mosque on top. Could Jesus have climbed these steps on one of his visits to the temple from Bethany, on the Mount of Olives (to our left)? Pretty likely. So you have 2,500 years of religious history and explosive interfaith rivalry inside a few square feet. For the faithfully political (or the politically faithful), it's pretty much the center of the world.

Since pilgrim Kathy, junior archaeologist, was helping injured pilgrim Pam prepare for her much-regretted early departure for the U.S. tonight, she didn't go with our group this morning. I retraced our footsteps with her this afternoon. That's she amid the massive stones that Roman soldiers threw down from the Temple Mount when they destroyed the Second Temple in A.D. 70 -- the very ones of which Jesus said in Mark 13:2b, "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." You can't get much closer to history than that, in this place where peace sometimes feels as far away as it can be.

The Al-Aqsa mosque and Mount of Olives, from the Jerusalem Archaeological Park

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.

Young Nazarenes

We pilgrims worshiped at Christ Church (Episcopal) in Nazareth on Sunday morning. These lads had the responsibility of collecting and storing the prayer books and hymnals after the service. And after that, punch and cookies in the parish hall.

We'll Never Be Alone

As Brian Greene writes, Albert Einstein needed a gimmick to bolster his theory that the universe had a fixed size and shape. His solution was the cosmological constant, a repulsive gravity that pressed against the gravity that Newton had discovered and kept the cosmos shipshape. While Einstein may have been wrong at first about the size of the universe, he was right about anti-gravity. Scientists now call it dark energy, and it's thrusting the universe away from us at unimaginable speeds, leaving us in the stardust:

If the dark energy doesn’t degrade over time, then the accelerated expansion of space will continue unabated, dragging away distant galaxies ever farther and ever faster. A hundred billion years from now, any galaxy that’s not resident in our neighborhood will have been swept away by swelling space for so long that it will be racing from us at faster than the speed of light. (Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)

Light emitted by such galaxies will therefore fight a losing battle to traverse the rapidly widening gulf that separates us. The light will never reach Earth and so the galaxies will slip permanently beyond our capacity to see, regardless of how powerful our telescopes may become.

Because of this, when future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. The past will have drifted beyond the cliffs of space. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness.

Especially apt for us Holy Land pilgrims are Greene's reflections on the fragility of empirical knowledge. Remember that he's talking about hundreds of billions of years in the future, when the earth would long since have been engulfed by the sun. Bless him for his optimism about the survival of the species, which, he suggests, would have to have planet-hopped even to confront this dilemma:

If astronomers in the far future have records handed down from our era, attesting to an expanding cosmos filled with galaxies, they will face a peculiar choice: Should they believe “primitive” knowledge that speaks of a cosmos very much at odds with what anyone has seen for billions and billions of years? Or should they focus on their own observations and valiantly seek explanations for an island universe containing a small cluster of galaxies floating within an unchanging sea of darkness — a conception of the cosmos that we know definitively to be wrong?

And what if future astronomers have no such records, perhaps because on their planet scientific acumen developed long after the deep night sky faded to black? For them, the notion of an expanding universe teeming with galaxies would be a wholly theoretical construct, bereft of empirical evidence.

That's where faith comes in handy, as with us who still tell our primitive stories about stars in the night and empty tombs.

Halfway Ride

Sign on aerial tramway cars at the Mount of Temptation near Jericho. We St. John's pilgrims could figure out how they unloaded passengers at the halfway point but not how they loaded them.

About To Row Mike's Boat Ashore?

From OC Weekly back in the New World, props for Andy Guilford (show at right yesterday afternoon on the Sea of Galilee with his fellow St. John's Church pilgrims):

[T]hough [ex-Orange County sheriff Mike] Carona had numerous establishment types (and, for far too long, a protective, gullible Orange County Register newsroom) working behind-the-scenes to shield him from accountability, they weren’t able to overcome the work of journalists like myself and Christine Hanley at the Los Angeles Times, the relentless determination of Sagel in the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the untainted manner in which federal Judge Andrew J. Guilford runs his courtroom. Make no mistake: In the hands of other reporters, prosecutors and judges, Carona likely would still be in control of the $800 million-per-year agency.

In coming weeks, Guilford will set a date for Carona to surrender.