The Holy Land - Day 1

It was hard to contain my excitement as we rode our minibus heading for Jerusalem for our first day touring the Old City. As soon as we “alighted” (what they call getting off the bus in Israel), our eyes caught sight of the ancient walls of the city.

Our first stop was the Garden of Gethsemane and the Church of All Nations, a site under the custody of the Franciscans in the Holy Land.  We got off the bus and walked up the hill to the stone gate marking the entrance to the holy site associated with Jesus’ night of prayerful anguish in the hours leading up to his arrest.  Walking around the site admiring the beautiful gardens filled with vividly colored flowers and seeing the grove of ancient twisted olive trees bathed in the early morning light, it was difficult to enter into the darkness which Jesus must have experienced that night.  Though we read the Scripture passage of the Agony in the Garden, my excitement and marvel at the novelty of finally being in the Holy City made it very difficult for me to really enter into what happened at this spot.

Also at the site was the Church of All Nations, which we got to visit briefly. The present façade of the Church features a brilliant mosaic.

 

Our next stop was to visit a Church known as the Tomb of Mary which is built into the ground. Liturgies are held at this site by the Greek, Coptic, and Syrian Orthodox communities in Jerusalem.

 We hiked up a steep hill and entered into the Old City by St. Stephen’s Gate (in Hebrew, the Lion’s Gate). The Lion is the symbol of the city of Jerusalem, which was founded by the Tribe of Judah (symbolized by the Lion). Actually, however, the “lions” which are on the gate look more like panthers or tigers, and some sources say that the Suleyman the Magnificent had them carved in honor of the muslim Mameluke emir Baybars and his successful campaign to rid the Holy Land of the crusaders.  Needless to say, you get a different explanation depending on who you ask.

Our next stop was St. Anne’s Church, which is traditionally believed to be on the spot where Sts. Anne and Joachim lived.  A Church was built there during the Byzantine era, and this Church was taken over by the muslim conqueror Saladin in 1192 and turned into a muslim theological school. The Church was restored in 1856.

Next to the St. Anne’s Church is the site which is traditionally believed to be the site of the Pool of Bethesda, described in St. John’s account of Christ curing a paralyzed man (Jn. 5:1-15). Today, it is a complex archaeological site containing the ruins of the ancient pools, a byzantine era church, and some later buildings built on the site.

After this, I had the opportunity to visit the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. It was an interesting experience for me, particularly as a non-Jew. Feeling a bit out of place and not sure what to do, I approached the wall very cautiously and watched the other (presumably Jewish) women for some indications of what to do. What I saw were young and old women, eyes closed, pressing their faces to the wall, deep in prayer. I saw women with tear stained cheeks, with their hands outstretched, reaching out and touching the wall, tenderly caressing it as if it were a beloved friend. I saw others standing before the wall rocking gently, holding prayer books, their lips pronouncing softly those sacred words which thousands of others had prayed before in the same spot. Still others searched eagerly to find a small crevice to place their prayers (written on small scraps of paper in countless languages) into the wall. I too took a moment to pray there, and was deeply moved by the experience. As I prepared to leave after my few moments of prayer, I noticed several young women, roughly my age, walking away from the wall backwards, not wishing to turn their faces from this holiest of sites.

Our final stop for the day was to be the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the most sacred site in all of Christendom. The moving experience at the Western Wall made me question my own level of devotion, and ask myself whether I was more like a tourist or a pilgrim in this Holy Land. I left the site of the Wailing Wall recalling a passage from one of our course readings which had struck me when I had read it – but even more so in light of this experience:

 “The road from the Jerusalem of the Tourist to the Jerusalem of the pilgrim is long indeed. The difference between the man surveying the Church of the Sepulchre with a handbook and the poor peasant who creeps into the inmost chamber of the Tomb to kiss the stone where he believes the dead body of his savior was laid, is something overwhelming to the mind.”

Heading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre along the Via Dolorosa, I resolved to be more like a pilgrim and less like a tourist.

The first thing that one sees walking into the main entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the anointing stone, the place which commemorates the place where Jesus’ body would have been brought for anointing prior to burial. Before me, men and women got down on their hands and knees, placed their foreheads or their lips to the stone, which has been worn smooth by years and years of veneration by such pilgrims. Like the women at the wailing wall, I saw other women caress this stone in much the same way.  Some of them brought with them small pieces of cloth and little bottles of perfumed oil which they rubbed on the stone, wishing to be like the holy women who would have prepared Jesus’ body for burial by anointing it with perfumed oils and spices.

The stone is cool and smooth, and it smells beautiful. After venerating the stone with the other pilgrims, I got up and walked around to where the main tomb was, and our group went and met up with a Franciscan Friar just outside of the sacristy by the Franciscan chapel adjacent to the Tomb.

More to come!