Holy Land Batman!

I awoke today with a strange feeling and I couldn’t put my feeling on it. Homesickness is the closest I can come to naming it. I think there has been so much conversation, so many important meetings and sites to visit that my head hurts and I long to be around the familiar. I realized that even with this blog I had shifted from experiencing and feeling to “reporting”. It has just been so much and because I don’t know any one person well, much of my processing has been internal.

Yesterday, we walked the Villa Delorosa, the stations of the cross, in the Old City led in a ritual procession by the Franciscan Monks who had their frocks on and who began with a microphone that didn’t work. This brought out the control queens in many of them so there was this scramble to make it work and then different ones asserting their authority and finally one older one who yells across the way “I can’t hear you!” Though it was to be solemn, I couldn’t help but see the humor of this theater production. I alternated thoughts between why aren’t other people seeing the exploitable humor in this and why am I so irreverent. Another question emerged, “Is this what Jesus wanted for Christians to do?” And then another “How does taking religion, ritual seriously make for spirituality and meaningfulness to emerge and how does it restrict and its rigidity cause it lose its original intent.”

Once we were on our way, the latin chanting and the reading of each station was interesting. This was certainly the most informative walking the stations I have ever done. But once again, I felt how brittle the relationships are—half of the stations are in the Arab quarter. One of the monks hushed an Arab teenager, who from the sound of his voice hurled curse words in response. The market places were full and people bombarded the procession with postcards and such. Wafts of strong smelling herbs, which later my colleagues affirmed was pot, swept through many parts of the procession. Again, life continues even in the face of sacred space and time. The bustle and the imposition that we made upon the Arabs in their quarter was only blunted by the fact that some of the 5 dozen people actually bought things. Necessity. So there we were in the intersection of 3 major religions: Christianity, Islam and Capitalism.

We finished at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where I refrained from visiting the tomb. At the second to last station one of the readings included the phrase “Fear of the Jews”. My impulse to make a loud noise and say something scary passed, and then I seriously wondered how in this moment around Israel people are scared of the Jews—apparently even Mel Gibson. It seemed a dangerous message, even irresponsible for those who do not understand the context of the phrase back then.

We had a discussion on the roof top. The Christians had a fascinating conversation about the power or lack thereof of the procession. I shared with them my thoughts about irreverence and they had brought up the challenge of the phrase fear of the Jews earlier. Where it was a discussion of what was in the Greek and what did it really mean as a way to confirm the challenge of using it today. From there we went to Shabbat services…

More to come…