Where Is God?

Where is God?

Well,  “of course,” we know that God is "everywhere."  God is in, among, through, and beyond all creation.  God is the power that holds atoms together and galaxies in their courses. God is before all things, in all things, through all things, and all things have their being in God.

But that’s not really the question we are asking, so that answer sounds theology-textbook dry.  When we ask, “Where is God?” what we mean is "How and when and where do we experience God’s presence?"  This lies at the roots of pilgrimage, the sense that God can be found in places and experiences beyond our everyday life. 

(This is also a dangerous instinct, for most people most of the time cannot go on distant pilgrimages and can and do find God in the everyday and mundane.  So everything I say here needs to be balanced by Brother Lawrence, the monastery cook “Lord of the pots and pans,” who writes in the Practice of the Presence of God (1693) "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.")

Yet many of us follow this instinct and search out “thin places” where the divide between the mundane and the Divine seems closer.  As Coloradoans, we all have as streak of nature mysticism in us, finding God in the mountains and meadows and sunsets.  (I hear Lillian Daniel muttering, "Any fool can find God in the sunset!" and maybe I should repost my sermon from May for my development of that point!) For others, it’s different.  A few years ago at Ring Lake Ranch, I listened to Marcus Borg wax rhapsodic over “foggy English moors, little moss covered villages, mist and clouds and the green of earth.”  That sounded claustrophobic and lame to me, as I looked longingly out the window towards the vast alpine reaches of the Wind River Range!

The other easy answer to this is that God is “in heaven.”  Somewhere up past the sky, behind the stars, far, far away in resplendent grandeur.   “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and our church steeples and cathedral towers point us up, up, up.  Even the A-frame construction of Plymouth and many sanctuaries of its era draw the eye and heart aloft.  Many of our beloved hymns point to the skies.  This was THE favorite hymn of a former congregation I served:

O Lord my God,

When I in awesome wonder

Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul! My Savior God to Thee:

How Great Thou Art,

How Great Thou Art….

In the Holy Land there is a different architecture.  Of course, there were plenty of basilica constructions and towers which form the prototype for our long rectangular sanctuaries and steeples.  But there were also a lot of round and octagonal structures, usually over a central rock or cave.  Domes bespeake a different language than steeples, feminine to masculine.  And the focus was downward.  God might indeed be enthroned in the heavens, but God is found by going down, deep, into the depths of the earth. The bedrock throughout the country is limestone, so it is riddled with caves, crevices, hollows and springs. Every church, every chapel, every shrine was built over a cave or rock or spring. The list of places built this way was profound:  the Church of the Nativity is built over the cave Jesus was born in, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is over Jesus’ tomb and the rock of Golgotha.  The Dome of the Rock is over the exposed bedrock Abraham sacrificed Isaac (or Ishmael, if the Muslims are telling the story) and you can descend into a small crypt in the rock, where Muslims pray.  The Church of the Multiplication (loaves and fishes) near Capernaum is over a rock (the table for the meal), now much chipped away by centuries of pilgrims.

Nazareth had at least two caves for the Annunciation, (different ones for Latin and Greek churches), the cave Joseph had his workshop, and a well where (alternatively) Mary met the angel Gabriel and also everyone drew their daily water, with a church atop each, and stairs down to each sacred place.  We saw the well Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman below another church, and at least three different caves of Elijah. Even the Shepherd Fields near Bethlehem had caves – while we envision the shepherds watching their flocks in open pasture, in reality they were likely penned for the night into these rock overhangs along the field’s edge.  So the chapels are in the caves, complete with altars. 

Kemal, our Palestinian guide, speaking in the Shepherds Field chapel

where I had just finished celebrating and serving our group communion.

It got to where, when I got to the Church of St. John the Baptist in Madaba, Jordan, and I heard there was a well in the crypt, I said, “Of course there is a well.”  You could draw up the water and drink of the same town spring Iron Age Moabites had drunk. (Sense prevailed over piety, and I’d splash water from these wells and springs rather than drink.)

The most striking example of this descent was the church of St. Peter Gallicantu, outside Jerusalem's modern walls but squarely in the ancient city and believed to be upon the site of the High Priest Caiaphas’s house where Jesus was first tried. You can easily look across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives and trace the route Jesus must have taken to get there.  You start in a lovely French church built in 1932, with striking frescoes of the Jesus’ trail, Peter’s denial and heartbreak, Jesus’ crucifixion, and Peter’s post-resurrection restoration.  Then you descend to a lower chapel made from Crusader and Byzantine elements. Large areas of bedrock are exposed, with ancient Byzantine crosses carved into the stone as graffiti.  Then you go on down, down, down into the bedrock, to a series of rooms, some maybe storerooms and some prisons with places for bolts in the walls, dating to the first century.  Was this where Jesus was imprisoned?  Was this where Peter and the Apostles were imprisoned (Acts 5)?  Nearby archaeology suggests it is entirely plausible.  And being in the dank bedrock, the bowels of the earth, it feels like it could be truly here. And as I descended from level to level, I felt my spirit going deeper and deeper into the story and deeper into me.  Peter’s story.  My story!

What does a reordering of our search for God from "up" to "down" mean?  We long ago gave up Dante’s “3 story universe” of hades-earth-heaven.  But what does shifting our spiritual aspirations from the skies to the depths mean?  I think part is looking inward towards that place where the Image of God who I am communes with the Spirit of Christ who I trust.  Yes, that means threading through the maze of thoughts and feelings and emotions and reactions and instincts and complexes that form parts of our inner selves, though not our innermost Selves.  Part is trusting our own earthy, embodied, fleshly selves to be real us and to be vessels of the divine.  You know, that crazy “incarnation” thing that I keep coming back to. “The Word became flesh and encamped with us” John 1:14. (More on the downside of being an incarnate being in a subsequent blog post when I’ll talk about my pilgrimages’ shocking dénouement.)   It means to look to the earth, care for her times and seasons, her resources and ecology, and find our place embedded firmly within life on this planet rather than awaiting evacuation to the skies. 

Where is God?  I will keep asking this question as I ponder the caves, the wells, cracks, crevices and springs I visited.  I think there’s something important there for us steeple-raised Westerners.  And I invite you to consider where you find God.  In the heavens? In the depths?  Or someplace else entirely?

Church of the Holy Sepulcher -- Third Visit: The Pilgrim

You should read my blog about my first visit to Holy Sepulcher before reading this one.  But don't go looking for a blog post about the second visit, when we visited Holy Sepulcher with a guide.  It was much like my first, though with scholar eyes rather than tourist, and we hurried through with scant time for reflection.  So I will jump to my third visit.

But before I get there, let me tell a couple other stories first.  For one does not come to a pilgrimage site in isolation, but one brings everything their heart has gathered along the way.  And this third visit only happened because of what went before.

Those of you who know me know that my basic temperament is intellectal, that I approach the world and my Christian faith through my mind.  I'm gifted with the abilities to draw connections between ideas and events, and will cheerfully tell you all about the Battle of Yarmuk. (Fought in 636 AD on the high plains southeast of Damascus, it was the final defeat of the Romans (Byzantines) by the Arabs, signaling the end of 7 centuries of Roman rule and 3 centuries of Christian hegemony in the Holy Land, and the beginnings of Muslim rule that lasted to the First World War.). But I have little grasp of the mystical, emotional aspects of faithing.  Charismatics have haunted the edge of my life and ministry, sometimes causing me significant grief.  I do better with contemplative spirituality, but it is definitely my inferior functio, so takes more work.  But our inferior function is our growing edge, and so I have sought in recent years to give it more attention.  However it is still largely uncharted territory -- I can't figure it out!

On this pilgrimage, there has been plenty of fodder for my mind, and that is easy and fun (Yarmuk!).  I have also worked to provide space and time for the intuitive, emotional, noumenal, part of faith.  The first flash of this came in Nazareth, at the Basilica of the Annunciation.  We had toured a number of site that day, and came there late.  Unlike some of the florid Byzantine churches we visited, this was simple, modern, enormous, and airy.  I really liked it.  We went in, and made I made my way to the lower crypt, where the angel reputedly appeared to Mary.  I looked through the grate into the grotto with a simple altar on which was the Latin for "The Word became flesh."  I felt a shock, a jolt, a thrill physically through my body.  It was here, this spot, this place that Christ was incarnate!  My body resonated with the power of that insight.  Body, flesh, skin and bone and blood, sexuality, like my skin and bone and blood and sexuality, God became.  The wall between my head and heart had a definite crack that ran right through my body.

Sometime later, we visited Hebron, a city painfully divided between Jew and Palestinian.  We went into the Jewish side of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and there looked through grates to the cenotaphs of Abraham, Sarah and their family.  The actual tombs are in unvisited caves far below,  but this structure is basically unchanged since Herod fancied it up in the first century. It is one of the oldest religious buildings in the world whose use has stood unchanged.  We had looked at the monuments and as the guide talked, I walked back to Abraham's to take another look.  As I peered in, all of a sudden I said aloud, "Pray for me, Father Abraham."  What on earth did I just say? I was taken aback at myself; where did that come from?  I have no history or context of veneration of saints.  I hadn't been feeling particularly pious as we made or way through the silent streets of the militarized buffer zone, and then the hectic souk. Yet it was as clear and simple and spontaneous and unmediated a request as could be. I knew right away that the plea was genuine, bursting up from my heart fully formed, passing my lips before my mind could critique or censor it.  Somehow I had tapped into the  millions of voices who had said that prayer before me, and was carried aloft on that wave. Prayers for what for me?  I am not facing it a burning crisis, deep pain, or even spiritual ennui.  I hope Father Abraham has vision into my soul to know what he should pray, because I don't know.  No, I haven't figured it out.

It was a day or two later when I returned to the Holy Sepulcher.  I had visited a couple very nice churches earlier that day, particularly St Peter in Gallicantu, built on the site of the High Priest Caiphas' house and site of Peter's denials.  The crypts where Jesus and later the apostles were imprisoned was very striking.  You descend from the bright upper church down into the quiet lower church, and then deep into the dungeons and crypts below.  It is a descent from head to heart to body and earth.  I stopped to listen to the choir at St James, then went into the Christian Quarter .I did some sovenier shopping there and then made my way into Holy Sepulcher.

The church was crowded, with many Muslims who had just gotten out of Friday prayers.  I tried first to go up into the Greek chapel of Golgotha, but it was closed for a service.  Same thing when I went towards the stairs down to the Armenian section.  So I went back around to the main rotunda, where the Edicule  is.  The Edicule is a large rectangular structure built over the slap of the tomb where Jesus laid. It had fallen into serious disrepair, and since the early 19th century had beeen strapped together with iron bands.  The Status Quo agreement had prevented repairs, to prevent any of the sects sharing the church from taking credit.  Only a year ago an agreement was reached, and extensive repairs, cleaning, and excavation were accomplished, reopening in March.  So I'm lucky to see the refurbished product.

I had intended to work my way to the Edicule by way of the other chapels.  But I noticed that the line was quite short and jumped into the line, even if I didn't feel quite ready.  The interior is tiny, so only about 4 people at a time are let in by the monk attending the door.  I was almost to the door, when suddenly the line was stopped.  The pipe organ filled the place with music, echoing through the vast rotunda.  A corps of Franciscan monks came to the door, with singing and candles, and had a prayer service.  After about 10 minutes, they processed away into a side chapel where they continued with a Mass.   So, with about three other people, I was let in for my 30 seconds at the holiest place in Christendom.

The room is tiny, with the slab filling most of the space and standing alongside.  Icons and candles are around, and the woman next to me lights a candle.  I lay my hand on the slab.  The Latin inscription above the slab reads, "He is not here, he is risen!"  I felt something crack inside me, my spirit burst open, and tears started to well up in my eyes.  It was here, right here, that my Lord and Christ rose from the dead! I felt deep churning in my gut, and leaned down and kissed he slab. Still fighting tears, I had the clarity to snap a quick picture before the monk announced, "It's time" and ushered us out.

I meandered stricken across the rotunda, tears breaking free.  I found a column and went behind it, leaned into it, and cried.  And cried.  And cried.  Deep sobs, racking my body from the very depths.  For minutes on end.  Yes, I was the weird guy crying his eyes out behind a pillar. I'd pull myself together for a moment, and then it would start again.  Finally, I composed myself, and went and sat with a group of Sisters of Charity to watch the last of the Mass.

Whence these tears? I didn't feel necessarily sad, or joy, or anything else I could identify. I wasn't overcome with guilt for my sins, I wasn't mourning the loss of a love, job or dream.  I certainly wasn't winging up to highest heaven. It was more primal than that, gutsy and earthy. They were coming from the most profound depths of soul and, yes, body.  That bodily, incarnated and now resurrected Christ, was working me at my core. I still don't  know what happened or what it means.  A friend said to just let it be and let it rest.  And don't try to figure it out.

But this I have more than figured out:  Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!

And it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.

   

Walls: Holy and Hellish

"You can go," the soldier told me as he cradled a well oiled rifle.  He was leading a squad of similarly armed soldiers who were protecting workers with a boom crane as they set 6' tall concrete blocks into place.  It appeared that they were blocking off vehicle access to the dead end street that led to the pedestrian crossing from Bethlehem towards Jerusalem.  A crowd of angry taxi drivers milled around, for this was where they gathered to take fares into the center of Bethlehem and elsewhere.  I walked past the equipment, up a hundred foot pedestrian tunnel, through a tall turn style.  I showed my passport and visa to the soldier there, crossed an empty parking lot, down a pedestrian tunnel, through another tall turnstyle cage, through a metal detector while my knapsack was x-rayed.  Through a line to a booth and another passport check, and I stepped outside into Israel.  Easy for me, but a daily gauntlet for Palestinians who might be lucky enough to have a pass to work in Israel.

Looming behind me as I walked up the hill to Tantur was The Wall. Snaking as far as the eye could see in either direction, the "separation barrier" is built of concrete panels 20' high and 6' wide to make a solid barrier.  Occasional watch towers and razor wire complete the picture.  Israel started the wall during the 2nd Intifada as a way to prevent suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israel, where they had been wreaking havoc and killing scores. Ostensibly a temporary measure only because of the bombings (which stopped in 2006), construction continues.  Unlike its famous Berlin prototype which was on the border, it is built on Palestinian land, sometimes miles inside the Green Line (1967 border).  It winds around villages, wraps Israeli settlements into the main body of Israel, and often cuts Palestinian villages off from their crop lands.  It can only be crossed at heavily guarded checkpoints, either full barriers like I just crossed, or vehicular crossings on specific highways.

While the Palestinians hate the Wall, likening it to living in a prison, the Israelis consider it an unfortunate necessity due to terrorism.  No mere theoretical possibility, the memory is seared deeply. I was being shown around Gilo one evening, the leafy suburb/settlement next to Tantur, and several different memorials were pointed out to me of people, often children, killed.  One was for the guard at the elementary school, who died preventing a terrorist from getting into the classrooms.  A week ago a policewoman died in a knife attack near Jerusalem's Damascus Gate.  For Israelis this is but the latest round of two thousand years of persecution, pogroms, and genocide:  They want to kill us.  We must be strong.  We will be armed.  We will build a wall, no matter the cost.  Security trumps any and every consideration.

"Good fences make good neighbors" has its ultimate expression at Hebron.  Hebron had a centuries long co-existence as a city holy to both Jews and Muslims due to the shrine of the Patriarchs. Abraham had bought the field of Machpelah to bury Sarah, himself, and subsequently his son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and his son Jacob and his wife Leah.  (Jacob's other wife, Rachel, died in childbirth and her tomb is at Bethlehem.). Then, in 1929, fearing the increasing presence of Zionist colonists in the region, local youth went on a rampage, killing scores of Jews.  The survivors, some of whom had been sheltered by their Arab neighbors, fled to Jerusalem.  Hebron remained uniformely Arab until Israel conquered the West Bank in the 1967 War.

Shortly thereafter, highly motivated religious Jews moved back to the city, building a suburban settlement and a couple of enclaves in the heart of the city near the shrine.  There were periodic clashes, bombings and riots perpetuated by both sides.  A cycle of retribution set in, until "who struck first" was completely lost in the smoke.  The nadir came when a US born Jew entered the mosque at the shrine during prayers, and shot dead some 30 worshippers and wounded a hundred others.  Bystanders subdued and killed him when he stopped to reload.

His grave, in a park in the settlement, is revered as of a martyr by the most radical settlers.

Enough! Said the authorities.  So Hebron is under a different military order than the rest of the West Bank:  total and complete separation between peoples.  Palestinians are forbidden to enter Jewish areas and vice versa.  Surrounding the Jewish enclaves in the city are buffer zones, where Palestinians may go on foot, but there are no cars allowed, commerce has been eliminated, and most homes abandoned.  It is like walking through something from a Mad Max movie, a post-apocalyptic Twilight Zone of abandoned streets, shop doors welded shut, barbed wire at every turn, and soldiers on every street corner.  The Jewish enclaves are surrounded by barb wire and checkpoints at every entrance.  While some Palestinians can cross into Israel in other areas, there are no crossings here.  Is this the ultimate conclusion of the Wall, two peoples side by side but never even seeing each other?

There is one more wall to consider, one with more hope:  the Western Wall.  This wall is the west side of the foundation platform Herod the Great built to support his greately expanded Jewish Temple.  The Temple was razed by the Romans in AD 70 and the site stood derelict until the Mosque of Omar and the Dome of the Rock were built in the 7th century.  Sometime in the 18th century, Jews started praying there as the closest one cold get to the temple site.  After the 1967 War brought the area under Israeli control, housing was cleared and a plaza constructed so now hundreds of Jews and others visit the wall every day.  There they pray and leave prayers an intentions on slips of paper in the cracks. It is a richly spiritual place, sanctified by thousands of prayers.

 Which wall will truly endure?  Berlin's lasted merely 30 years.  China's Great Wall has endured for centuries, even if it didn't ultimately keep the Mongols at bay.  I would hope that the praying wall is what endures.  That some day, both of the peoples of the land, Israeli and Palestinian, would join to

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem."

Shabbat with a gay couple during Tel Aviv Pride

During Tel Aviv Pride, I want to a Shabbat dinner at the home of a gay family.  I had found the opportunity during my advance research, through the website EatWith.com.  Now worldwide, Eat With is a program that began in Israel, first to enable newcomers who had recently made Aliyah (that is, for Jews to "ascend" or formally immigrate to Israel) to meet people and assimilate to Israeli society.  It is a challenge to create a unified society and culture when people arrive from every corner of the world, and there are extensive networks of classes and events to help people learn Hebrew, navigate governmental bureaus, find housing, work and schooling, etc.  This program seeks to provide an informal way for people to connect over a meal in a home.  It is also poplular simply to help people make friends in a big, sometimes anonymous, city.  The host sets a price on par with a night at a restaurant, and advertises the sort of meal and gathering.  Some are ethnic, "An Evening in Thailand," "Our Cinco de Mayo Fiesta," while other are more prosaic, "A Vegan Feast," "Wine and Song."  This was "Shabbat Dinner with Sammy and Dan."  I had paid online, and received directions to their apartment.

I was among the very first to arrive, and it quickly became apparent that most of the guests weren't necessarily from the program, but were friends from work and school.  Danny was working the kitchen, while Sammy was the social butterfly.  Their 5 year old son alternately played in his room and came out to mug for the guests, and played with those he knew.  Everyone was friendly, making sure to introduce themselves.  Most spoke some English, there were also French speakers, and everyone (but me!) spoke Hebrew.  Some were self-described "ex-pats" who had come to Israel to study or work, and then fallen in love, married and stayed.  So there was the linguistics student from Utah with his PhD student boyfriend, the PhD student in human rights and his boyfriend who worked with an NGO school system.  (Yes, there seemed to be a pattern.). Several straight families were there with toddlers, a few single people of each gender, and everyone seemed to be enjoying the company and the wine.

This was a secular Jewish gathering, though in fact I was not the only non Jew present. But as at the start of every Shabbat, the women present, sharing the role of "mother" lit the candles and said a prayer to which everyone responded Amen.  Then Sammy poured wine, everyone sang a blessing,  and Sammy had his son drink a bit before he finished it off.  They then handed the loaves to one of the men, who raised them up and said a blessing, to which everyone said Amen. Then, doubtlessly in good secular Jewish custom, Sammy pointed out which dishes were vegan and which were merely vegaterian. I was pretty sure kosher wasn't commented because it was simply assumed. I never knew vegan cooking could be so varied and so good!  I'd be hard pressed to describe the wide variety of dishes on the table, vegatibles and hummus and sauces, olives and pickles of different kinds of vegetables.  I filled my plate, and then helpful guests piled on yet more, "So you can eat like an Israeli."  They weren't shy about piling their plates high!

I moved around the apartment and small balcony a few times, making the small talk of "How do you know Sammy? Where are you from? What do you do?"  I learned that the most remarkable thing about being a Protestant clergy was that, unlike priests, I could have sexual relations.  Wouldn't have been in my Top Ten Points of Protestantism, but consider that nearly all the Christian's in Israel are either Roman (or Roman connected) or Greek (or other Orthodox) all of which require clerical celibacy.  I then had two very different conversations that made my evening full.

The first was with a woman who had grown up in Nazareth.  She is an Orthodox Catholic (Melkite), married to an American ex-pat. I asked about her family and life, and learned that during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, they had tried to "run away" from the fighting to Lebanon, which border is about 20 miles away. But their truck broke down in the middle of the night, and they had to turn back, "which ended up being a good thing, because otherwise we would have ended up like my cousins living forever in a refugee camp in Lebanon."  Maybe even at the Sabra or Shatila camps, where in 1982 during the Lebanon war, Phalangist militias allied with Israel massacred between 350 and 3500 refugees.  Instead, she had gone to the Baptist school in Nazareth, "One of the very best schools in all of Israel."  She told me that as "a minority's within a minority (an Eastern Catholic Arab amid an Arab minority) she and others like her had to work extra hard.  "So you will see, we are the most successful in all Israel, the doctors and lawyer, so we prove ourselves."   Being a minority is harder, but she has a happy life. She was a delight to talk with.

A few minutes later another man sat by me. I'd beeen enjoying the antics of his toddler daughter all evening.  Now he was a man on a mission.  "What you need to know about us Israelis are that we are very direct and will tell you just what we think," he opened.  "The 1967 War was the most important war for us and for our self-understanding."  He told me that before the war everyone was terrified, "We all thought we were going to die."  There were Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan all set to invade, the tension was high for a month before the war, and at its narrow point it was only 9 miles for Jordan to reach the ocean and cut the country in two.  "The country had only lived for 19 years, our leaders had all escaped Hitler's Europe and the death camps. We were going to die.  We had lived just to come here to die? What were we to do but fight?"   This was the week of the 50th annivesary of the war, there had been both celebrations and protests of the outcome.  "How old were you during the war, I asked.  He told me he was not yet born, he was born in 1983.  Hmmm.   "So we fought, and the Arabs threw down their weapons and ran.  We learned that we could be strong.  And never would we be afraid again."  He went on to tell me that "Obama, he ruined everything.  Syria, Libya, he stirred up the Palestinians.  It's a mess!  But we will not give in."  Trump, on the other hand "Understands us, that we will take care of ourselves first. He's the kind of American friend we need."  During this, his wife shot him the "It's time to leave, dear" eye a couple of times as the party was breaking up, but I ended up having to end the discussion, thank him for sharing his point of view with me, and take my leave of the host.

As rough as that last discussion felt, I was completely glad I'd gone to the dinner.  There were others I'd loved to have talked to (the PhD student in human rights, what did that mean for him? And what a about the handsome Frenchman?).  What was fascinating was that all in one dinner party were so many divergent stories, both those I recounted above had been talking amicably to each other at different points.

Pilgrimage is being present to those God puts before you, the pleasant and the opinionated, the fluent English speaker and the discussion in broken world and hand gestures. I hope to find more opportunities for these unprogammed spontaneous encounters.

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt With Pride Among Us: Experiencing Tel Aviv Gay Pride

This weekend I joined 200,000 of my closest friends for Tel Aviv Gay Pride, the only Pride celebration in the Middle East and one of the largest in the world.  The municipality puts on the main event, and estimates that as many as 30,000 come from abroad to spend their dollars and euros.  I got to explore the fair, celebrate Shabbat at a gay family’s home (through EatWith.com), dance at a giant rave with hot gay men, wade in the cool ocean, and go to a Pet Shop Boys concert (which shows my age).

The event is not without controversy. There were religious counter protesters, transplanted American evangelicals and local groups of uncertain affiliation.  More important were marchers with signs and t-shirts against “Pink Washing.”  Pink Washing is the idea that Israel markets its tolerance for gays in Tel Aviv to Western liberal elites to divert attention from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  And a sub theme is that Tel Aviv is held up as this open place, while gays in the Palestinian Authority are driven underground or co-opted by  the security services upon pain of exposure to homophobic families.  This is another of many cases where “The Situation,” as both Israelis and Palestinians call it, rears its ugly head.  My own half formed opinion is that it is a move to set oppressed peoples against one another in a divide and conquer move.  So while Israel recognizes gay marriages performed elsewhere, they (or and civil marriage) are not performed here.  While Tel Aviv Pride has 200,000 marchers, Jerusalem has around 2,000.  And the Pink Washing marchers were receiving as many middle fingers as cheers.

You might ask why, in the midst of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I stepped away from the program go do Pride for a weekend.  Isn’t a big gay party a distraction from the holy work I'm pursuing?  The answer is two-fold.

On pilgrimage, I do not only bring my intellectual and professional self.  To be fully present to the people, places and Spirit I’m engaging, I need to bring my whole self to pilgrimage.  Gay people struggle mightily with re-integrating our sexuality and our spirituality. Pilgrimage is to be a holistic transformative and integrative process.  To leave out a core of my imago Dei, my capacity for relationship at the deepest level, would miss the reason for going.

More importantly, Gay Pride reminds me that I am an embodied person following an incarnational faith.  I too often act as if Christianity is about an abstract, ethereal, disembodied spirit.   But God is incarnate in flesh in Christ:  my body isn't something to cart my brain around.

The particular gift GLBT people bring to the Body of Christ is a reclaiming of bodily, sexual, passionate existence.  In drag, we reshape and subvert patriarchal power.  In dance, we open to ecstasy, caught up in the beat and the crowd.  By highlighting sexuality, we invite straight people to consider how even their embodied human sexuality is a good gift from a passionate God.

So I needed to dance with 1,000 other men until my exhausted body was drenched with sweat. I needed to clap and chant and shout and march until my feet were sore.  I needed to relish an ice cream in a park surrounded by crowds of happy bodies.  I needed to talk to the Palestinian from Jericho who introduced himself as “Osama bin Laden,” and I needed to listen to the Israeli who told me that Obama “ruined everything” but Trump understands that they will never ever again allow their Jewish bodies to be herded to slaughter.

This Holy Land pilgrimage is not just about seeing the settings for ancient stories.  It is not even about unearthing bodies long gone.  It is about meeting the living bodies of the land here and now. It is even about following a resurrected body.  Gay Pride sets bodies free from agony to ecstasy.  Gay Pride helps set my body free, free to be present in this amazing Holy Land.

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Join the community at Northern Colorado Pride on Saturday July 15 in Fossil Creek Park at the Lakeside Pavilion from 10 a.m to 4 p.m.  See www.NoCoEquality.org/events

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, First Visit -- The Tourist

Sunday afternoon, after worshiping in a Syriac church near the Damascus Gate, I decided to wander in the Old City.  Being my first time there, I purposefully did not set a goal other than to walk up and down the street, seeing whatever I might find.  A true tourist walk.

First, I went thru a narrow bazaar, stalls piled high with fruits and vegetables, housewares and clothes.  I turned off into residential areas occasionally, but there was not too much to see behind high walls and closed doors. I kept finding myself back on a commercial street.  There discovered myself to be on the Via Dolorosa, the way tradition tells us Jesus carried his cross from Pilate's fortress to Golgotha (then outside the city walls, tho now well within them).  I was passed by groups of brightly dressed African pilgrims singing as they went.  I looked inside a few churches along the way -- the Church of the Flaggelation was particularly striking -- but not being in a particularly pious mood, soon turned off onto a side street.

Seeing what looked like an open park ahead, I went towards it, only to be stopped by two very large Israeli policeman.  "You a Muslim?" They asked.  "No," I said.  "You can't go in."  I gazed past them, into the other courts of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the ancient high place of the city, on the platform built by Herod for the JewishTemple.  "What are you looking for?" one asked in a challenging tone.  "Just looking," I replied, as I peered around him.  As I turned away, I heard him mutter to his fellows, "Tourists!"

After some more wandering and a lunch stop at a street side cafe near the Austrian Hospice, I was again on the Via Dolorasa.  I decided to follow it to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of both Jesus' crucifixion and his resurrection.

Coming into the square, it scarcely looks like a church.  You can't see the domes, the main clue are the hoarders of pilgrims.  Some alone, some families, many organized groups and all from the ends of the earth.  I walked in the door, and the first thing you see is the Stone of Anointing, a low slab where Jesus' body was prepared for burial.  Kneeling at the slab, pilgrims drew handkerchiefs along the stone, making a sacred souvenir, laid down their heads, and wept.

I wasn't into it.  I shot some discrete photos, and then went right into a chapel with exposed bedrock:  the dry hill of the skull, Golgotha.  Plexiglass protected the stone from chipping pilgrims.  Again people were praying intently.  This was where their Lord died!

Not being willing to be drawn into it, I wen down a hall and staircase to the Armenian section of the church.  You see, the management of the church is divided by decree of the Ottoman Sultan in the 1840's, the "Status Quo" agreement, into areas for the Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Copts and Ethiopians.  Each sect has their own areas, and woe betide the careless monk who strays into another's zone!  There was an excellent Byzantine mosaic floor, and very large and impressive paintings -- maybe of the rescue of the Real Cross from the Persians (628 AD) with the mountains of Ararat in the background.  Another chapel with a small altar filled with candles; I found myself chuckling at seeing a fire extinguisher tucked discretely against the wall.

Coming back into the aisles alongside the nave, which you can't see from there because of construction scaffolding, I went around to the Edicule, the small shrine built over the very tomb of Jesus.  I'll write more about its recent refurbishment and archaeology another time.  A long line waited to get in, and not feeling very pious, decided against going in.  Why take time and space from another who is ready for it?  I'll come another day, when I feel ..... What?

I was seeing the place as a tourist, not as a pilgrim.  I could marvel at the size, recognize the different periods of architecture, gaze respectfully upon the icons.  I could be alternately challenged and repulsed by the florid displays of devotion all around me.  Maybe, as a rather an-iconic Protestant, there was too much imagery.  More likely, as an intellectal introvert, all the praying, weeping, singing, kissing of icons was too much.  I was jockeying with the other tourists for the best camera angle, and not feeling that was my best self.  I didn't feel bad, just detached, a vaguely interested observer watching Christians run around in a Petri dish.

"Just Looking."  I think that is, for me, the first move of really "being here."  Maybe I have to be the "tourist" first.  Looking, listening, tasting, smelling.  But not yet ready to let loose my spirit, to bare my soul, to make myself vulnerable to the untamed Spirit of the place.  That, and any transformation it may bring, will have to wait.  On this particular pilgrimage, I have the unbelievable gift of time.  I will go again to the church tomorrow on a guided tour.  Maybe I will have the eyes of a scholar, a historian, an observer of religious arts.  I think I will probably visit it yet a third time, God willing, with the heart of a pilgrim.

June 7, 2017
Tantur, Jerusalem

PS:  Does anybody know how to insert a picture into a Blogger blog like this?  I can copy pix to the clipboard, but when I past them in they're huge and I can't figure out how to resize them.  And all that shows on preview is a little box, not the pix at all.  So need some Help...!

The Journey: The Spirit Finds a Way, but the Body Walks It

It seems fitting to be reflecting on the "journey" aspect of pilgrimage while in transit to Israel. I've been flying since 10 a.m. yesterday; it's now the next morning and I've just boarded my final leg from Paris to Tel Aviv.  My sleeping and eating schedule are completely scrambled. The iPad tells me it is 5 a.m. Back home, and it's 11 o'clock here.

Of course, I have relatively few complaints compared to pilgrims in past centuries.  A couple of days wisks me to the Holy Land, rather than months on ships, horses and afoot. Stewardesses attend to my every need (almost), rather than being at the mercy of sea captains, caravan wranglers, bandits and innkeepers.  Even the predictable interview with El Al security was eased by the well-timed production of a business card.  (You try to explain what is "Plymouth Congregational" to someone from another culture!)  

Modern air travel removes much of what made for the communitas of past pilgrims.  While everyone has their TSA, lost luggage, or weather delay story, pilgrims often are not actually experiencing those things together.  Shared hardships provide some of the bonding of communitas.  Perhaps that is why artificial sufferings are often built into pilgrimages:  walking barefoot up a sacred mountain, fasting, sunrise vigils.

But the journey did not begin at 10 yesterday morning.  Like every pilgrimage, this journey really began months, even years, ago.  It began with a hunger to see the places Jesus walked.  It was nourished by Bible courses that sought to make clear the history and archaeology of place.  It started to crystallize about four years ago, when I first decided that I was not getting any younger and started seriously investigating pilgrimage options.   That led directly to the Turkey pilgrimage with Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan just three years ago.  But the Holy Land still called, so I started researching more options there, and discovered (among others, most notably St. George Anglican's programs) Tantur.  I'll write more specifically about Tantur later.  

The preparation period opens up an imaginative space.  What am I trying to accomplish?  Why does this draw me so?  Wonder how I'll feel when I see the Church of the Holy Sepulcher?  How will I come to grips with understanding the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians? What is being gay like in Israel?  How do Jews here (or Muslims here) relate their spiritualities and sexualities?  And just what will these stones I look at mean?

So started weeks of research.  I plowed though a few books on biblical archaeology and history.  I read Lonely Planet guides,  Chacour's "Blood Brothers, Sennett's "The Body and the Blood," revisited Michener's "The Source."  Wandered around websites Zionist, LGBT, and Palestinian. Indeed, the more I studied the less I knew:  and so know it is only in being there I may come to any sort of full accounting.

I am penning this last paragraph after being in Tel Aviv two days and finishing the first full day of programs at Tantur.  Which leaves me one last observation about "journey."

Tantur is right next to Hebron Road, the main road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.  The ways the hills go it is pretty much the only route.  So whatever one might say about the "authenticity" of this or that place -- was Jesus really born in this grotto? Did Abraham offer Isaac up on this rock?  Was this the sycamore tree Zachary's climbed to see Jesus? -- it is quite certain that this road, a mere 100 yards from where I am typing, was the very road Jacob walked before losing Rachel, King David took back and forth from his capitol to his hometown, Mary and Joseph took the baby Jesus up to the temple upon, and a million pilgrims since have trod in honor to them all.  The journey might be as close to the place as we get.  We'll see.

People: Different Every Time

A core component of pilgrimage is "communitas" the web of relations in which the pilgrim journeys.
There are one's fellow pilgrims, organized perhaps by the same leader, church or tour group.  There are those pilgrims with whom one is not formally connected, but who are going to the same destination.   Then there are the fellow travelers; seat mates on an airplane, commuters sharing the same bus, pedestrians along the sidewalk. Finally, there are those service personnel without whom the  project would be impossible:  drivers, translators, waiters, pilots, bathroom attendants, flight attendants, guides, etc.

This communal aspect to pilgrimage is something I resist.  I'm basically an introvert, and jealous of my personal space and time. I arrive at a high mountain lake and consider it overrun if there is but one other party there.  I wander off from the group, sometimes deluding myself that I can still hear the guide on my headset AND take in the wonders he is passing by and I am miraculously discovering on my own.  I indulge in the oldest American spiritual sin, that of rugged individualism.  "God helps those who help themselves."

Yet it is through other people that I have had the most profound experiences.  Other people crack me out of my easy assumptions faster than anything else.  I found after my Turkey trip that it was the unexpected encounters that later kept me awake at night.  Sometimes it was trying to get my head around radically different understandings of life, theology and politics.  Sometimes it has been praying for their safety as the political situation in Turkey has deteriorated.  Sometimes it is just sheer wonder that such fascinating people and I crossed paths.

I'd be remiss to talk only in general terms about the people.  There was the goatherd who, despite the failure of Google Translate, let me photograph him and his animals.  There was the retired English widow with her 22 year old very pretty Turk boy-toy zooming from bar to bar on his motor scooter in the dead of night. The English tourist whose partner had long since gone to bed after a long day of longing on the beach, who, observing my nervous carefulness with my drink and my hypervigilance of strange situations told me "Get yer bloody head outta yer ass!  And buy me a drink!"  There was the highly educated polyglot civil servant who, while counting himself an agnostic, detailed me the story of Lut (Lot) and the Koran's anti gay take on the Sodom story, mixed with his sadness at only falling in love with unavailable married straight men.

Of quite a different impact are those one intentionally journeys with.  I must confess to not having paid due attention to them.  Perhaps it was knowing that it was only a temporary set of relationships that made me avoid deep connection. Probably some of it was my introversion, where holding myself apart seems like the path of emotional safety.  Yet they provided structure around the journey.  Some was as simple as my roommate putting up with me drying sink-laundered clothes all over the balcony.  Others were as profound as Marianne Borg asking when I came out of Goreme's Dark Church,
"What did you think?"  "I'm speechless, " I replied.  "Struck mute."  Her simple question helped me crystallize an otherwise overwhelming experience.  Companions help us see, help us articulate, help us attend to what I'm experiencing.  And help find the right airline gate and the nearest bathroom!

So on this trip:  I commit to pay attention to the people among whom God places me.  I've worked to set up opportunities to meet with gay people, Israeli and Palestinian, with a particular focus on those who are maintaining their religious identity (Jewish, Muslim, or Christian).  I commit to be present to those in my class cohort, as wildly diverse as it appears we are (Catholic and Protestant, from very conservative to radically liberal).  Not to pre-judge anyone by labels, but to let the relationship between us unfold naturally.

So God of Jesus, the one who welcomed all:  give me an open heart to those you bring my way.  Amen.

PLACE.... An Elusive Goal

The place seems pretty straight-foward -- pilgrimages go to a sacred place, a place where the divine and human seem particularly close together.  The places are often associated with a thick set of sacred narratives -- the acts of prophets, saints or Christ; the story of God's people as they have struggled to live faithfully; stories of prior pilgrims approaching the same place.  Sometimes the place doesn't look like much, and sanctified imagination is needed to reconstruct the ruins into a once living community.   Sometimes the place is where something is honored or memorialized, even if the odds of it being the correct historical location are nil.  Yet the faith of communities have sacralized even a 'wrong' place.  (I think of Mary's house near Ephesus as a prime example of this.  The beautiful gardens, chapels and grounds, hallowed by Christian and Muslim prayers, was only identified in the 19th century -- by vision of a nun in Germany!  Yet the Spirit is thick in the place.)

Virgin Mary's House, Hills above Ephesus

 
And many places are layered, even contested -- the same site that was once a Canaanite temple became an Israelite high place, then a Christian shrine, a Muslim mosque, a Crusader church, a mosque again, and the current edifice was built by the Franciscans in the 19th century and completely remodeled in 1958!  Or the place is even currently contested, as Abraham's tomb in Hebron.  Or shared, as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  So what is before your eyes, the goal as it were of pilgrimage, is not necessarily (ever?) what one expects.  Place is not so simple after all.

The very idea of pilgrimage places is challenging.   After all, don't I believe that God is everywhere, that God is as present to me as my own breath?  Couldn't I throw a dart at a map, follow where it lands and go on a pilgrimage to 3rd and Elm in town, and experience God every bit as fully as if I'm kneeling at an ancient altar?

I think this is why pilgrimage involves the other two aspects -- the journey and the people.  Journey takes the place out of the ordinary flow of our lives, and gives it intention.  And the people provide a tapestry of narratives that go far beyond what I myself might bring to a place.  I'll explore these further in subsequent posts.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

I've always loved travel.  Backpacking and camping trips were one of the highlights of my childhood.  Two college summers doing missionary work in France -- and hitch-hiking solo to the Alps, backpacking and then hostling across Switzerland and Austria rate as one of my greatest adventures.  Subsequent years have brought journeys as diverse as a conference in Australia, Caribbean and Alaska cruises, and vacations in Canada, London,  Paris, California, D.C, and New Orleans. 

But in recent years, there has been dawning a more spiritual edge to my travels.  I've always wanted to see the sacred places -- the cathedrals, museums, and wild peaks.  Some places I've returned to again and again precisely because they have been places that let me feel closer to God.  Cottonwood in the John Muir Wilderness, Sequoia National Park, Ring Lake Ranch in Wyoming, and Ghost Ranch in New Mexico have become prime pilgrimage goals for me.  Then in 2014, I had the incredible privilege to go on a structured pilgrimage to Turkey with Marcus and Marianne Borg, and Dom and Sarah Crossan.  This was the first that the language and literature of pilgrimage really started coming into focus for me. 

Now I am on the eve of departing for a far longer pilgrimage, to the Holy Land.  I will spend a month with a cohort of pilgrims based at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem  www.tantur.org.  The program is particularly attractive to me because it is a mix of classroom instruction and field trips to holy sites.  It is also attractive because of the ecumenical, interfaith, and multicultural makeup of faculty and fellow pilgrims. While operated by the University of Notre Dame, on land owned by the Vatican since the 19th century, Christian, Jewish and Muslim voices come together; Israelis and Palestinians enter dialogue; the very traditional and the radically liberal sit at supper together.  When my month there is done, I will have a week on my own to explore sites in Jordan.  This whole pilgrimage will be just shy of six weeks long. 

In subsequent posts, I want to set the stage for what I expect to unfold in these coming weeks.  Pilgrimage is a dynamic relationship, unique in each incarnation, woven from the place, the journey and the people involved.  I'll explore each of these:  Place, Journey, and People.  This analysis of the essentials of pilgrimage shaped the title of this blog.  I hope that this helps me make sense of the experince, even as I hold open space in my heart for the unexpected.  For pilgrimage by its very nature cannot be prescribed, it must be received.  I pray that I am receptive!

 Tantur, Main Gate