We are back! As you may know, we have been back since Sept 22. As soon as we got home several things happened. Jim had caught a cold while we were away, and he gave it to me! Of course, I got it all, cold and bronchitis. That took three weeks to finally get over! Then, at the same time, I was taking care of a very sore knee. It's the same knee I tore out 12 years ago, and I'm not surprised that I have wrenched it again. The ACL is in good shape, but I've torn up some other stuff. After weeks of waiting to see if it got better and using ice and meds, I had an MRI and now I go off to the orthopedic doc. Isn't it nice that he's in my Bible Study class!! All of that makes this post very late for October. In order to catch up, I am going to post two short essays I wrote for the church newsletter. They'll give you an idea about the trip to the Holy Land and how I responded. I hope you enjoy them. V. P.S. We also learned our beloved Pastor Rachel is leaving us. She'll preach her last sermon for us on Sunday!
Traveling Stories-The Wadi Qelt
5:30AM-That morning we were asked to have breakfast between 5 and 5:30 AM so we could be on the road before sunrise. Jim and I had set our clocks wrong and jumped up two hours early; after we munched a pita bread and cheese and drank a quick cup of coffee, we napped on the bus. There were 25 of us, but the group was quiet on the bus. We were told to bring our prayer books, our hats, and water and to wear good walking shoes. The bus parked along side the road, and we started the walk up a rocky hill, covered with loose stones and bigger rocks. We reached the top of the hill to see over into a valley, dropping down steeply below. We walked along the edge of a steep ravine; I had my hand on Jim’s shoulder in front of me as we walked the narrow path. It was steep and I felt the fear that I could plunge over the edge. I kept my head down and my eyes on the rocky path in front of me until we reached the level spot on a point, looking over to the place where Jesus might have sat in his time of temptation. We were there to feel the presence of Christ.
Iyad, our guide, said quietly, “I know some of you had to deal with fear as you came here. It is good sometimes to have fear. Now we will share our morning prayers and then we will be silent. We have forty-five minutes and the Bedouins will come.” We read our morning prayer together and then there was quiet, each of us finding a place to sit or stand apart from each other.
6:30AM-The sun rose orange over the edge of the hills. All around were cream colored hills, rolling like waves into the desert. The silence was complete. There was no noise from any city, planes, music, humans, only the occasional rock fall over the edge of the hillside, bouncing down the side of the cliff. No birds sang; no animal cried out. The silence was like a wave on my ears, allowing me to hear my heart beat. The hills were lined with paths made by sheep or goats, crisscrossing the steep edges. Small rust colored bushes dotted the hills, and only in the deep valley did we see a few green trees, scrubby blotches on the golden expanse below. The breeze turned cool, waiting for the noon day heat of 100 degrees or higher. The silence was a gift after the chatter of our voices. I was glad I over came the fear to be there on the mountaintop to begin one of our last days in the Holy Land.
7:45 AM-I sat and prayed for our group, for our church, for my friends and for myself. I looked at the hillside and thought about the trip and what it had meant to me. Each day was a revelation of some ancient truth about Christ and this land. The group had spread out around me, as we watched the sun rise higher and higher in the sky. We were silent.
Then, I heard a strange, low animal rumble, growing louder and deeper. I turned and looked behind me. There on the hillside was a camel and the Bedouins. They had arrived so quietly, we had not heard them. They were sitting above us on the hillside, watching and waiting for our silent time to finish so they could offer us camel rides. The Arab boys had come, too, with their donkeys. A one armed Bedouin held bone necklaces over his arm, selling them for $10. Another sold scarves, traditional Arab head pieces for men. We all burst into laughter, and picked our way back along the edge to get back on the bus. We bought necklaces, head scarves and other souvenirs, jolted back into the 21 Century, and away from our visit waiting on the hillside with Christ.
It was a morning to remember, thinking about Jesus in that landscape and knowing his isolation on his hillside. It was one of many mornings when I saw Him as a man, walking the hillsides and valleys of his birthplace. It was a reminder that I should go apart from others now and then and wait for the silence before the Bedouins of my life activities arrive to distract me from His presence.
Traveling Stories-Ramallah
St Andrews Church and The Evangelical Episcopal School
Their faces were the faces of children everywhere: five year olds with curly hair, straight hair, blonde hair, or clipped short black hair. They smiled and looked frightened at the strange people waving at them; we were Americans who had come to visit their kindergarten class. We smiled and tried to be reassuring, but few spoke to us, and all seemed shy in that first room. Sharon Beck from St A’s went right in to the next room of first graders and gave a high five to a young boy, drawing him into a conversation. In the fourth grade class they were studying English, writing in workbooks. Rachel and I went up to speak to the teacher and she told us about their needs. In every place we asked what we could do. Everyone wants money, the answer to so many of their problems, but I wanted something tangible to take back to the parish to tell our members. When I mentioned English dictionaries, the young teacher looked surprised and then said that would be a great idea. We agreed 35 would be a good number. In another room, the first graders entertained us with dancing and an Arabic version of, “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.” They giggled and wiggled and jumped just like every first grade class you’ve ever seen, except they all wear uniforms, colored T-shirts to show the different grades. The 8th graders had written essays about the struggles of their grand-parents in the war between Israel and Palestine. They were heart wrenching stories about separation and loss and death. These were Palestinian children, and they only know they can not travel to Jerusalem even if they have a grandmother living there. Outside during recess, four eighth grade boys posed for photos, grinning and looking like pre-teens everywhere, but they, too, wore uniforms, black pants and white colored shirts.
The principal was open about their struggles to maintain the school. Muslim and Christian children study together and only separate for religion classes, and only 30% are Christian. They have room to board as many as 97 children who need an education, orphans or children from refugee camps, but they are not allowed to bring in children from outside any more. Today they only have 10 living at the school. They know of needy children in Jordan and elsewhere, but they are banned from entering the Palestinian area.
We were in Ramallah where they never see tour buses because it is supposed to be dangerous there. Ramallah was once the headquarters of Yasser Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, icon and long-time face of the Palestinian cause. Now few tourists come to visit their city. People waved at us as we went by in the bus, smiling at the surprise of a tour bus in the middle of their busy streets. We were in the heart of Palestine. “Israel has occupied the West bank and Gaza Strip (about 2,200 square miles) since the 1967 6-day war, and has built settlements with a population of about 220,000, mostly in the West Bank.” In 1993 Israel limited “the flow of Palestinian workers to Israel to prevent infiltration of terrorists, and by strict checks at border checkpoints. The border closing drastically reduced the Palestinian standard of living…Checkpoints around Jerusalem made it difficult for Palestinians to get to work in Jerusalem and to travel between Palestinian towns…. In March of 2002, Israel launched operation Defensive Wall in the West Bank and has since reoccupied most of the territories ceded to the Palestinians in the West Bank. (They)… set up additional checkpoints and (have) kept towns under virtual siege with extended periods of curfew, disrupting work, education and daily life. Ditches surround towns, preventing people from leaving…A security barrier [Apartheid Wall] being built inside the West Bank cuts off Palestinians from their lands and from other towns, and destroys olive groves and other property…. The route of the fence has been changed several times under international pressure.”
In the midst of this national tension, the message we were given by children and adults, both Muslim and Christian was: “Tell the world, we want peace.” They live in peace, going about their work and studies every day. They worship at their chosen places, they celebrate their special days, and they raise their families just as they have always done. They all know their leaders must see the need for peace before anything can change in their lives. They know it will be an exceptional leader who will lead them into a peaceful coexistence with those of other faiths. Perhaps that leader will come from that school we visited. Perhaps he or she will be one of those sweet faces we saw when we visited Ramallah and the Evangelical Episcopal School.
