St. George's

On Sunday morning, we attended church at St. George's Cathedral for their Arabic/English service, the place where I stayed on my first trip here. Stepping back into the refuge of their walls came with a rush of grateful familiarity. Hosam Naoum, the dean of the Cathedral and a fellow VTS grad, preached on fear vs. love in our lectionary's passage from Luke. They were particularly poignant words.

The movements and rhythms and melodies felt like home. Afterwards, we shared coffee with a wonderful old friend, Bishara, the logistics director (aka, the muscle and cat-herder of our wandering pilgrimage group.) We spoke about the plight of the Israeli/Palestinian impasse, and Melissa asked if Christians were stuck in the middle.


"To be in the middle would mean equality," he said. "We are much, much lower." Christians account for less than 1% of the population here, and the number keeps falling as they keep leaving. We had heard that morning that the ministries of the Diocese of Jerusalem focus on Christian witness, particularly in education (their schools teach 80-90% Muslim students) and medicine (the Diocese has two hospitals in the area), but also in establishing a community where local Christians can feel safe and valued.


Bishara's words, too, held such poignancy. For all my oddness of religiosity in American culture that I wrote of yesterday, I never feel minimized or powerless because of it. I am a bit of a weirdo, but no infidel. I have a voice and a pulpit.

It stirred empathy -- this experience being a taste of what it is like to live as a Muslim or Jew in America, particularly the all-white, all-English speaking, all-Christian South. I looked around at the faded needlepoint kneelers given by parishes all over the Anglican Communion, their names and seals sewn into each pillow, and prayed our common union would be strong enough to stay in these times.

At the Tower of David

One does experience the long view of time here, with most of the stones we walked on older than America itself. We went that afternoon to tour the Tower of David, a citadel in the Old City built as we see it now during the Mamluk/Ottoman periods, but whose stones tell the stories of all who have claimed this place. The Hasmonean, Roman, Byzantine, early Muslim, and Crusader periods are all seen in the stones of the fortress, built upon and added on top of one another. Walls torn down, walls built again. Both trebuchets and machine guns have been fired over its ramparts. Empires rise and fall -- and empire masked in religion is no different.

"Walls never stay up," Bishara said to us. If only we knew the things that made for peace.

You can learn more about and support the ministries of the Diocese of Jerusalem here:
http://www.j-diocese.org