Holy Land Pilgrimage: Day 8

Monday, May 8, 2023

We’re back a little earlier than usual from today’s journeys, so maybe I can get most of this written before dinner … and get to bed earlier than I have been. (I overslept more than an hour this morning, which should tell me something about needing rest. At least I made it to the bus on time.)

I think the word for today is “grace” – God’s love, freely given. It’s an idea we throw around a lot in an abstract sense. “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,” Paul wrote to the Ephesians (2:8). And since Luther’s time, Protestants have been claiming that statement as part of an argument against works-righteousness. So “grace” can become a dog-whistle in Catholic vs. Protestant polemic. But that’s abstract grace. The divine love freely given that we got to experience today had flesh and bones on it.

The Jerusalem Princess Basma Center 

Our first stop was the Princess Basma Center in Palestinian east Jerusalem, a ministry of the Anglican diocese. It’s part children’s rehabilitation hospital, part social-work agency, part community-health organization, and part school (kindergarten through 12^th grade). The hospital and clinics treat kids with all kinds of disabilities – congenital, neuromuscular, developmental. Just as American parents might expect from a children’s rehab hospital, Princess Basma offers physiotherapy, speech/language therapy, occupational therapy, sensory therapy, hydrotherapy, autism therapies, and psychosocial support. This facility would be a blessing to any number of American communities. To find it here is amazing. And to find it here specifically for underserved Palestinian families, not just in Jerusalem but in 16 communities in the occupied territories – it’s an inbreaking of the reign of God. The hospital and clinics serve about 2,300 kids annually, and the school has about 425 students. About a third of the students are there because they need special-education services; the rest are there just because it’s an excellent school (and the mixed classes bring all the students the psychosocial benefits of mainstreaming).

The hospital is a ministry of the
Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem
and the Middle East.

Disability is a source of shame in Palestinian culture because either the families, or the children themselves, are blamed for the burden they bear. So, a significant part of the center’s support is for parents dealing with depression and hopelessness from having been shunned – on top of the overwhelming work of caring for a child with disabilities, and making a living in a disadvantaged region, and existing in occupied territory. So, some of the divine love freely given here heals the hearts of the parents, to say nothing of the healing miracles that come to the kids. And walking though the facility, we could see miraculous works in progress, reflected in the joy on the kids’ faces.

The day’s second experience of grace was more personal. From Princess Basma, we drove to the Mount of Olives, stopping at the Church of Bethphage, where Jesus’ triumphal march into Jerusalem started (and where we learned that the short date palms we associate with Palm Sunday were introduced into the area centuries later, so most of the branches being strewed along his way were probably from olive trees instead). Then we visited the Church of Dominus Flevit (“the Lord wept”). Not long before he was crucified, Jesus looked out from the Mount of Olives at the beauty of Jerusalem and its Temple, and he wept over the city’s coming destruction at the hands of the Romans. Standing there, we, too, could see Jerusalem as the travel posters show it, the gold Dome of the Rock rising above the Old City walls and shining in the sun.

The Temple Mount as seen from the Mount of Olives. 

There was certainly grace for me in that moment, the fulfillment of a decades-long dream. I was here when I was 13, which priest-math tells me was 45 years ago. My parents, especially my mother, paved the way for me in so much, most pertinently right now by showing me travel as a way to connect with God. It was neither of their styles to wear their faith on their sleeve. But my parents opened a door for me to know, deep down, that if I go journeying in search of God, that pilgrimage will lead me somewhere extraordinary. Today, it led me to see the Temple Mount again. I can’t explain it intellectually, but I can see why pilgrims for millennia, from at least three faiths, have felt like they stood at the center of the world when they stood in Jerusalem. And I’m grateful for the love that brought me here.

A 2,000-year-old olive tree in the Garden 
of Gethsemane.

As if that remembered love weren’t enough, we then went to the Church of Gethsemane and the garden itself. As usual, the church is modern but built on ancient stones, both Byzantine and Crusader. Here, the modern renovation replicated the floor mosaic of the Byzantine structure from about 380 (as well as displaying a portion of the preserved ancient mosaic). But before the altar is the most important stone, the Rock of Agony, commemorated as the rock where Jesus asked the Father to open some other pathway for him to defeat sin and death. (I couldn’t get a photo of the rock because a service was in progress.) Then, more powerfully, we spent some time simply in the garden. As we’ve done at many of these significant sites, Fr. Bill offered a Scripture reading, this time from Mark about Jesus praying in the garden to be spared his coming agony. We prayed, too; and Joey McGee, the musician traveling with us, led us in singing, “I Come to the Garden.” Growing up, hearing my parents’ suspicion about people who talk about their personal relationships with God, I never much cared for the song. But the individual grace it illustrates, the direct connection with Jesus, is where this journey of faith ultimately leads, right? So, we sang about hearing Jesus’ voice and sharing his joy – the gift of love that only personal relationship brings. And just as we ended that song, sitting amid the beautiful roses and ancient olive trees, a loud, harsh bell began clanging. It might as well have been a police siren, a reminder that sin will have its way – the sin of the world, certainly, but just as much the brokenness of our own hearts. After all, Judas had been hearing Jesus’ voice and sharing in his joy for years – and then, that night, he walked up with the cops to identify the perpetrator. I am just as much there with Judas as I am there with Jesus in that garden. And the grace is that “He walks with me” anyway.

A diagram of the Garden Tomb. Unfortunately, the interior walls 
of the tomb have been plastered over.

From there, probably anything would have been a letdown. Filling that role was the Garden Tomb, the alternative (Protestant) site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. The guide from the site was very earnest, taking the opportunity to preach. This cave is thought to be an authentic first-century tomb, whether Jesus’ or not. Is this the one? Or is Church of the Holy Sepulcher the one? To me, it didn't matter. I’d walked with Jesus that afternoon already.