At the end of many trips I've taken I've been thankful to arrive home, but this time I think I am the most thankful of all. In the last two weeks, I think I can honestly say that my world has been turned upside down, and that's a good thing. Here are some of the things I am most thankful for (on possibly a very superficial level):
1. Walking down the streets without seeing teenagers (18-19 years old) carrying automatic weapons ... sometimes holding them as though they will need to use them momentarily.
2. Not needing to carry my passport everywhere I go so that when we go through checkpoints (with same said 18-19 year olds as the guards) I can prove I am American and it's o.k. for me to go to the place I am headed.
3. Not having to travel with 22 other people! (it was a great group, but after two weeks I was ready to be able to spend more than my evenings alone).
4. Being able to put toilet paper in the toilet, and not the nearby trash can
I will miss certain things about my experience as well. It was nice to have someone clean my room each day, make meals for me, and take me everywhere I needed to go (if you ever get to the Holy Land, ask to have Walid as your driver, he's the best). I will miss the wonderful terrain of the Holy Land which changes drastically from one point to the next in less than a couple hundred kilometers. I will miss the impact that the things I won't miss had on my life and how grateful they make me for what I do have (how's that for a confusing sentence). I will also miss interacting with people who understand the experience that I had, because some of what I experienced is simply too difficult to share in words or pictures ... you simply had to be there.
I have to say that in some ways a trip to the Holy Land really destroys a lot of romantic notions that I had about the area. On some level, I assumed (as most Americans probably do) that I would get to places like the Mount of the Beatitudes and find a sign (or at least our guide) saying "here is where Jesus stood, this is where the people sat" but it isn't like that at all. At best, we have guesses of where some of these things happened. At worst, we (I'm using the royal "we" here because I'm sure at some level we all encourage this) have built shrines over where these things have happened.
I was quite annoyed, maybe even sickened, to see two of the places that I was most looking forward to. The birthplace of Christ (which is now covered by the Church of the Nativity) and Golgotha (which is covered by the church of the Holy Sepulchre). In both cases what torked me the most is that the shrines that have been built in these places have completely obscured what the place is. The place where Jesus was born is a cave ... with a few "rooms" but the walls of that cave are now covered in tapestries and there are all kinds of incense lanterns hanging in there, to the point where it doesn't look anything like a cave, it looks more like ... well, let's just say it's not anything I felt I wanted to take a picture of. Ditto on Golgotha ... I expected to see a hill or a mountain ... but instead, we were ushered into a HUGE church with stairs running every which way and people all over the places pushing ... we finally walked up some steep stairs to a "room" with a huge mosaic of Christ on the Cross, then a statue of Mary (which to many of us looked like one of those "fortune teller" machines from the carnival), and then an altar (surrounded again my lanterns and icons, and tapestries) which you could kneel at and put your arm through a whole in the floor to touch the rock of Golgotha ... but you couldn't see it at all!! UGH!!! From there we walked over to get in line near what was basically a "church within a church" this little chapel building, guarded over by some Eastern Orthodox Monk who let 4 people at a time into what is believed to be "the empty tomb" ... very interesting, but again, it looks nothing like a cave that they would have put a body in, it looks like a shrine, built to commemorate such an experience.
After all of my frustration though, I had a realization ... brought on by talking with others and then brought to point by our tour guide. "Isn't it great that we don't worship places?" our tour guide asked. "For if we worship places, some of you would be disappointed and may have lost faith. But we worship a living God, and Christ lives in our hearts." What a reminder ... going to those places was nice, but it doesn't shake what I believe ... it doesn't change the fact that I can look at everything in the world from the lens of the Empty Tomb ... Christ is Risen! Alleluia!
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