An Account of My Travels

A Quick, Final Post

2010-07-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

Obviously, I've been back in the States for some time, but I wanted to officially close out the blog by letting people know what I'm about.

I have returned, two years gone, to Concordia Seminary and am taking summer Greek. It's going splendidly.

For those who found my more reflective posts interesting, I've decided to open another blog where I can post on whatever issue or controversy particularly holds my interest.

The blog is called My Occasional Musings, and you can find it at:

http://billsoccasionalmusings.blogspot.com/

Nothing is there yet, but feel free to subscribe.

Finally, thanks for all your prayers and support throughout my pilgrimage. They mean more to me than you'll ever know. God bless.

Why I Am (Still) Lutheran

2010-05-29T06:13:00.001-07:00

So I've been on pilgrimage viewing holy sites and relics, learning to work through the Via Dolorosa and the rosary. I've stayed at St. George's, visited Mount Athos, and ended at Rome. And I get back, to no suprise, finding that people have been concerned whether I would have become dissatisfied with Lutheranism (and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, in particular) and taking bets as to whether I'd end up Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox. After all, I haven't been silent about things I find dissatisfying in American Lutheran churches.

This is my response. This will be a long and theologically dense post, but I encourage everyone to read it who wants to know exactly what is going on in this brain of mine. And I hope that my months of wrestling with these questions will help those going through the same process. So grab your dictionaries and hold tight.

Allow me to begin by explaning why Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy are on the table as options, and why the denominations and sects of Protestantism are not. I don't divide the Christian world into Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. I think it's a sloppy taxonomy. Rather, I have a fivefold division: Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Anglican-Lutheran Reformation, and Protestantism.

Oriental Orthodoxy branched off from the Great Church after the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. This was one of the most important ecumenical meetings in Christian history, as it defined who Christ was and thus who we, as Christians, worshipped: of fully divine nature (the same nature as Father and the Spirit), of fully human nature (via the Virgin Mary), with these two natures subsisting in one person, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The churches of the east- Armenians, Ethiopians, Copts (Egyptians), and Aramaic-speaking Syrians- disagreed. They though that this was too close to the Nestorian heresy (that Christ is two natures in two persons) and said instead that Christ is one person of one nature, that one nature being a merging of the divine nature of the God and the human nature of Mary. This is miaphysitism, and it was condemned as heresy. They were therefore no longer part of Mother Church, and for this reason (and many cultural reasons), are simply not an option for me.

You'll notice that I do not define Protestantism to include Lutherans or Anglicans. This is very specific, and it is a key to understanding how I understand the church and the history of Christianity. The church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. All orthodox Christians confess this in the Nicene Creed, and I refuse to believe that the writers of the Nicene Creed (at the Councils of Nicea in AD 325 and Constantinople in AD 381) meant this to be merely a fuzzy statement of unity. No, they meant- and I think they were right to mean- that denominations, sects, schisms, and all such other tragedies tear into the heart of Mother Church.

I separate Anglicans and Lutherans from Protestants because Anglicans and Lutherans never intended to break away from the church of Rome, with its longstanding continuity reaching back to the apostles. The bishops and parishes of the English church (with its own long pre-history) were wrenched away from communion with Rome thanks to the political machinations that plagued Tudor England and the illegitimate exercising of temporal power by the late medieval popes. The schism did not formally occur, however, until the excommunication of Henry VIII, and this sent an entire country with formally consecrated bishops into ecclesiastical exile.

The Lutheran situation was slightly different, but the conclusion is the same. Martin Luther was looking for a theological debate on the theology of indulgences (1517); what he got was a refusal to debate and a demand to recant at the Diet of Worms in 1521. He refused to recant with his famous words: "Unless I am convinced by Scripture and by plain reason and not by popes and councils who have so often contradicted themselves, my conscience is captive to the word of God. To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. I cannot and I will not recant. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen." Unlike the English Church, the Lutherans had no preexisting ecclesiastical (church) order with bishops, priests, church buildings, and such; they had prepared no such thing, because they were not the official church and as a theological movement, the Lutherans had never intended to set up an alternative church structure to the one they knew and loved: Mother Church, in communion with Rome. But when they discovered themselves thrust out of her arms, they were forced to build a para-church in exile so serve the needs of their (my) theological movement until the day of reconciliation.

The best metaphor I have heard for this situation is drawn from World War II, and has been oft-repeated by the Lutheran (ELCA) theological and churchman Carl E. Braaten. When Nazi Germany invaded France in the summer of 1940 they occupied the northern half of the country, including Paris, and set up the puppet regime in Vichy under Marshall Petain to control the south and the French colonies. At this time, Charles de Gaulle fled to England to establish the Free French Forces to continue the fight against Nazi Germany and reestablish the fallen French Republic. But at no time did de Gaulle- or anyone else- imagine that the Free French Forces were somehow a substitute for France; nor did they believe that they could exist happily alongside the Vichy French regime. And just imagine if they had somehow gone on to think that they could somehow start France anew, and that they weren't exiles after all, but bold adventurers. Preposterous.

But that, I think, is the attitude of Protestantism, defined over-against Lutheranism and Anglicanism. In my mind, Protestantism truly begins with Calvinism, and includes all those churches that are either Calvinists or reactions to Calvinism. Allow me to explain.

In the first case, Calvinism (and, more broadly, the Reformed tradition) never had quite the same self-conception as Lutherans or Anglicans. There isn't that deep and haunting soul-searching about the tragedy of the Reformation. Catholics-in-exile? Not at all. The early Calvinists seemed quite happy to be outside the Roman church, and readily went about setting up a counter-church organization in Calvin's Geneva. In Calvinism, and its Protestant successors, we seem to be talking less about a reformation of the Roman church than a reformation of Christendom. The idea is not to remake the Catholic Church, but to make a new church entirely, using the Bible as a blueprint.

This attitude, and their understanding of the Scriptural blueprint, led to three important distinctives in their theology. First, Calvinists placed a heavy emphasis on predestination. God's eternal decree determines who will be saved (through the cross), and who will be damned. It determines, with no participation of free will, who will live eternally, and who will merit eternal wrath. This predestination to eternal life and to hell, both, is thus called double predestination. Second, Ulrich Zwingli (the first reformed thinker, before Calvin, whose ideas nevertheless became more prevalent than Calvin's in Calvinism) believed that the sacraments were merely signs, and thus that baptism does not actually save persons and that the bread and wine of communion do not become or convey the physical body and blood of Christ (as Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, and most Anglicans believe). As a result, what does baptism do, especially if we are baptizing infants (as Calvinists did)? Baptism does not save the infant, since it is not predestination and does not actually impart grace; unfortunately, Calvinism struggled- and struggles to this day- to provide a sufficient answer, and has only really said that baptism brings us into the visible church community, somehow. And third, the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition has placed a strong emphasis on the role of covenants in the history of redemption, from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Christ. These covenants are either conditional (do this and you will live, do that and you will die) or gracious (you will live, period, or you will die, period, regardless of what you do).

Why go through this? Because these three beliefs all produced strong reactions, and it is Calvinism and the three reactive movements that make up Protestantism in all its varied forms. Against the Calvinist theory of predestination, Jacobus Arminius, a late sixteenth century Dutch theologian, contended that God only predestines people according to his foreknowledge of what choices humans make. Therefore, God predestines people to eternal life on the basis of their willing, or choice, for salvation, and people to hell according to their willing, or choice, against Christ (most American Protestants, I think, believe this). This was the beginning, in Protestantism, of the 'free will' position that ended in the modern American demand that people 'choose Jesus' or some such thing. Second, the fuzzy Calvinist answer concerning what baptism does- it brings us into the church community, somehow- led many English Calvinists to adopt the position of early church heretics and the radical Anabaptist reformers (and anarchist revolutionaries), rejecting infant baptism altogether. After all, if they're not professing Christians, and baptism doesn't actually impart grace or save them, how can they be part of the church community? And third, Calvin's strong covenant theology produced the particularly strange reaction called dispensationalism, which would require a lengthy post in itself, so I'm not going to bother. Suffice it to say, this odd corner of theology and history is where the belief in the rapture came from.

A less theological and more obvious point of Calvinist belief and counter-Calvinist reaction: Puritans and charismatics. Calvinism had a very serious, sombre, sterile view of worship. The Puritans were strict Calvinists who believed in no dancing, no instruments, no hymns apart from the Psalms. The reaction? Dear me, the Pentecostals.

Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, free church evangelicals, and charismatics are all either Calvinists or reactions to Calvinism. This is Protestantism- Calvinism and counter-Calvinisms- and that is the problem. Protestantism is not on the grid for me, because I take 'one, holy, catholic, and apostolic' seriously, and because I do not view the Scriptures as a blueprint on which to build the church ex nihilo; and clearly, the results of believing otherwise are schisms upon schisms. But I hope this makes it clear why I view Anglicanism and Lutheranism differently.

So if I cannot consider Protestantism, what makes Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism so attractive?

I'll deal with the attraction to Orthodoxy and the basic reasons I cannot be Orthodox together. Orthodoxy is deeply attractive, first of all, because of its ancient roots. The liturgies in use go back to the fourth century at least, with earlier precedents. And what beautiful liturgies they are. And in some ways, there are fewer barries between Lutheran theology and the Orthodox Church than between Lutheranism and the Roman Catholic Church. There is no dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, no dogma of papal infallibility (indeed, no pope), and there are no councils beyond the Seven Ecumenical Councils of the first millennium. I think the Orthodox have a rather healthy view of the Virgin Mary between the Catholic demi-goddess and the Protestant incubator. Orthodoxy also has a balanced ecclesiology, being neither papal nor congregationalist, but centered on the community of bishop. And, as in Lutheran theology, Orthodox theology sees salvation as the very heart of theology and life; indeed, their view of salvation as a process of transformation of the person from sinful brokenness to perfect communion with the divine- indeed divinization, the whole process of which they call theosis (god-becoming)- is deeply attractive.

Unfortunately, almost all of the critiques of Catholicism and its soteriology (theology of salvation) coming below apply to Orthodoxy as well. I'll simply address them to Catholicism, but be assured that Orthodoxy falls squarely in the target as well. And to be perfectly honest, Orthodoxy is very impractical for me. I'm a Western Christian, and as beautiful as I find the Orthodox liturgies, I also find them more than a tad impenetrable. And beyond the stylistic differences, there is a very unfortunate feeling of non-participation by the laity in worship. Worship in Orthodoxy is something largely done by the priests, with the laity as passive receptors (I witnessed this firsthand in the Holy Sepulchre and on Mount Athos). The priest-as-mediator theology so heavily critiqued by the Lutheran reformers against medieval Catholicism is alive and well in Orthodoxy. And, while I haven't the time to argue the point in such a lengthy post, I simply do not believe that worship can be a performance. When active participation by the laity- through responsive chant and readings, participation in the Sacrament of Holy Communion, through the confession of sins, and the like- goes out the window, whether in Orthodoxy or Protestantism, something has gone terribly wrong.

And then there's the fact that I'm not Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romanian, or any of the other ethnic groups around which the Orthodox Communion is organized. Orthodoxy is a community of national and ethnic churches, and unfortunately, this tends to be a problem when one lives in a country without strong Orthodox roots. In fact, this has long been a problem in the history of Orthodox evangelism, but that's another story.

As for my own ethnic-national roots: Anglicanism, in some forms, is a real live option for me. I think they have the best English language liturgy in existence. They are, after all, Anglican. Anglicanism is also theologically broad, allowing for a wide and truly catholic communion unified under bishops in common worship. Yes, unified under bishops in common worship. That is a particular dream of mine, and it's something I want to be a part of. Thanks to this unity-in-diversity, Anglicanism offers one the ability to engage in a dialogue and debate while still finding common ground in worship. I could hold all my Lutheran beliefs as an Anglican; my college roommate, living in Washington, D.C., is doing exactly that. He has joined a parish of the new (broadly conservative) Anglican Church in North America after leaving his native Evangelical Lutheran Church in America when the latter slid too far to the left.

The Anglican Church also has the benefit of being truly global. You can find an Anglican parish almost anywhere. For a traveller like myself, this provided a real degree of comfort throughout my journies.

Unfortunately, the Anglican Communion, while taking 'catholic' and 'apostolic' very seriously, seems to have drifted far from 'one' and 'holy.' All of the problems in the conservative American Lutheran denominations- my Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod- and the liberal American Lutheran giant, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, are present in Anglicanism. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

"Holy." The Episcopal Church in the USA, the Anglican branch in this country, is on the leading edge of a leftward movement that pervades the Anglican Communion. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a conservative. That doesn't mean I'm intolerant, or unsympathetic. In fact, an embrace of liberal Christians is not at all the problem. The double problem is the exclusion of conservative Christians and the politicization of the the church. I would find the leftward leaning in the Anglican Communion, in particular in the Episcopal Church, less offensive if the focus were on, say, extending foregiveness to homosexuals and welcoming them as members of a congregation. As it is, however, the program is not to extend Christian charity by rightly balancing sin and forgiveness, but by redefining the mission of the church as one of the contemporary American dogma - political tolerance. The Episcopal Church, it seems, is more concerned with accepting homosexuality than accepting homosexuals.

I find this severely distorts- and evidences a severe distortion of- the mission of the church. Accepting homosexuals does not exclude conservatives. Yet demanding homosexual consecration to the priesthood and the episcopate does. It pushes conservatives out of congregations, because the ecclesial elites are spitting in the face of traditionally and sincerely held moral sensibilities. I could mount a lengthy biblical argument against the practice, as well, but purely on the level of prudence it seems like the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion, could work to draw a finer line between accepting homosexuals and accepting- through faux marriages and sensationalistic consecrations- homosexuality.

This is the most visible issue, but I merely use it as an example. My primary problem with the Episcopal Church is not this one mere issue, but the far deeper problem of Christian and church identity. I believe the church has a role to play in the public sphere, even in politics. On abortion, for instance, I think the church must make a firm stand, because it cuts to the heart of what the church means when it believes in the sanctity of the human person (including, by the way, the person of the fetal Christ, one person from the virginal conception). But there is a real difference between standing, as the church, for matters of deepest principle (against abortion, against slavery) and turning the church into a political platform.

Second, I find the whole issue of Bishop John Shelby Spong disgraceful. No, he's not gay. I'm not talking about Bishop Gene Robinson. I'm talking about a former bishop of the Episcopal Church who, during his time as bishop, denied the virgin birth, resurrection, and divinity of Christ, and was never disciplined for it. He left his office in good standing. I cannot and will not be a part of a church with that sort of record.

"One." The other reason I cannot be part of the Anglican Communion is that the ideal of a church under bishops united in communion and worship is, today, merely an ideal. As it is, the Anglican Church as focused so thoroughly on being catholic- too often meaning broad and tolerant- that centripetal forces have ripped apart the center. On the one hand, this is the partner of the problems above, wherein the church, in its attempt to be broad and tolerant, has become a narrow haven for liberal Protestants.

But all these criticisms largely apply to the Episcopal Church, and not the Anglican Communion as a whole. Many Anglican churches are deeply conservative, and many are sensibly broad. While the Anglo-Caucasian world of Anglicanism is moving steadily left, the vast majority of Anglicans, especially in Africa and the rest of the Global South, fall into these two categories. These conservatives and moderates came together in Jerusalem in the summer of 2008 at the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). These churches did not break away from the Anglican Communion, but rather affirmed their commitment to traditional Anglicanism, an oppositism to secularism and the political agendas of the American, Canadian, and English churches, and committed to running their churches through a Council of Primates (heads of the churches, as in Orthodoxy) rather than through identification with the Archbishop of Canturberry (a strangely papal structure). They also, most controvertially, agreed to create the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) as a broadly conservative alternative to the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church in Canada.

I was very, very excited about the ACNA. The ACNA united most of the churches that broke away from the Episcopal Church over the past couple decades due to debates over women's ordination, homosexual ordination, and the performance of homosexual marriage ceremonies: about a dozen para-church organizations and missions in all. It is not recognized as an official Anglican church by the Archbishop of Canturberry, but such recognition is not required under the settlement at GAFCON; their status is therefore a serious matter of dispute. They are, however, in communion with the Anglican Churches of Nigeria and Uganda, powerhouses in the Communion. The ultimate goal, I think, of the ACNA is not to serve as an alternative to the liberal Episcopal Church, but to replace it as the official Anglican church of North America. Significantly, four whole dioceses of the Episcopal Church up and left to become dioceses of the ACNA. Ouch.

So why not up and leave for the ACNA? First, because its status is still very much under dispute, and I'm not about to board a ship that might sink. The LCMS (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod) is a far safer option. Second, because whatever problems I might have with the LCMS, they are all magnified in the ACNA. I would like it if the LCMS were larger (it is 2.4 million members in about 6,100 parishes); am I about to join the miniature ACNA (100,000 members in about 800 parishes)? I am concerned about the history of the LCMS as a small denomination with a long history of internal disputes, schisms, and a 'mighty fortress' syndrome; shall I join a brand new denomination composed solely of breakaway sects?

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Far and away, my biggest problem with the ACNA is that 'unity in diversity under bishops through common worship' fails precisely at the last word. I'm a high churchman. Everybody knows this. I like my incense, my bells, my processional, my chant, my holy water, my icons. And don't even get me started on how weekly communion is fundamental to the life of the church. And if you know the LCMS, you know that there must be a little bit of tension for me there, because while I can certainly find such churches, it's a bit of a struggle. But now, take a look at the ACNA. You really have no idea what you're going to get. You may get a great high church Anglican liturgy, but on the whole, the ACNA worships according to American Protestant standards. On average it is lower than the LCMS.

This practice, of course, is reflective of theology. Because the Anglican Church has always been broad, it has always been willing to embrace Calvinists and Arminians within their fold. That means it has always been susceptible to the diseases of Protestantism: disunity, schism, a loss of catholicity, a loss of traditional worship. That, of course, is exactly what we see. And that is part and parcel of a central paradox for me: how to be a conservative in ethics and doctrine, a moderate in biblical scholarship, and high church in my worship and ecclesiology? Where is that church? Wherever it is, it isn't the ACNA.

So in the end, my attraction to Anglicanism turns out to be largely theoretical. Some Anglican churches, in some parts of the world- namely in Jerusalem- may be perfect for me. But as an American? It simply doesn't click.

Now for the big one. Rome.

I have avoided, up to this point, engaging in sustained biblical and theological debate. But that is precisely the nature of my relationship with Rome. Openness to diverse methods of biblical scholarship? Rome has everyone from the medieval scholastics to the greatest historical-critical exegetes of the twentieth century. Ethically conservative? Can you find a church that has done more for stand up for the dignity of the human person? A strong, and applied, understanding of the church's social mission? Catholic social theory knows peacemaking, social justice, ethnic reconciliation, and environmental stewardship like nobody's business. High church? It's the definition of high church.

Aside from doctrine, Rome is everything I could ask for. So doctrine is where we go.

First off, I hope my foray into the history of Protestantism (Calvinism and counter-Calvinisms) helped clarify exactly how I view Lutheranism and myself-as-Lutheran. Unlike the Anglican Church, which is first and foremost a national church with extra-national provinces, Lutheranism is first and foremost a theological movement within the broader church. It was originally conceived, and in another (better) world would have been, a theological movement within the Roman Catholic Church, like Thomism, or Le Nouvelle Theologie, or Molinism, or any of the other contending schools of theology that still exist and debate within the Roman fold. But the Lutheran movement was not allowed to flourish as a Catholic movement, and we were excommunicated; we thus became Catholics-in-exile. Catholics-in-exile. Rome is Mother Church; but she has been a very abusive parent. The Lutheran reformers, as you can read in the Lutheran Confessions in the Book of Concord, were even willing to exist in her fold alongside other theologies, so long as we had the freedom to debate on, to preach, to proclaim the gospel. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and we have set up denominations- temporary para-church organizations, really- to serve the needs of our faithful for five hundred years.

We are not schismatics. We are Catholics-in-exile. We want back in. So what prevents us?

Allow me to run down a list of reasons that, for me, are not definitive.

It isn't the Catholic view of Mary. I am happy to ascribe to Mary the many titles that Catholics grant her. I find such titles as Theotokos (God-bearer), Ark of the New Covenant, Queen of Heaven, and New Eve to be thoroughly appropriate, and even biblical (or logical outworkings of biblical motifs). I'm quite happy with them all. I do have a problem with the dogmatic definitions of the past couple centuries: namely, the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was conceived without original sin) and the Dogma of the Assumption (that she was raised into heaven like Elijah). I find the previous dogma dead wrong, and the latter more something that a person might believe as pious option. You have to believe in the Assumption in order to be in communion with the Bishop of Rome? That strikes me as very, very odd. But I think I could get past both if I were convinced that being in communion with Rome that important.

It isn't the cult of the saints and the prayers to the saints. Those are not part of my spirituality, but I don't think that is the sort of issue on which the church stands or falls. Catholics, after all, do not believe that the saints possess magical powers which we need to petition them to use; a much more fair way of characterizing the Catholic view is praying with saints. They are asked, in Catholic tradition, to pray alongside Christians on earth in order to petition God for favor. If it is superfluous, it is only superfluous in the way that asking a friend or a fellow congregant to pray with you is superfluous. Perhaps they cannot hear us? Maybe so, but again, I don't think it is so central an issue that it would keep me from the church that gave birth to Western Christendom.

Papal infallibility. Now here's a tricky one. I certainly don't believe this, but I also don't think it is a terribly important issue. Papal infallibility, despite unending claims by the uneducated, does not mean that whatever the pope says is true. If the pope says that Twix is better than Snickers, that doesn't make it so. Nor does it even mean that he is infallible when speaking on religious matters. Pope Benedict XVI wrote a wonderful book called Jesus of Nazareth, but he made it very clear that he was writing as a scholar, as Joseph Ratzinger (his real name), and that one could take it or leave it. Even when writing or speaking as the pope, he is not writing or speaking infallibly. When the pope writes an encyclical (general letter to all the church) he might outline a theology of society, economy, and politics (Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum) or a theology of the body (Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae), he explains truths which are derived from infallible truths, and are meant to guide the bishops and priests of the church in their ministries, but that doesn't make them infallible. The pope is only infallible inasmuch as he is speaking ex cathedra, that is: he, as the pope, in his capacity as the shepherd and teacher of the apostolic communion, specifically defines, on a matter of faith and morals, a dogma of the church, which has already passed into rite, usage, and common belief. This last point is key: the pope cannot make up new dogmas willy nilly. The point of papal infallibility is not to give the pope more power, but to bypass the lengthy process of calling an ecumenical council (like the aforementioned Councils of Nicea or Chalcedon, or like the Councils of Lateran IV, Trent, or Vatican II), so that beliefs already held by the church but not officially proclaimed may be made official without much hassle. Thus the only two times the pope has spoken under infallible authority have been with those two contentious Marian dogmas: the Immaculate Conception, defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854 in his statement Ineffabilis Deus, and the Assumption, defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950 in his statement Munificentissimus Deus.

The problem here is twofold. First, whether something had passed into rite, usage, and belief as a (non-infallible) tradition depends solely on whether it has passed into rite, usage, and belief among Roman Catholics. Therefore, like the Roman Catholic church councils since 1095 (the split with the Orthodox), these definitions only serve to make the Roman Catholic church narrower. Each and every one puts up another barrier to those who would otherwise want to become Catholic. Second, as in all instances when humans are given such meta-human authority, it is susceptible to corruption. We have yet to see a real example, but what checks are there on this power?

Moving on. It isn't monasticism. I have no problem with monasteries, monks, nuns, and the lot. The monasticism condemned by Luther and the early Lutherans in the Book of Concord had, indeed, fallen far away from the monastic ideal. In fact, medieval German monasticism was much more like Eastern monasticism. These monasteries were not centers of good works, where monks worked for the good of the community and provided essential services like clothing, food, healthcare, education, etc. They were centers of private and communal prayer where monks were encouraged to spiritually improve themselves; they were also, most notoriously, places where large amounts of wealth were amassed in the form of lands that were owned by the church. These were Luther's primary problems with monasticism: the cultivation of attitudes and theologies of works-righteousness and the corrupt holding of landed wealth by the church. And yet Luther praised the founder of monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia, for St. Benedict promoted monasteries as very different institutions: places of supreme humanity, service to the pooor, the orphan, the widow, and places where the rule of poverty, not the hoarding of wealth, was the rule. As far as I can see, the Council of Trent cleared up many of the corruptions in monasteries. While a theology of works-righteousness still rules in the monasteries, this is less a problem with monasteries than with Catholic theology as a whole. I think the institution of the monastery was happily salvaged by the post-Reformation Catholic Church. A job well done.

In case this actually needs to be said, my problem isn't rituals, icons, stone and wood churches, or anything else on the endless Protestant litany of complaints against the rich symbolism of Catholicism which is so poorly understood here in America.

And by the way, if you're Protestant, and after narrowing this all down you're still wondering why I'm not Catholic, I highly suggest you go back and reevaluate your theology.

Because the answer, of course, is the doctrine of salvation and justification.

As Luther himself said to his opponent Erasmus, "I praise and commend you highly for this also, that unlike all the rest you alone have attacked the real issue, the essence of the matter in dispute, and have not wearied me with irrelevancies about the papacy, purgatory, indulgences, and such like trifles (for trifles they are rather than basic issues), with which almost everyone hitherto has gone hunting for me without success." The real issue being, of course, the free grace of salvation.

The great issue of the Reformation was salvation, and specifically justification. But before launching into my argument, it is very important that I define exactly what Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox, Calvinists, and Arminians believe (and why Orthodox, Calvinists, and Arminians as well as Lutherans and Catholics? You'll see).

I'll start by noting that salvation and justification are treated as nearly synonymous by all these traditions (except perhaps the Orthodox, who really don't talk about justification at all). All of these traditions assume that when we're talking about justification, we're talking about the ultimate fate of men's (and women's) souls. Other elements might be involved in salvation- regeneration, adoption, sanctification- but these are ultimately determined by what happens in justification.

Unfortunately, forget for a second that Catholics, Orthodox, and rest all have very different views about how one gets justified. A related issue that really muddies the waters is that while they all equate justification with salvation, they all mean something very different by justification (and thus salvation). We can't even agree on what is happening, let alone on how it is happening. So as I define what each tradition means by 'grace,' 'faith,' and 'works' (let alone 'by' and 'through'), I also need to define what each tradition means by 'justification.'

So let's begin our survey.

Calvinism: Justification is a legal act performed by grace alone through faith alone. First of all, Calvinists take very seriously the Greek meaning of 'justification,' dikiosis. Dikio means 'righteous' or 'just,' and thus dikiosis means 'to justify' or 'justification,' or 'to make righteous' or 'to rightwise.' Therefore, when Paul says that justification is by grace alone through faith alone, whatever that means, it means that we are made 'righteous.' Somehow, then, we are made righteous (justified) not by being made better people, but by grace alone through faith alone. How, then, can God say that someone is righteous when they are still going around sinning? He must be giving them a righteous status from elsewhere. God is, in short, imputing (legally crediting) righteousnes to the sinner from an outside source. Where does this righteousness come from? From Christ. Christ lived a perfectly righteous life by obeying all the commands of Torah and being perfectly ethical, and when God forgives sins by legally crediting (imputing) the crucified Christ with our sins, he credits the sinner with the righteousness of Christ. This is called double imputation, a glorious double exchange of my sin for Christ's righteousness, and it is central to the basic Reformation contention about justification. Justification is therefore forensic (legal and declaratory), a single moment in a legal exchange.

'Through faith alone' means that faith is the means, or criterion, on the basis of which we receive this declaration. Notice we have skipped from 'by grace alone' immediately to 'through faith alone.' In Calvinism, faith is a requirement (the sole requirement) on the basis of which sinners receive the double imputation of our sin to Christ and Christ's righteousness to us. This saving faith, by the way, is not simply belief: it is notitia (knowledge of the content of belief), assensus (belief in the content), and fiducia (loving trust in the content of faith). It is not bare knowledge of facts, but an active love and trust in the salvation provided by Christ; and it is fiducia, by the way, that produces good works. As Calvin and his followers have repeatedly said, "we are justified through faith alone, but saving faith is never alone."

But this faith cannot be borne of ourselves, otherwise it is a work. It must come through grace and grace alone. The place of 'by grace alone' in Calvinism is that faith can only arise in the sinner, bound to sin, death, and Satan, through the miraculous intervention of grace. Faith that saves (faith with fiducia) is not a work, but is itself a gift of God. This is where predestination comes in. God has chosen, according to the Calvinist, from before the foundation of the world whose eyes he will open to faith and whose eyes he will keep firmly shut. So faith in the cross of Christ is dependent entirely on the word of God. We do not choose; we are chosen.

Catholics: Justification is a process performed by grace and (human) will, through faith and works. This is one reason I wanted to explain Calvinism first: virtually everything is different from the Catholic view, and they place each other in stark relief. Catholics take dikio, righteous or just, very seriously as well. But rather than looking for an external righteousness (of Christ) granted by God in a legal exchange, they take the word to mean the visible righteousness that all can see. Who is righteous? Well, the person who acts righteous, obviously. It is not a legal exchange that happens in a moment, but a process that transforms the sinner into an ethically upstanding person. This process (dikiosis, justification) continues throughout life and even after life in purgatory, until all believers are perfect and ready for resurrection at the end of time. The process of growth in visible righteousness that goes from conversion to death that Protestants (and Lutherans) call sanctification is justification, according to Catholicism. And this is no mere semantic difference: the question of whether justification is a legal act performed by God or a process performed by both God and the human sinner is precisely the whole point. But I get ahead of myself.

Catholic theology professes that God's grace is the principal agent in transforming the human person, but that the person must cooperate to receive that grace through human will. Grace is offered, but we must choose to receive it (sound familiar?). This grace comes in many forms: the sacraments, particularly beginning with baptism and continuing in holy communion, but aided by confirmation, confession and absolution, etc., all of which are received through the acceptance of the human will. This grace also generates faith, or stirs up an inherent human capacity for faith (there is debate on this in human circles), and we only go on to grow in visible righteousness because of this faith. But this faith is borne of human will and human capacity. This necessary faith, by the way, does not necessarily possess fiducia. Good works will not necessarily flow from it; they must be striven for. These works, however, make us more righteous. The more good we do, the more good we are.

Allow me to make clear that certain Protestant caricatures of Catholicism, at precisely this point, have been clear off the mark or exaggerated for polemical purposes. For one, humans may only choose to receive grace, in this scheme, because God has graciously allowed us to choose (how it is gracious to leave it on our shoulders, I do not know); also, our works that merit an increase in righteousness are only meritorious because God has graciously allowed us to contribute to the process of justification, for otherwise our works would been seen for the trash they are (though again, how this is gracious, I do not know). My disagreements aside, one must see that from the Catholic point of view, people are justified (made righteous) when they really are acting righteous. And how do they view Calvinists, who look for God to legally declare Christians righteous on the basis of Christ's obedience, even though we Christians aren't acting perfectly righteous? Well, say Catholics, we are making God to be ignorant or a liar, and likely both. We are, they say, implicating God in a legal fiction.

By the way, one might ask (if one was so inclined, though it baffles me where this question first came from): where does this merit that God gives out to people doing righteous acts come from? The answer is that Christ won on the cross a great treasury of merit, which is added to by the righteousness of the saints. This merit is then doled out to believers who do good works. Odd? I thought so, but it has bearing later.

(Orthodox: This is really a side note, but I'll put it this way: everything that I just said about Catholicism is basically true about Orthodox, except that Orthodox don't make a firm distinction between faith and works. For them, faith and works are really two sides of the same coin: works are done because of faith, but faith is only faith if it is loyal fidelity to the law of God. And through these faith-works, we are unified to God's nature, becoming one with him, becoming gods ourselves. For them, the point is not dikiosis, but theosis. Not justification, but deification. It is the flip side to the incarnation of Christ. As St. Athanasius said, "God became man that man might become god.")

Arminian: Justification is a legal act performed by grace and human will through faith alone. Take the Calvinist framework and change the final bit of it. Justification is a single event, a legal exchange of our sin for Christ's rightoeusness, decreed by God on the basis of faith alone. How do we acquire this saving faith (notitia, assensus, and fiducia)? Calvinists say we are given saving faith through the gracious act of God alone, a choice on God's part willed by him since before the foundation of the world. Armininism broke off from Calvinism at just this point. Arminians offer up a Protestant version of the Catholic answer: Grace is offered, but we must choose to receive it (ah, that's why it sounded familiar!). In other words, we must choose to believe. Like Catholics, Arminians say that we can make such a choice because God, in his graciousness, has offered sinners bound to sin, death, and Satan an opportunity to make such a choice (this grace is technically called prevenient grace in Arminian theology, if you care that much). But it is essentially a retreat within Protestant ranks from the Reformation position; and sadly, and strangely, it is now the most widespread belief about grace and human will in America.

Lutheran: Justification is a legal act performed by grace alone through faith alone. Just like the Calvinists, right? Well yes, in a way. Lutherans do believe that justification is a forensic act whereby God imputes our sin to the crucified Christ and imputes Christ's righteousness to us, on the basis of faith alone given in grace alone. However, there is much more to the Lutheran view.

First off, double imputation is only one thing that happens in justification. Justification includes a much broader whole, including adoption into the family of God (centered on the family of the Trinity) and the regeneration of the human person that begins sanctification. This is all true in Calvinism, but it is heavily overshadowed by the Calvinist emphasis on imputed righteousness.

Second, and most distinctively, while Calvinists believe that God grants his gracious declaration on the basis of faith alone, with faith as the proper criterion (issued through grace), Lutherans understand the relationship between grace and faith differently. Faith, we say, is not a criterion on the basis of which God grants his declaration of righteousness, but the attitude of existential trust that receives grace. It is grace itself that declares a person 'righteous,' 'adopted,' and 'redeemed,' and faith that makes that present in a person. And because faith is understood less as belief than as trust and fidelity, (i.e., the emphasis is on fiducia rather than assensus), it makes sense that it would be the thing by which grace is received as well as the thing by which works are produced. Grace, faith, and works fit together more neatly, I think, in Lutheran theology.

I also think this view does more justice to the Pauline phrase 'by grace through faith.' On the Calvinist formulation, it seems more like it is faith by which people are justified, through the means of grace; on the Lutheran formulation, it is actually grace that saves, through the receptivity of faith. And where is this grace? In Word and Sacrament, of course, the standard Lutheran answer. The proclamation of the word of the gospel- the Good News that Jesus Christ is the Risen Lord and Savior- captures us from the captivity to sin, death, and the devil and sets us free to believe; and the grace of the sacrament of Holy Baptism places God's seal upon us, truly saving us because though we be infants in body, we are always infants in the eyes of God. Real grace raises our dead souls when they hear the gospel word 'Lazarus, come out;' comes through water baptism when we are adopted into the family of baptism, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But that's another argument.

I spelled out the Arminian version because I wanted everyone to see how far it retreats back into Catholicism; Lutherans, however much we may look and sound and smell Catholic, have mounted a far more serious protest than American Protestants against the Catholic doctrine of salvation. If Luther is right that it is this doctrine and none other- "papacy, purgatory, indulgences, and such like trifles"- is the real issue, then I challenge Protestants to explain why these trifles keep them separate from Mother Church. But again, that's another argument.

It was also important, however, to explain the difference between Calvinist and Lutheran understanding of justification, similar as they are. For a great majority of the critiques that Catholics level against the Lutheran-Calvinist theory of justification miss the Lutheran while striking the Calvinist. One of the great Catholic criticisms is that our theory of justification ignores the familial aspect of salvation, and treats the church (and the people of God) as a corporate entity rather than the extended family of the Trinity. Again, Calvinists technically believe in adoption as a key element in the ordo salutis, but because Calvinists believe baptism is merely an external sign, there has never been a real picture of adoption. For Lutherans, we witness an adoption at every baptism.

(I note, by the way, that this picture of Lutheranism is not drawn primarily from the Lutheran Confessions or Lutheran Orthodoxy, but from Luther himself; the New Finnish Interpretation of Luther has made this abundantly clear)

But forget the fluffy impressions. Let's get down to the arguments.

First of all, I would point out that in addition to these traditional positions, one new heavyweight contender has entered the field: the New Perspective on Paul (NPP). The New Perspective on Paul is more like an ongoing conversation between a number of likeminded scholars- among them E.P. Sanders, James D.G. Dunn, and N.T. Wright, with many more besides- than a school. For one, it is somewhat unfortunate to call it the New Perspective on Paul, since there are as many new perspectives on Paul as there are NPP scholars. What they do all agree on, however, is the New Perspective on Judaism.

Luther made the basic assumption that whatever the details, Paul's opponents were his opponents. The Judaizers, or whomever he was writing against, were thought to believe and preach works-righteousness, whereby meritorious good works would earn us righteousness. Before anything else, the New Perspective challenges this view. Several decades ago E.P. Sanders wrote a book called Paul and Palestinian Judaism in which he thoroughly surveyed the literature of Second Temple Judaism- that is, the Judaism of Jesus' and Paul's day- in order to determine whether Jews could be found believing that they were saved through works. The answer was a resounding no.

Rather, it seems, Jews were not even concerned with the question of 'how do I get saved?' so much as 'how can I be marked out a member of the community God will vindicate on the last day?' Notice the question is not even 'how can I get into the community that God will vindicate?' but rather 'how can I make it clear that I'm a member of this community?' In Sander's phrase, Jews of the day already believed in salvation by grace alone; they were, as he put it, "good Protestants." In another of his (in)famous phrases, the question was not "how do you get in?" but "how do you stay in?"

This is what works of the law were about. The Dead Sea Scroll document 4QMMT is the only place where we find the phrase 'works of the law/Torah' outside of Paul, but in line with this general concern, it defines 'works of the law' as those boundary- and barrier-markers that separated Jews from Gentiles and true Israel (the Israel to be vindicated on the last day) from ethnic Jews in general. These were the things, in other words, that marked out someone as a true child of God.

If Paul is condemning marking oneself out as a true child of God by works like keeping kosher, Sabbath-keeping, circumcision, etc., then he is saying that those that God will vindicate on the last day are those who profess faith in Jesus Christ. The NPP asserts, therefore, that whether or not the Lutheran position is true, Paul was addressing different questions than those addressed by the Reformers, and therefore gave different answers.

Suffice it to say that I think the New Perspective on Paul is basically right. The problem with saying that it is basically right is it opens up a whole can of worms, not least among them: "If you say Paul wasn't addressing Catholic works-righteousness, doesn't that leave works-righteousness open as a theological possibility?"

I don't think it does, once we understand the NPP more fully. I rely here on N.T. Wright's most recent, and excellent, book, Justification: God's Promise and Paul's Vision. It is his answer to the Calvinist John Piper who wrote a whole book arguing against Wright's work on justification and the NPP, but while going after his opponent's arguments, he also wants to show them that the NPP is not so threatening as Calvinists (and Lutherans) once supposed. Let me take you through it.

As I said above, Calvinists and Catholics, in their own ways, take dikiosyne (righteousness) and dikiosis (justification) very seriously. For the Calvinists (and Lutherans), if a person is declared righteous the moment they believe, they must somehow really be righteous (on the basis of the imputation of Christ's active obedience). For Catholics, if a person is to become righteous, they must actually become visibly righteous.

Notice an implicit assumption here: righteousness means morally upright. Dikiosyne, on this view, means having a virtuous quality, and perfect righteousness means being ethically perfect. Wright absolutely, under no uncertain terms, says that that is not what the word biblically means. Righteous, he argues at length, is not a quality that one possess but a status. It means 'in the right.' It is a legal term, as Protestants have always believed, but it does not describe the person's moral status; as a legal term, it describes a person's legal status. When a Hebrew judge declared someone 'righteous' he did not mean that that person was morally virtuous (though perhaps they were); when he declared a person 'unrighteous,' he didn't mean they were ethically corrupt (though perhaps they were). The judge means, simply, that they are acquitted (if they are a defendant) or vindicated (if they are a plaintiff).

There is also this curious phase that shows up again and again in Paul, 'the righteousness of God' (dikiosyne theou). The traditional Reformation position has thought that this is the righteousness of God, or Christ, which is transfered to the believer in justification. But according to Wright, this is merely saying that God, too, is 'in the right.' For there was always this nagging question among Jews, 'when will God vindicate us?' After all, God promised that he would make them a great nation (Genesis 15, to Abraham). Is God a liar? No, God is righteous (not guilty of being a liar), because he has been faithful to his covenant promises and saved the world through Israel in the person of the one true faithful Israelite, Jesus Christ.

The question of the 'works of the law' was primarily a question of which sect of Jews- was it the sectarians at Qumran? the Pharisees? the 'poor ones?' who?- were the true Israelites who geographically returned from exile in Babylon. There were works of the law that separated Jews from Gentiles- kosher, circumcision, Sabbath- and then there were works of the law that separated one sect from another (the Qumranites with their distinctive calendar, etc.). These laws marked out the true Israel, which would be the group that Yahweh would call out when he returned to Zion to end the dark night of exile; it would be this group of true, vindicated Israel through whom he would begin the restoration of the world.

As it turned out, no one got it right, although John the Baptist got very close. For in the end, there were no true Israelites left save one: Jesus Christ (and perhaps his mother). And in the end, it was not works of the law that led to the climax of God's plan for the world through Israel, but the faithfulness of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, to God's covenant promises and purposes. The one-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world became the one-plan-through-the-one-faithful-Israelite (Jesus)-for-the-world.

How, then, are we to be part of this? Faith alone! Faith is the only sign that shows we are part of this community, brought in through grace alone. And as part of this community, we are part of the family of the Messiah, adopted by the grace of baptism. Yes, baptism. For at the end of his discussion of these matters in Romans 2-5, Paul says in Romans 6:4 that the Messiah died for our sins and was raised for our justification, and through our baptism we die and rise with him. We are brothers (and sisters) of Christ, and thus sons (and daughters) of the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

One thing this does is break apart the old synonymity between justification and salvation. Salvation is the whole process, from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Christ, from conversion and baptism to death to resurrection; justification is the declaration that we are indeed part of this community that God is saving, and through whom God is renewing all creation. Adoption, baptism, and regeneration thus step firmly into the foreground alongside justification.

And what of the crisis of conscience that Luther suffered? Can this understanding of justification provide solace for the heart? It can, just not simply through the texts once used. Rather than pointing to texts that supposedly speak to the imputation of Christ's righteousness, we can point instead to our adoption as heirs of God, to be regarded as standing together with him in his faithfulness to the point of death, and vindicated through resurrection. Rather than the legal imputation of righteousness, the NPP opens up a way to see this as one piece of a whole that is described by Paul as being one with Christ, and one in Christ. God views us as his faithful children, faithful to the point of death on a cross, and therefore children who, like Christ, are to be resurrected.

Yes, this would mean justification means something slightly different than the Reformers thought it meant; and yes, it means we have to use different texts to get to the same doctrines. But they are, after all, the same doctrines. In fact, I would contend that rather than putting the Calvinist-Lutheran Reformation doctrine of salvation in threat, opening us up to Catholicism, the NPP actually shows exactly why the Lutheran understanding is superior to both the Calvinist and the Catholic expression.

On the one hand, the Lutheran emphases on adoption, regeneration, and baptism as elements in justification (here reformulated as elements of salvation alongside justification) are firmly vindicated by this reading of Paul. On the other hand, it means that the Catholic doctrine of good works meriting righteousness is so far off the radar scene in Paul's day that we can safely say it is a medieval innovation based on medieval notions of merit. If Paul's Jewish opponents believed in covenant inclusion by grace alone, after all, and if Paul and his opponents both agreed that justification was a forensic status rather than some sort of process, how far off the mark is the Catholic doctrine?

This brings me to my final point. If terms like justification, faith, and works require some tweaking, I think the Lutheran understanding of grace remains right on the ball. Martin Luther's The Bondage of the Will remains a definitive guide to my understanding of the relationship between grace, faith, and human will. Luther wrote The Bondage of the Will in response to the Diatribe of Desiderius Erasmus, which contended (with Catholics and like Arminians) that grace is received and effected through the human will. Luther mounted a devastating attack in what became his greatest work.

In the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote against Pelagius and his followers who believed that human will and human works were the centerpiece of salvation. Humans must strive, said Pelagius, with all sincere effort to be as best they can be and do all the good they can do, and only then, with great effort, will persons be saved.

Erasmus, and the Catholic Church, and the Arminian Protestants all saw the folly in this view, and thought to minimize its error by saying that one does not need to do great works, but requires only the smallest cooperation of the will.

Luther's response?

That makes the error all the more grave! For at least the Pelagians made God's grace expensive, and understood the great effort required to run after righteousness (that is, moral righteousness). But by requiring merely a human choice to be saved, Erasmus (like the Arminians after him) made God's grace cheap; a trifle to be grasped with ease.

No, he said. God's grace is free, but never cheap. It is not won by human choice, but by the cross of Christ alone, and only the cross of Christ- the divine outpouring of the divine self- can give it. God's grace is free, but never cheap.

Go ahead and read Luther's The Bondage of the Will with Wright's Justification, and try to see how you can reconcile them. It's an interesting exercise, but boy, how enlightening to draw from such diverse- and opposing!- sources. And if you want some individual Scripture verses defending these views of faith, I'll just list them here: grace as free apart from human will (Romans 8:5, John 1:10-13, esp. verse 13!, 6:44), faith as a gift of grace (Colossians 1:29, 1 Corinthians 15:10, and esp. 1 Corinthians 12:3!), baptism as source of grace (Mark 16:16, John 3:5, Acts 2:38-39, Romans 6:4, Galatians 3:27, Ephesians 5:26, 1 Peter 3:21). Go on, look them up; I dare you.

So yes, I must remain in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It is hard and difficult, for I have my criticisms and there are many times when I am deeply saddened by a lack of proper liturgy, or the absence of our Lord's Body and Blood from our table just because it's the second or fourth week of the month, or the lack of bishops; and I want more academic freedom, and catholicity, and grandeur. So what? My conscience is captive to the word of God. The Anglican Church is simply too broad, and the Catholic Church is too narrow. I will fight the good fight within the LCMS, even if that means sometimes guarding my rear.

This is what I believe, and I am convinced by Scripture and sound reason that it is so. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

Happy Feast of Pentecost!

2010-05-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

I have yet to post those final reflections on my pilgrimage, but I wanted to let everyone know I'm still working on it while I'm down here with Maria in Gainesville, FL.

So Happy Feast of Pentecost to everyone! We went to an Anglican Church in North America parish today so we could partake of the Sacrament of Holy Communion (her parish doesn't have communion every week). It was a very nice traditional service; far too low church for my taste, but all the essentials were there.

Today we remember that our life as the church is empowered by the Holy Spirit, the first-fruits of the transformation of the new creation, the sign of the first-fruits of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the forerunner and guarantor of our own resurrection destiny. And we celebrate as well the incorporation of Gentiles into the people of God through the outpouring of the Spirit who makes alive by grace through faith apart from the works of the law. Unpack that dense and wonderful truth as you will.

The Last Day

2010-05-13T12:28:00.001-07:00

Sunday. The last day. I can't believe I've gotten to this point. I can't believe I made it.

I started out the last day as the first day of the week ought to start, by going to church. However, this was some church: I went to St. Peter's Square at noontime to enjoy a papal audience and blessing. You could barely see him, but there he was, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, in the flesh. I can't say there are many popes in the past 1500 years that I've liked more.

Afterwards I climbed the dome of St. Peter's for the magnificent view of the church and, above, the best view of Rome you can get anywhere. One climbs the dome in between its double-layered shell, so I was inside it. The walls curved more and more on the ascent. It's really quite hair raising, knowing that all that is supporting you is hundred year old engineering, with nothing but the fifteen stories of emptiness beneath. But the views, inside and out, were breathtaking. Remember that seven foot tall lettering (notice the grown man on the catwalk)?

I toured around St. Peter's Square as well, once the crowds gathered for the pope's appearance had dispersed. Recall that I got into St. Peter's the first time through the back door from the Sistine Chapel, and therefore never took a good look at the square (designed by the omnipresent Bernini). The square, actually an oval, is concave, so that even from the edges people can see what is going on in the middle. It is lined by Bernini's Doric columns and topped by a hundred or so statues of his favorite saints. The obelisk in the middle came from Egypt, saw the rise and fall of the pharaohs and of the Greeks, and was in Rome here at Vatican hill's Circus of Nero where Peter and countless other Christians were likely executed. They've put a tiny cross atop it.

And speaking of history: this was it, the grand climax. To avoid the lines at the Colosseum, and to make sure that it would be the last thing I did, I bought my combo ticket at the Palatine. Most people think of Palatine hill as an extra, but I found it fascinating.

The Palatine Hill was the palace complex of the Roman emperors (in fact, we get our word palace from palatine), a political center adjacent to Rome's religious center, Capitoline Hill. Sloping off them to the northeast is the valley of the Forum Romanum, which descends further into the location of Nero's Domus Aurea and the Colosseum.

The ruins atop the Palatine date from the period of the Emperor Domitian, the third emperor of the Flavian dynasty. The first two Flavians, by the way, were Vespasian and his son Titus (Domitian's brother); the former commanded the legions against the Jewish revolutionaries between AD 66 and AD 69, when he was crowned emperor in the chaos following Nero's suicide; at that point Titus became commander (it was he that actually besieged Jerusalem) and later become emperor himself. Domitian is also known as an early persecutor of Christians, like Nero.

The Palatine Hill palace was an enormous structure built around two giant atria, one a gymnasium (above), the other a fountain (right). To the south, the palace loomed over the great Circus Maximus, which we all know from Ben Hur; to the north, it commanded a view over the Forum. Tradition was that Romulus founded his settlement at this spot, and indeed there are Iron Age huts on the site.

But it was Caesar Augustus, as always, who really made the Palatine what it was. His rather simple house- he was always a modest and moral man true to his farmer-warrior stock- was purposefully placed near the legendary huts of Romulus. He lived in his own home throughout his reign. The Emperor Caligula built a sprawling palace that swept down the north side of the hill into the Forum, but following the Great Fire of AD 64 and Nero's building of his Golden House (Domus Aurea), which Vespasian had destroyed (more on that below), Domitian built the Palatine palace that served emperors throughout the remainder of the empire.

I found it especially interesting to stand in the actual throne room of the emperors and imagine both approaching them as subjects (the terror) and being a Caesar, ruling from that spot (the thrill).

After spending awhile touring the site I went down to the Forum.

To emphasize: every proper Greek city had an agora, but the one in Athens shall always be the Agora with a capital A. So too here. All proper Roman cities had forums; indeed, Greek or barbarian cities reconstructed as Roman towns were all given forums. But the Forum of Rome, that will always be the Forum with a capital F.

Think of the Forum and the Capitoline as the Agora and the Acropolis. The Capitoline and the Acropolis were the religious centers of Rome and Athens, respectively. The Forum and the Agora, however, were the political, economic, and social centers. Although the Palatine would eventually supplant the Forum as the official headquarters of political life, the Senate always met at the Curia in the Forum, just at the bottom of the slopes of the Capitoline.

And the Curia, I might add, is magnificently preserved (left). It is a full standing building with a roof because for hundreds of years it was used as a church. One thing I didn't see coming: it's a square. I'd always imagined it to be a semi-circular building.

If the last of the Flavian Emperors, Domitian, put his great mark on the Palatine with his palace, it was his predecessor and brother, Titus, who shaped the Forum. That's probably an overstatement, but the entrance to the Forum today is at the Arch of Titus, which, like the Ara Pacis, was one of the most moving, jaw-dropping, and fulfilling moments for me.

The Arch of Titus, you see, was erected to commemorate the Roman victory over the Jewish rebels of the Great Revolt, and it depicts the plunder of the treasures of the temple: most distinctively the candelabra or menorah from the Most Holy Place. It was a vivid reminder of just why I am doing what I am doing: because Jesus Christ is risen and his Spirit is poured out, the temple no longer need be the center and focus of God's meeting with man. Therefore, I can go on pilgrimage to Rome, in the opposite direction of Jerusalem. And what's more, it provides another contrast: the glories of the temple were brought to Rome as booty by the force of empire, but the glories of Christ were brought to Rome by Paul in chains.

And then, the last site to see: the Colosseum. Honestly, there's nothing I could say about the Colosseum that you couldn't read for yourself. Yes, there were battles of man against man, man against beast, beast against beast; yes, in the early days it could be filled up to create mock sea battles; yes, Christians were crucified and lit on fire to provide lighting for night games; yes, Gladiator was an awesome movie.

But lets bring this back to the pilgrimage aspect of it, eh?

The Colosseum was built by the first of the Flavian emperors, Vespasian (notice that we've worked backwards through the Flavians). It was built atop the demolished ruins of Nero's Golden House, or Domus Aurea.

When the Great Fire of Rome broke out in AD 64 it destroyed a third of the city, especially this area east of the Capitoline and Palatine hills. Nero, not caring a fig about the severe problems this caused the city, took the opportunity to acquire this prime real estate so that he could build himself the greatest palace-mansion even built: the Domus Aurea. It was unlike anything ever built by Romans before, and it would not be surpassed as a palace complex until the palaces of the early modern age like Versailles and Peterhoff. No wonder the Roman populace and later historians, seeing his glee at the opening up of key space for the project, blamed the fire on him (and no wonder he immediately turned around and blamed it on the Christians).

Vespasian, a rough and ready military commander who took power after Nero's suicide in AD 68 and a succession of three other emperors in AD 69, would have none of it. He demolished the Golden House and decided to give the land back to the people in the form of a massive double stadium capable of meeting the demands of a rowdy and unhappy populace in need of bread and circuses. Thus, the Colosseum.

That's the one way in which the Colosseum relates to early Christian and Jewish history. The other is that the Colosseum was financed with booty brought back by his son and lead general, Titus, from the Great Jewish Revolt (as well as from the Domus Aurea). It was constructed by Jewish slaves carted back for the triumph parades in Rome. Forget the later murder of Christians, which likely occurred more often in the Circus Maximus and the circus on Vatican hill, anyway. From the very beginning, the Colosseum was a monument to the persecution of God's people for their faithfulness to him- however misguided we believe the Jewish way of expressing that fidelity to be. Once again, Lord God shows up in the absurdity of resistance to Lord Caesar.

I walked out of the Colosseum and thought, "Done. The last site is seen." A real weird feeling.

Fortunately, the evening afforded me the opportunity to go out with a number of other hostelers who were also on their last night in Rome and enjoy a nice walk and fine dining experience in Trastevere, south of the Vatican on the other side of the Tiber. Italian meals include antipasti (appetizer), pasta, secondi (a meat dish), desert, wine, and coffee. How do these people stay so thin? But all and all, a very relaxing evening, when I allowed myself to spend a little more money than I should, have one more glass of wine than I should, eat one more scoop of gelato than I should, and- catching the plane from which I type this- stay up an hour later than I should. Boy, it felt good.

I have some final thoughts I'm going to detail in two or three posts over this coming week. I hope you'll enjoy them. As for now, I'm safe and sound at home in Boyds, Maryland. My pilgrimage along the route of the Exodus, the ministry of Jesus, and the journeys of Paul has ended. God bless.

The Via Appia and Pilgrim's Rome

2010-05-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

The problem with being on pilgrimage is that there's so much to see in the locations you're at, you really slip back into being a tourist on holiday. Yet on Saturday, I was determined to get on the real pilgrim road and see the many shrines and churches of Rome.

I began, quite naturally, with the Basilica of St. John Lateran (San Giovanni in Laterano). If you haven't heard of this church, know that it is the true capital of world Catholicism. St. Peter's Basilica of Vatican City may be the largest Catholic church in the world and the basilica of the Vatican, but the papal throne- that is, the diocesan seat of the bishop of Rome- is at St. John Lateran. This is the pope's official church, and it is its episcopal chair where he sits in order to become the pope.

The church is absolutely magnificent. It was the first major church built after Christianity was legalized by Constantine's 313 Edict of Milan. Today, even thought it lies outside the walls of Vatican City, it is still sovereign Vatican territory; when you pass the meter high markers in the piazza outside, you are no longer in Italy. The other fascinating passageway on my way into the church were the doors; the grand bronze doors (not the ones I passed through, alas) are the actual doors of the Curia, the Senate house of Rome. Yes, those are the actual doors that saw the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, there on St. John Lateran.

From there I went to Santa Maria Maggiore, the leading church in the world dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was built in the midst of the Nestorian controversy once the Council of Ephesus ruled that Mary was indeed the God-bearer, or Theotokos, and therefore the Mother of God. The debate was significant because the opposing side (the Nestorian heretics) ruled that Mary was only the mother of Christ (Christotokos, or Christ-bearer), of his human nature, and not his divine nature. Obviously, she did not generate his divine nature, but motherhood is an interpersonal, relational role. Therefore, if she was only the mother of his human self, then Christ was both a human person and a divine person as well as having both human and divine natures. Christ thus acquires multiple personality disorder. No, said the Council of Ephesus, Christ is one human person, and Mary is the mother of that total human person, with complete human and divine natures.

This began the excellent and proper tradition of ascribing honor to Mary in order to say something about Christ. We call her the Virgin Mary in order to affirm Christ's origins; we call her Theotokos in order to affirm Christ's divine nature and singular personhood. And so on and so on. Santa Maria Maggiore was built specifically to commemorate this victory of true doctrine and to emphasize the truth about Christ by celebrating truths about Mary. Contained in the church, by the way, are the supposed relics of the manger of Bethlehem. Er, well, it's the thought that counts...

The other churches I visited later in the day were closed, so I made my way by bus to the Appian Way. I was dropped off on the southern end and walked downhill, past the Tomb of Cecilia Metella (daughter-in-law of Crassus) and the Villa of Maxentius (the enemy defeated by Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge). After only a few minutes (and a few more minutes stop for lunch), I came upon the Catacombs of St. Sebastian.

St. Sebastian was a pre-Constantinian martyr who served as a captain of the imperial guard but built up others' faith in times of persecution and death. For this he was shot through with arrows, a scene often depicted in iconography and later realistic art (the story goes that he miraculously survived this, and was later beaten to death; who knows). He was buried in these catacombs, and his body now rests in peace in the Constantinian Basilica of St. Sebastian built atop them.

The catacombs are miles and miles of subterranean tunnels used for burial. Romans preferred to cremate the deceased, but Christians, due to their belief in the resurrection of the dead, preferred full burial. Since the Romans did not permit burial within the sacred boundaries of the city (as I mentioned in my post 'Jesus Is Lord (and Caesar is not)') these catacombs, as well as mausoleums like that of Cecilia Metella, were placed along the Via Appia.

Alas, there were no photos permitted in the catacombs (although I did get a picture inside the church of the tomb of St. Sebastian, left), but it was an interesting experience to view ancient Christian tombs- with adjacent Christian graffiti- stretching out beneath the earth. I highly recommend it for anyone visiting Rome.

I walked farther up the Appian Way past the catacombs of St. Calllisto (which I did not enter for lack of time) to the Church of Domine Quo Vadis. Domine Quo Vadis means 'Lord, where are you going?" So the legend goes, Peter fled Rome during Nero's persecution of Christians after the Great Fire. On his way out, leaving other Christians and martyrs behind, he encountered Christ (or a vision of Christ) walking in the opposite direction, and asked Domine, quo vadis? Christ answered "I am going to Rome to be crucified again." Peter took this to mean that he should face death in solidarity with his fellow Christians, and returned to Rome to be crucified upside down. The church marks the supposed spot where the meeting between Christ and Peter took place. Er, well, it was a nice little church.

My day continued with a return to Pilgrim's Rome (the neighborhood of St. John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore, between the Termini Train Station and the Colosseum). The next church I saw was St. Peter-in-Chains. This church holds the chains that are said to be the ones that bound him to his cell in Caesarea Maritima and in the Mamertine Prison of Rome (during his imprisonments in those places as recorded at the end of Acts).

Relics aside, the church contains one of Michelangelo's greatest sculptures: the horned Moses on the tomb of Pope Julius II. The tomb was originally meant to be his greatest achievement, fit for none but the greatest of the late medieval/renaissance warrior popes, Julius II, but when the pope died the funding dried up, and when Michelangelo died the tomb was left unfinished. The tomb as it exists today is a mere compilation of the few portions he finished; the famous horned Moses was supposed to be in the far upper right hand corner. As it stands today, the tomb is a mish-mash of whatever Michelangelo managed to complete. All the same, the horned Moses is one of the greatest pieces of sculpture on the planet.

He is horned, by the way, because the rays of light that shone from Moses as he descended from seeing God on Mount Sinai were translated in the Latin Vulgate as 'horns.' Michelangelo knew better, but by then it had become tradition to depict Moses with horns, and the Moses in question is supposed to be menacing. This is, after all, Moses at the moment he descends from Mount Sinai with the original tablets of the law, horrified and angered by the idolatry of Israel and the Golden Calf. The horns just complete the scene.

After a brief stop at San Clemente- a 12th century church built atop a 4th century church built atop a 1st century temple of the eastern Mithras mystery cult built atop Roman homes- I headed on the metro down to St. Paul's-Outside-the-Walls. St. Paul's was the largest church in Christendom until St. Peter's was completed, and it contains some of the finest mosaics in Rome. Indeed, all of the churches mentioned in this post- except the Basilica of St. Peter- have early medieval iconographic mosaics that look straight out of the Christian East. That surprised me to no end, I must admit, but in the most pleasant way.

That's a fairly quick summary of my Saturday, but it was a very fulfilling day.

Assisi and Siena

2010-05-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

It stuck me about halfway through the trip that, being on pilgrimage, I should try to get to a few places in Italy besides Rome. To be honest, the whole Italy portion was scheduled a bit poorly: I'm going to neither Florence, nor Venice, nor Naples. But having gotten to Cassino, the center of Benedictine monasticism, I thought I should try for Assisi.

St. Francis of Assisi is a saint much beloved by Catholics, but also by Protestants of every stripe. His was a message of poverty, chastity, and obedience; his was, indeed, a message of simple but fervent love for God, neighbor, and all creation. His commitment to nature and the animals strikes a particular chord with our generation, I think.

Unfortunately it's a three hour train ride from Rome to Assisi, so I had to pull myself out of bed nice and early at 5am to catch the train forty-five minutes later. Somehow I managed to do it after only three good hours of sleep, and I was off to one of the central pilgrimage sites of Europe.

Arriving three hours later, with my Rick Steves guide to central Italian hill towns in hand, I began following his walking path leading from the top of the fortified town down the hill to the Basilica of St. Francis. I wound through the brick-clad back streets (well, they're all back streets) from one church to the next, including the Basilica of St. Clare. When St. Francis' fame grew as a great preacher- early eleventh century- he attracted the interest of a nobleman's young daughter, Clare(Chiara). Against her father's wishes devoted herself to following Francis and founded the Order of the Poor Clares. This order exists alongside the Franciscans today, and the basilica in Assisi is the order's headquarters. Naturally, it contained her relics (corpse).

From there I walked downhill to the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (yes, the same name as the one in Rome; they really liked to show that the Blessed Virgin is better than the Mother Goddess, didn't they?). Unlike the one in Rome, however, the church is still obviously a pagan temple; it has the typically pagan columns with a triangular pediment, but with the steeple stuck on the side.

Then came the climax of the walk: the Basilica of St. Francis (alas, no pictures inside). It was far larger than I was expecting, for though it was a basilica, Assisi just isn't that big. Naturally it contained the relics (body) of St. Francis, watched over by gently Stoic monks in those robes that became so familiar to me in the Holy Land. Going to the heart of the Franciscan order was, in a way, like going home to Jerusalem for me.

The basilica contains numerous fine examples of art by Giotto, a major figure who first left the standards of medieval Christian art- two dimensional and emotionless- and added both dimension and character to his art. His work is beautiful, although commentaries on it often come with an unfortunate negative portrait of medieval and Byzantine art. Earlier iconography is portrayed as primitive or unconcerned with art. I disagree; they were concerned with using images that did not represent reality strictly in order to discover a deeper reality. And, of course, there were theological reasons (at least in the East) to stray away from three dimensional portrayals that smelt of idolatry. That said, I love Giotto, and I can't help but agree on at least the point that the emotion of his figures is a true step forward toward the Renaissance.

My original plan had been to spent the entire day in Assisi, to go back up the hill and visit other sites. However, I'd been disappointed in Rome-centric (almost Rome-only) approach to Italy, and had become increasingly disappointed in not getting to Siena. Naturally, Florence and Venice and Naples would have been nice, but I'll save those for a honeymoon or some such trip. However, Siena turned out to be doable, especially since I had a rail pass that got me free transit throughout the day. So hours and hours on the train notwithstanding, I was determined to get to Siena.

Three and a half hours after leaving the basilica, I finally arrived- via multiple connections and a bit of backtracking by bus- in beautiful Siena. I wasn't quite taken with it the way I was taken with Assisi. Assisi is entirely the old town, with no new town to speak of'; Siena has a historic core, but at the edges turns quite modern. However, the historic core is something people see once and fall in love with, and I did.

The main reason to go to Siena is to see the hometown of St. Catherine of Siena, the medieval mystic and theologian. She is known especially for a vision in which she was married to Christ, a symbol of the relationship of all believers in the church with our Lord. After winding my way around town I got to the Church of San Domenica which contains her head. As I mentioned, her body is in Santa Marria sopra Minerva in Rome, covered by a casing. Here, however, her head was on full display. There weren't any pictures allowed, but allow me to assure you: the face is rotting around the mouth, but the rest of her is in a surprising state of preservation. Her thumb was also in a jar.

Her home has also been preserved as a chapel with windows looking in to sections that remain as they were in her day. It was interesting, to me, to walk through the home of a saint, something I don't believe I've ever done. How, after all, did these examples of life in Christ live day to day?

Then to the Duomo. Duomo is the Italian term for cathedral, and the Duomo of Siena is world famous for its curious design. It is a Gothic church with a vaulted ceiling, but the exterior and the interior pillars are off-white with horizontal black stripes. It is one of the oddest things I have ever seen, but it was fascinating. Many churches are beautiful, but they start to run together; the Duomo of Siena stuck out.

Unfortunately, its chapel designed by and adorned with sculptures by Bernini was closed for renovation. A Michelangelo sculpture of St. Paul was visible, though, as well as some beautiful frescoes in the library.

I can't emphasize enough, though, that it was less the sites at either place that impressed me than the feel of the towns themselves. Assisi was getting ready to have a medieval and renaissance fair that would last through the weekend; Siena is characterized by a friendly (sometimes unfriendly) rivalry between its fourteen [double check] neighborhoods, all of which have their own flag. The brick architecture and winding lanes of these hilltop Umbrian and Tuscan towns is something to just fall in love with, and I look forward to spending a more leisurely day and night in each some time in the future.

Well, I had to take a bus back to Rome, and that was an uncomfortable three hours, especially after waking at 5am. It didn't arrive until ten at night, which is why I uploaded the pictures of this day without labeling them at first. They're all properly tagged, now, by the way.

It was certainly nice to get away from Rome for a day and see a bit more of small town Italy. But the following two days it was back to the tourist grind: the great Christian centers of Pilgrim's Rome and the Appian Way on Saturday, and as a grand finale, the sites of Ancient Rome on Sunday.

Thursday in Rome

2010-05-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Having done the Vatican on Wednesday, I thought I'd make Thursday the day for antiquities: the Ara Pacis, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Forum, Trajan's Market, and the Palatine. By the time I woke up and realized that it was raining and that it was already almost ten, I decided I would switch the outdoor sites for indoor ones. That, by the way, leaves the Palatine, the Forum, and the Colosseum as my grand finale tomorrow night. What a way to end it.

Fortunately, the Ara Pacis is indoors. Haven't heard of it? Ara Pacis means the Altar of Peace, and it is the altar erected by Caesar Augustus after his victories in the civil wars and over barbarians knocking at the gates of Rome. The inaugural sacrifice took place in 9 B.C., and that meant the beginning of the Pax Romana. More than Augustus' Pantheon or his Forum, more than roads or aqueducts, this little-known altar tells us exactly, precisely what Imperial Rome was all about: the gospel of peace through victory under the father of the fatherland, Caesar Augustus, Lord and Savior, the Son of God. And on the side, the Ara Pacis tells his gospel, The Acts of the Divine Augustus.

I got to Priene in Turkey, where the word euangelion (gospel) is first found used for the message of Caesar and Rome, but I have no idea where the inscription is; Aphrodisias, where the great shrine to the Julio-Claudian family, the Sebastion, is located, has a copy of Acts of the Divine Augustus on it, but because I had to hurry through Turkey to make the tour, I never got there; and at Pergamon the Altar to Zeus, upon which the Ara Pacis was likely based, is no longer there, but at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Walking into the museum where the altar is now located, I had to catch my breath at the site of it. No, nothing visually stunning. But there it was, something I've been waiting to see for months now, the pinnacle of Rome's self-understanding. It was here that Caesar Augustus, as Pontifex Maximus (high priest) of Rome and Princeps (First Citizen), brought those two roles together to confirm Rome's place in the world- and his place in Rome.

It's shaped like an empty box with an altar in the center, with one side open to allow access. On either side are reliefs depicting Augustus, his friends, his family, his supporters and clients (patronage again). Aside the entrance way are two particularly interesting reliefs. The Ara Pacis, you see, collects the myths of Romulus and Remus and of the exiled Trojan Aeneas into a history of the Julian clan in the same way Virgil's does. So on the left side of the rear face is a relief of Romulus and Remus suckling from the She-Wolf; on the other is Aeneas. And note that Aeneas is the son of Venus, while Romulus and Remus are the sons of Mars, thus showing the godly lineage of Augustus and the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

The rear contains parallel reliefs of the goddess Roma, symbolizing (or ensuring) Augustan victory, and a pastoral scene, displaying the prosperity of the Pax Romana. There it is, the gospel of Caesar in stone. It was reassembled, by the way, by Mussolini.

From there I went to the rather uninspiring Castel Sant'Angelo, just up the Tiber from the Vatican. The two tiers of the structure are ancient and medieval; the first was the grand mausoleum of Hadrian, and the second structure built atop it was a fortress for the popes. I spent most of my time wishing I'd brought my coat, since the rain had brought in a chill for the day.

Then I headed to the Pantheon. I'd seen the Pantheon Wednesday night when I took a nighttime stroll from Campo d'Fiori, through Plaza Navona, by the Pantheon, past the Trevi Fountain, and ended at the Spanish Steps. But now I got to go in it.

The dome is an engineering marvel. Look it up for yourselves, because I'm just not competent enough to really explain it. But standing in there I had an appreciation for the genius of Rome. It is, after all, one of the few structures built by the Romans that isn't in ruins (even if the right side is currently covered in scaffolding).

One thing I didn't know about the Pantheon is that three very important people are buried there: Victor Emmanuel II (more on him in a second), his son Umberto I, and, wow, who knew?, Raphael. That was a pleasant surprise I hadn't seen coming.

The guidebook I had (Rick Steves, of course) pointed me to a number of local churches with impressive histories or architectures. I got to three out of four of the recommendations. The two that I was most impressed by were Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the Gesu Church.

Santa Maria sopra Minerva is Rome's only Gothic church (left/above). The interior is blissfully devoid of stucco overstatement and rococo absurdities. It has the sort of vaulted ceiling that is far more common in northern Europe than Italy, which is my favorite sort of ceiling (St. George's Cathedral in Israel had a vaulted ceiling).

The church also has a great history around it. 'Sopra Minerva' means that it is built atop a temple to the mother goddess Minerva, although no evidence of that is extant. This church's monastery is where Galileo was tried as a heretic by the Inquisition. On his way to his trial he knelt before the altar here. And the altar? It contains the body of St. Catherine of Sienna.

Note, by the way, 'the body.' Her head is in Sienna (more on that in the next post).

The church also has a Michelangelo sculpture in it of a strong, muscular Christ clinging to the cross. His privates are comfortably private thanks to that characteristically Counter-Reformation swoosh of bronze loincloth; Michelangelo originally sculpted him buck naked. You know, I don't have a problem with nudity in art, and we probably need to be less hung up about it since in classical art it represents innocence, not eroticism; but I draw the line at Christ (oh, and Mary, definitely Mary). Anyways, fantastic sculpture; the muscles are so the muscles of a stone cutter (or 'carpenter')

The other church I was particularly impressed with was the Gesu Church, or Jesuit Church. This church is the headquarters of the Jesuit Order, and as much as I loved it, it was downright scary.

In the left transept is the tomb of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the soldier-turned-saint and founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). An altar rises up to the ceiling above him, but the most interesting feature is the statue scene just to the right of the altar: Religion Overthrowing Heresy.
In this picture, Religion is symbolized by an angry freaking nun, the kind you've never experienced personally but always hear horror stories about. She's holding a whip and beating Heresy, a man scampering, or toppling over, on the ground. Around Heresy is the Snake, our good pal Martin Luther (or Lutheranism in general), pulling him in. Off to the side, a mean-looking cherub (the way only fat babies with wings can look mean) is tearing the pages out of a heretical book. Yeah, it was scary.

Happily, the right transept is more ecumenically friendly. Here lies the grave of St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic missionary who attempted to spread Christianity to the east. He got as far as Japan. Now that's better.

After these and other churches I walked past Trajan's Market, which really isn't anything special, and checked out the Victor Emmanuel monument. Vitorio Emmanuel II was the king of Piedmont (northwestern Italy) and Sardinia (the island) before uniting Italy under his Savoy dynasty. He is called 'the second' because he kept the numbering system of Piedmont-Sardinia, much to the chagrin of the united Italian provinces. The House of Savoy ruled Italy until their position was compromised by support for Mussolini; they were voted out of power by popular referendum in 1946, and live (and say stupid things) in Switzerland.
The monument itself is cool, though. It's a bit... big... but the central statue of Victor Emmanuel on horseback is the largest equestrian statue in the world. The Italian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is here, too, watched over by the goddess Roma.

From here I circled around to the Capitoline Museums. This collection is one of the four great ones of Rome (with the Vatican, the Borghese, and the National Museum), and it was nice to get a good amount of time there.

Here's a rundown of their best pieces:

Bits of the colossus of Constantine, from the Basilica of Constantine that once stood in the Forum:

Commodus, the bad guy from Gladiator, dressed as Hercules:

The Capitoline She-Wolf, with Romulus and Remus:

Marcus Aurelius, extending a hand of clemency to foes and mounted on horseback (this statue was thought to be Constantine because of the hand of blessing and thus saved from the Christian purge of pagan statues; it was placed in the center of the Capitoline Square by Michelangelo):

The Dying Gaul, from Pergamon:

The Capitoline Venus, the only cute Venus I've ever seen:

And that was my Thursday.

My Day At the Vatican

2010-05-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was Vatican day for me. Each Wednesday the pope has a scheduled appearance, which he sometimes attends and sometimes doesn't. This draws the crowds away from the horrendous line at the Vatican Museum; I had heard he wasn't going to make an appearance this week (he did, oh well), so I decided this was my quick way in (since without a printer I couldn't print off an online ticket). It worked like a charm. Twenty minute wait. It's usually two hours.

The Vatican Museum is one of the greatest museums in the world, on par with the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Smithsonian. In fact, throwing the Smithsonian in there probably does us a little more credit than we deserve, but I couldn't help myself (I'm looking forward to getting back to the Land of the Free, after all). Its collection goes on for five miles of hallways, and includes the Sistine Chapel as a finale. But Michelangelo's chapel is only the pinnacle of the experience; all the art and archaeology throughout the collection leads up to his work. The museum subtly, but unmistakably, tells that story.

There's no way for me to write up a full description of what I saw in the museum; whole treasures, like the Map Room, I'll have to skip. I'll just tell the story that leads up to Raphael and Michelangelo.

Guided by Rick Steves' Rome guide, I went around the painting galleries and Egyptian rooms for awhile until coming to Apollo Belvedere, in the courtyard (in the painting galleries, by the way, I saw Raphael's The Transfiguration, above). The original Apollo Belvedere was sculpted by the Greek Leochares, and the one on display that I saw is a Roman copy of the original. It was discovered during the Renaissance and delicate artists like Raphael took it as an example. It is the epitome of balance.

Nearby is a lounging Greek river god. Can you see how Michelangelo took it as his inspiration for God in The Creation of Adam?

But Michelangelo's real inspiration was Laocoon. Laocoon is the character in the Iliad who, as high priest of Troy, warns the Trojans not to accept the Greek's Horse. The famous "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" is his statement. However, the gods were on the side of the Greeks, so they sent two huge snakes to crush him and his sons. This sculpture captures that horrific moment. It isn't just the death of himself, or his family; it captures the death of a civilization.
It was known to have existed since antiquity, but had been lost for a thousand years until rediscovery (in Rome) in 1506. It was a watershed in aesthetics and took Renaissance art in a new direction; one early viewer was the young Michelangelo. It was only two years later that he began on the Sistine Chapel, with its horrifying picture of The Last Judgment: the ultimate end of civilization.
A side note: Laocoon's right arm was long detached above the elbow, missing. It was popularly thought that the arm stuck straight out, in order to balance with the diagonal left arm; this was the culture bred on Apollo Belvedere. Michelangelo, however, insisted that it must have bent backwards, behind Lacoon's head. He instinctively saw the importance of tipping balance in order to confound the viewer. Sure enough, when the elbow was discovered in a farmhouse in the early twentieth century, Michelangelo proved to be right.

Back inside the halls I was directed to the Belvedere Torso. This hunk of unfinished and broken rock just shows how much effort goes into sculpture. And even if it were finished, it's not beautiful; the Hercules once depicted is chunky and knotty. And yet this torso turned out to be Michelangelo's inspiration for the torso and inner joints of Christ in The Last Judgment. This is not the effeminate Christ of western medieval artwork, nor the Christ of Raphael, but the hulking Christ of Revelation.
Skipping way, way ahead in my day (there was just far too much to even scratch the surface), I came to the penultimate exhibits: the Raphael rooms. The last one them contains one of my favorite pieces of art, ever: The School of Athens. I'm contrasting Raphael unfavorably with Michelangelo in so much of this post, but don't be misled; Raphael was a genius of the first order, and this painting shows you why (click on it for the full effect). It is the epitome of symmetry; philosophers on the viewer's left, scientists on the right, with Plato pointing up to the sky and Aristotle signaling to the earth below as their crux. Two archways above Plato and Aristotle form secular halos over them. Those gathered around them include Euclid, Socrates, and many others. Such a school never existed, and they lived at varying times and places; but it captures the spirit of the Renaissance, to bring them all together.
And yet, the Renaissance was above moving forward, too. Raphael worked this in by modeling the likenesses of the ancients on contemporary Renaissance men. Plato is Leonardo Da Vinci. Euclid is the architect Donato Bramante. Raphael himself stares out at the viewer, almost winking in playfulness, from the bottom right. Yet when Raphael finished he walked down the hall to see Michelangelo, at work in the Sistine Chapel. He gasped; he was astonished; he had never seen anything like it. He ran back to The School of Athens and added one more figure, in the foreground, leaning on a hunk of marble: Michelangelo.
Being in the Sistine Chapel was a deeply moving experience. No pictures; enforced rule of silence, with just a murmur from tour guides. It is so much bigger than I'd imagined (a contrast to St. Peter's; read on). The Creation of Adam is incredible, though one wishes it were a little larger. Yet The Last Judgment....

The Last Judgment may be the most sublime artwork ever created. And I use sublime the way the philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term, not in the frilly way that the term has come to be used. He contrasted the beautiful and the sublime; Raphael is beautiful. The beautiful is balanced. The sublime is a thunderclap. It challenges us. It deeply moves us by disturbing us rather than drawing us in. Michelangelo is sublime.

No one smiles in The Last Judgment. The righteous dead, resurrected to new life, wake to find themselves still corpses, and must scamper up to the divine embrace. How much more terrifying, then, for the damned. They are shot down to hell, to the welcome of the boatman, Charon, looking all too excited to ferry them across the River Styx. The terror on their faces terrifies the viewer. In the center, Christ raises his right hand, preparing to smite the damned to his left; his left hand holds up a sign of peace to those on his right, but his attention is focused on the smiting to come. Just by Christ, Mary huddles, curled submissively, looking away from the damned, unable to watch. Her days interceding for sinners are over indeed.

When the painting was unveiled to the public in 1541 the pope dropped to his knees and said, "Lord, charge me not with my sins when thou shalt come on Judgment Day."

And Catholics say the Reformers overemphasized wrath!

Awestuck and not a little introspective of my own sins, I headed out the secret back door directly into St. Peter's.

Since I took the right door, reserved for tour groups, out from the Sistine Chapel rather than the left door, which leads back to the Vatican Museum entrance, I got dropped right on the colonnaded porch of the basilica. So I didn't get to walk up through St. Peter's Square, with its famous obelisk and Bernini columns. Instead, my first view of the church was passing through the doors into the nave.

Did my jaw drop? No. Actually, I was confused. I was in the Hagia Sophia two weeks ago, after all. That felt far, far larger; far more open, with its wide dome. This was grand, to be sure, but it seemed like it was on a far smaller scale. Was this the right church?

Then I looked down the nave, and saw the size of the people at the far end.

And then my jaw dropped.

The church was actively designed to appear- and feel- smaller than it is. The canopy over the altar is a full seven stories high, but it is more than a football field away, so it looks smaller; the height of the altar canopy also cuts the distance between the floor and the dome, in order to reduce one's feeling of isolation (which is exactly what I felt in the Hagia Sophia). For instance, the twin statues of St. Teresa, on the right pillar when one enters the nave, look the same size. However, the one at the top of the pillar is a full six feet taller than the one at the base, in order to create the illusion that the church is not nearly lofty as it appears. The end result is something grand with an immense capacity for congregants that still retains a cozy, intimate feel.

The other significant thing about St. Peter's is its Counter-Reformation thrust. The whole church is designed to make absolutely clear where the church is, and where it ain't. Around the frieze of the building runs a gold band with seven-foot tall letters (it looks like it can't be more than two feet tall from ground level) that contains every phrase spoken to Peter by Christ in the New Testament. The lettering around the base of the dome reads: "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will built my church." The basilica is built on the supposed location of Peter's tomb, directly beneath the altar. To the right of the altar is a bronze statue of Peter, holding keys in his left hand and extending his right hand in blessing, and clad in Roman toga. He is wearing the toga of a Roman senator, and pious pilgrims touch or kiss his foot.

The climax of any tour of the basilica is Michelangelo's Pieta, with the life size sculpture of Christ's corpse being held by a larger-than-life Mary. Her size, and yet her youth, capture in the abstract of non-realism her maternal love for our savior. Unfortunately, it is behind bulletproof glass because a crazy man came into a church a few years ago and began chipping it with a hammer.
After a stroll through the crypt (where I located the tomb of John Paul II) and the treasury (uninteresting except for a single pillar from the Constantinian basilica), I headed out for the National Museum of Rome. Once in the square, I turned around for my first look at the Basilica of St. Peter from the outside.

Wow.

My evening in the National Museum of Rome didn't quite compare to either experience, but it is definitely worth a trip. It is one of the four great museums in Rome (with the Vatican, the Capitoline Museum, and the Borghese Gallery which I won't be getting to) and contains a collection of Roman sculpture that chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Neato.

And that was my Wednesday at the Vatican.

Tivoli and Cassino

2010-05-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

After a nearly sleepless midnight bus ride from Bari, I arrived in Rome shortly before 7am. Naturally, it wasn't yet check in time (the real disadvantage of saving money on accommodations and time on travel by taking night transport), but the people at Alessandro Palace and Bar (great name for a hostel) let me leave my stuff in luggage storage while I went out for the day. I thought I might take in Subiaco as a day trip from Rome in order to see the monasteries of Sts. Benedict and Scolastica, but I hung around the hostel too long chatting with the early risers. Instead, I went to Tivoli.

Tivoli is a nearby medieval hill town containing two of the most impressive villas: Villa D'Este and Villa Adriana. Villa D'Este is a palace built for the sixteenth century Cardinal Ippolito D'Este, grandson of Pope Alexander VI and son of Lucrezia Borgia. He plowed over a Benedictine monastery in order to catch this piece of prime real estate, where he built a a winding series of gardens and fountains. The palace is fairly standard and boring, but the villa's estate is a wonderful place to wander. He had a political falling out in Rome and was exiled from the city's boundaries, and fortunately for him, he already had this place to retire. Honestly, it was an interesting stroll, but nothing terribly exciting.

The Villa Adriana, on the other hand, was great. This was the private estate of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who ruled over the Roman Empire at its greatest extent and built a palace to show for it. The ruins stretch out over the grounds, which are kept green by the water system set up over 1800 years ago. It contains a bath house in true Roman style, so I finally got to see what all these bathhouses scattered around Israel, Turkey, and Greece were attempting to imitate. Hadrian's villa also included a dual-language Latin and Greek library, which seems to have been a particular interest of his (a man after my own heart).

That afternoon I returned to Alessandro's, checked in, and relaxed. The hostel scene is a lot of fun; one of 'Europe's Famous Hostels' (an association of hostels across Europe), Alessandro's offers beds as low as 19 euro a night with hot water, breakfast, free pizza every night, and a great lounge and bar. It's also located right by Termini, the central metro, bus, and train station of Rome, making it extraordinarily convenient. Sounds like an advertisement? Yeah, probably, but this is the sort of budget-traveling I can really get into. I probably should have stayed in more dorms, anyway.

The next day I slept in and went to Cassino. I'd thought about going to Subiaco to see the Benedictine monasteries named after the eponymous St. Benedict and his sister, St. Scholastica, but that's best done first thing in the morning; instead, I went to the town of Cassino, the site of the World War II battle of Monte Cassino named after the Abbey of Monte Cassino. This is the first monastery in the western world, founded by St. Benedict of Nursia; it was reduced to rubble by Allied bombing during the battle, but a new structure has been built that captures the glory of its former incarnation.

It was an hour train ride to Cassino, and a hefty price for a cab up the mount (monte) to the abbey. However, it was totally worth it. The monastery contains the relics (that is, bodies) of Sts. Benedict and Scholastica as well as a truly excellent sacristy/museum/treasury (like the ones at St. Catherine's in Sinai and St. John the Theologian on Patmos). Nothing was nearly so ancient as the manuscripts contained in those two, but I got to see quite a few items saved from the rubble of the old Monte Cassino.

I probably could have spent my first days in Rome more efficiently, but I was exhausted after two sleepless nights on a ferry and on a bus. Now it's a race to the finish, and I'm seizing every minute.

As they used to say here, carpe diem.

Jesus Is Lord (and Caesar is not)

2010-05-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

I've been hinting at this post and openly promising it for a few weeks now. Now that I'm in Rome, the Eternal City, it's time.

"Jesus is Lord." It is the central confession of faith for St. Paul in its simplest form. Better: "Jesus is Lord and Savior." We're implicit. We're the ones who require saving. But the focus is on the Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, Son of God.

In fact, "Jesus is Lord and Savior" is a sentence that unpacks Paul's most formal way of speaking of the crucified man from Nazareth: Lord Jesus Christ. As the Messiah (Gr. = Christos), Jesus of Nazareth has banished the great enemy, the unholy triad of sin, death, and the devil, and is thus our savior and our lord. Jesus is Lord and Savior is the way of stating who he is, such that 'Lord' and 'Christ' have become so attached to 'Jesus' that for Paul (and hopefully for us), they're just as much a part of his name as the one given to him by his parents.

'Lord and Savior.' What does it conjure in your mind? Prayer partner? A friend in time of need? Someone who has saved your soul? It should. But what did 'Lord and Savior' mean in the first century? Why this phrase, Paul?

Who is Lord and Savior in the first century? You probably already know the answer if you've been reading this blog: Caesar is Lord and Savior. And this isn't a later comparison drawn up by theologians; no, 'Lord and Savior' is a phrase found in the archaeological record, from the tiniest coins to the grandest inscriptions on imperial cult temples, referring to Caesar.

The same goes for 'Son of God.' Caesar is the son of a god, for when each emperor dies, he becomes a god and takes his place among the pantheon of gods. This isn't a metaphor; the deceased Caesars were literally worshiped as gods, and the living Caesars were worshipped as sons of gods. Eventually, some of them dispensed with the niceties and had themselves divinized while still alive.

So when Paul says 'Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, the Son of God,' lets be clear: he is committing high treason against the state. If you've ever wondered why the Romans persecuted Christians, make no mistake: the Christianity preached by Paul and his fellow apostles was (and is?) deeply subversive. 'Jesus is President and Commander-in-Chief' doesn't really capture it. But imagine saying in Germany in 1938, 'Jesus Christ is the Fuhrer,' or Italy in 1934 'Jesus Christ is Il Duce,' and you might have an idea.

So whenever Paul says 'Jesus is Lord,' there's this eerie echo of the subject: 'And Caesar is not.'

That isn't to say that the Roman emperors were totalitarian despots. First off, much laud heaped upon the Caesars came freely from their subjects throughout the empire. The Sebasteon (Greek for 'Augustan') of Aphrodisias, a temple to Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Julio-Claudians, was constructed by the local population in order to celebrate the Caesars and the good they brought to the empire. The empire, after all, was borne in the crucible of a series of terrible civil wars: the first between the survivors of the First Triumvirate (Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus), the second between the survivors of the second (Octavian, adopted son and natural nephew of Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony). When Octavian defeated Mark Antony and consolidated power as the 'first citizen' of the empire, we was proclaimed 'august' by the senate, and thus took the name Augustus; august, by the way, means venerable, and venerable means worthy of worship, and worthy of worship, of course, means divine. The ascension of Augustus meant peace, and his divine triumph was celebrated throughout all the world.

Second, and following, the site of Priene (where I visited shortly before the Seven Churches tour) contains an astonishing reference. The word euangelion, 'gospel,' is used specifically of the word that goes out from Caesar proclaiming the good news that Rome is triumphant, civilization is restored, a new Caesar as ascended to the throne, or some such. "The gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Son of God" stands over-against "the gospel of our Lord and Savior, Caesar Augustus, the son of a god."

Paul drew these terms 'Lord,' 'Savior,' 'Son of God' from two sources: they fulfilled (and filled-out) the meanings he inherited in Judaism, and they clashed like cymbals with their usage in imperial Rome. With 'gospel,' he's taking it entirely from Rome and throwing it back in the empire's face.

And yet, in Romans 13, Paul tells us to obey the authorities, for they are there to do us good and punish evildoers. In my humble opinion, Paul, recognizing the politically-charged nature of his language up until this point, which pervades the letter, wants to make absolutely clear that he is not advocating rebellion or anarchy. That is something the zealotous revolutionaries that launched the Great Jewish Revolt of AD 66 wanted, and it got the temple burned down in AD 70. Nor is he advocating radical withdrawal from society or pacifism; as a Roman citizen, Paul is glad to live under the civilization of Roman rule. And yet, and yet, he advocates submission to the authorites not because they are gods or sons of gods, but because they receive their vocation from the one true God. He is happy to live under an earthly lord and to appreciate their good news, but Caesar is not the Lord, and his good news is not the Good News.

Another word: apostle. It means emissary, or ambassador. This is not a street preacher advocating a spiritual encounter with God, or even acceptance of a truth that will save one's soul. An ambassador is a formal representative that goes around delivering proclamations in a foreign country, making known not the options or opportunities, but cold hard facts.

Can any of us imagine the Roman general (later dictator) Sulla, on his way out to Pontus and Armenia in the early first century B.C., delivering this message? "The Roman Republic is sorely displeased with your conduct. We would like to give you the opportunity to change your hearts and minds, and embrace our republic's ideals as a path to spiritual betterment." Don't be ridiculous! The message was: "Rome is on it's way. I am on my way. Pledge your loyalty to us now, be faithful to the true world power, whatever your illusions of your own self-importance, because your time is short and our wrath is bottomless. Our coming is nigh."

It gives another meaning to 'parousia,' the 'advent' or 'coming' of the Lord. For anybody in Paul's head, using politically-charged terms like Lord, Savior, Son of God, and Gospel, 'Coming' (as in, Second Coming) cannot be spoken without at least taking account of its usage in Roman imperial terminology. When an emperor or official envoy was on his was to a city, the city was forced into a state of urgent preparation for his arrival. Whether they accepted him with a parade or with barred gates determined their gate; by the time he arrived, it was already too late.

Paul's talk about salvation is thus never far from his talk about the last days. 'Getting saved' isn't about ensuring your soul goes to heaven when you die; it's about ensuring that you're marked out as a loyal subject here and now so that when the king arrives back to earth, you don't die then. After all, the end of the end times isn't eternity in heaven; it's heaven brought to earth at the hands of the king.

How then, are we marked out as part of this loyal community with this rebellious corner of God's empire? Faith (pistes) and baptism. The Greek word for faith, pistes, means belief, trust, fidelity, loyalty; it is not merely an intellectual affirmation of a truth, but deep-abiding dependence on something and tenacious loyalty to it. Roman citizens and soldiers had pistes in Caesar; Christians have pistes in Christ. We can say we are saved 'through faith alone' because faith is not dead belief, but generates works (that add nothing themselves). And baptism? Baptism is the visible sign, seal, and sacrament that incorporates us into this family of faith. It is the grace that alone generates pistes, and alone marks those with pistes.

The faithful baptized make up the church; and what is the church? In AD 135 the Roman Emperor Hadrian, after defeating the Jewish rebels of Simon bar Kokhba, turned Jerusalem into a Roman colony city, Aelia Capitolina. It was called a colony because, as in so many other places, it was a city for poorer Romans and Roman veterns to move to. It was prime real estate. And it was typical Roman strategy: pacify a rebelious area by making it properly Roman.

The church is quite the same thing. Its individual congregations are like embassies (headed by ambassadors, populated by foreign service officers and staff), or colonies. The church is the place where the true emperor of the universe- Jesus Christ, not Caesar- plants down his loyal followers. The church is the ark that the floodwaters will pass over, because these cities are already loyal.

A side note: much has been made of Paul's curious statement in 1 Thessalonians that the dead in Christ will rise first, to be followed by the living, and that the living will meet him in the clouds before he returns to earth. The latter has somewhat mangled into a justification for this brand new idea of a 'rapture' seven years before the return of Christ; so the reasoning goes, there's no reason for believers to meet Christ up in the heavenly realms only to turn right back around to come back to earth; there must be a seven year gap inbetween, the so-called tribulation period.

But in ancient Rome, both the dead rising first and the meeting the Lord 'out there' before returning make absolute sense. In the former case, one must recognize that ancient cities had sacred boundaries in which people could not be buried. The dead were buried outside the city; the graveyards of Rome are all south of the current city center, around the catacombs of the Appian Way, and the same is truth of Kerameikos Cemetery in Athens, west of the Agora and Acropolis. If Paul is envisioning a parousia (advent, coming) paralleling the coming of an emperor to a city, well, of course you meet the dead first! They're outside the city, after all.

In the second case, remember that a city loyal to the emperor didn't just wait for him to arrive. They certainly didn't wait until he arrived to unbar the gates. No, a good and proper and loyal city held festivities in which the populus ran out to greet the arriving dignitary and escorted him back into the city. Believers ('the faithful' is a better translation) show their fidelity to the Lord by running out to greet him. There's nothing odd about it that requires the insertion of some seven year tribulation.

So what about our (post-)Protestant phrase from the Pax Americana, "make Jesus the Lord of your life?"' Is this really how Paul and the early Christians thought about their relationship to Jesus of Nazareth and the nature of his reign? I very much doubt it. One does not 'make Caesar the lord of your life.' Caesar is the lord of your life and everything around it. You don't even get to accept it or not; it's just a fact. You can rebel against it all you want, and willfully fight against it, but at the end of the day, Caesar is your lord anyway. The only question is whether you will break the law and have him as the lord that condemns you to death on a cross, or you will go about your business and have him as a lord and savior.

This is one of the many, many reasons why, at the end of the day, I don't believe we can talk about 'accepting' Christ, 'choosing' Christ, or doing anything to become saved. We may choose to rebel against the Kingdom of God; we can reject his Lordship; we can frown at the good news, the Gospel; we can deny that he is Son of God; we can turn cynical at the prospect of his increasingly-delayed Parousia; but only pistes, that tenacious fidelity, that loyalty, that belief in the Lord who is unseen, can ensure that he is our Savior. We may choose our earthly lords; it is obvious whether one might choose to believe the good news of America. But choose to believe in the unseen? That sort of radically moronic move- foolish in the eyes of the world- can only come about because grace has generated that within us. No choice necessary; that is the radical confession of grace alone, and I reject theology that says otherwise.

And therein lies the difference between Emperor Caesar and King Jesus. Caesar commands loyalty and leaves it to his subjects to obey; Jesus extends grace, and adopts brothers and sisters to be the Father's sons and daughters. The gospel of Caesar is the order brought about by Roman law; the gospel of Christ is the good news grace. As Martin Luther put it in one of my favorite quotes of his (or of anyone): "The Law says 'Do this,' and it is never done; Grace says 'believe in this,' and everything is already done."

And now we strike to the heart of the difference between Caesar and Christ. Caesar wins his victories by conquering enemies on the battlefield. He rides at the head of legions and compels people to behave like civilized men rather than barbarians.

But Christ has already won the victory. And his victory, quite appropriately, was at the hands of Rome's principal instrument for the execution of those rebellious barbarians: the cross. Christ died for our sins; but however much it would have 'worked' had his innocent life ended quietly in bed in Nazareth, can we really imagine Christianity being the same if the death that saves us from death was a quiet and peaceful death in his sleep? I think not. Christ conquers Rome's good news of civilization by dying at its hands; he shows the world for what it is; he shows us for what we are. The Old Adam dies in the mutulated Image of God at the hands of those who believe themselves to be gods. He becomes the rebel- "he became sin"- in order to win the victory that Caesar never could. The idolatry of earthly goods and the pride in human accomplishment lies in ruins scattered around the Mediterranean Sea, while the ambassadors of Christ continue to subvert the principalities of this world through our tiny colonies called churches. Who is the victor?

Jesus is Lord. And Caesar is not.

Corinth and Onward

2010-05-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

To get things straight: there's the site of ancient Corinth, which includes the ancient city and the acropolis (Acrocorinth) rising beyond it; there's Corinth, the modern city that has been built up around the canal that runs through the isthmus of Corinth; and there's Ancient Corinth, the modern village which envelops the site of the ancient city like a ring.

Got that?

So from Athens I caught a bus to modern Corinth, and from there to Ancient Corinth after a lengthy wait. Modern Corinth isn't all that big, but it's got a big city feel and nothing of interest. It's sort of like Harrisburg.

Ancient Corinth on the other hand is a lovely little village with one central cobblestone square. It's got real character, even apart from the fact that it has a truly extraordinary archaeological site smack in the middle of it and the hill to the south rises up into the massive Acrocorinth (which dwarfs the Athenian Acropolis, by the way). I checked into a place I reserved from Chan HaShayarot (the Bedouin tent with internet that I stayed at during Lent) called Rooms for Rent Tasos, a little mom and pop (and daughter and grandfather) Greek place above their own Tasos taverna, where probably no Americans ever stay. It was wonderful; hot water, clean sheets, a shared balcony, shampoo and soap and towel included; really, what more could you ask for? Well, internet, but fortunately there was an internet cafe up the road that doubled as the one and only hangout for the village youth.

By the time I'd arrived it was an hour before sunset and the sites were long closed. However, I took a few minutes to walk around the town and acquaint myself with its single main street, running along the north side of ancient Corinth, and talk to some locals. It was a very relaxing evening.

I'd planned on getting up bright and early in order to hike up Acrocorinth, but I ended up sleeping in and I took a taxi up to the top instead. No worries, though; there's quite a bit of hiking to be had at the top. Acrocorinth was fortified in the archaic age of Greece long before the Dorian invasion, when those northern tribes intermingled with the native Mycenaean population and produced the ethnic Greeks of classical Athens. It proved a solid fortification for the Corinthians until the ascension of Rome, which smashed it with her legions. Byzantine, Frankish Crusader, Venetian, and Ottoman rulers have all placed their stamp on the site, and the current walls are largely Frankish and Venetian.

After hiking around the site for about an hour and a half, going from various disused fortresses and coming across an abandoned mosque (which, like all abandoned Ottoman mosques in Greece, lacks its minaret thanks to an orgy of destruction wrought by the liberated Greeks) I decided I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't trek up to the Temple of Aphrodite. There isn't really anything there except the barest witness to its foundations, and I knew that, but this was, after all, the Corinthian Temple of Aphrodite.

In his correspondence with the Corinthians St. Paul calls them out for their sexual immorality. This conforms perfectly to the picture we have of Corinth from others in the ancient world; the Temple of Aphrodite was known to various writers as a center for sacred temple prostitution (in which women would sacrificially offer their bodies to the goddess by using them as means of financing the temple).

The best preserved temple in ancient Corinth, though, is in the ancient city remains down below. Upon returning to Ancient Corinth village and taking a break for lunch, I went into the site, which contains an archaic era Temple of Apollo. We know it's archaic because archaic-era temples were very long and narrow, unlike the classical Parthenon; the temple is pretty well preserved, too. The rest of the site, however, is largely Roman-era; thanks to this, it is one of those sites where we can really envision Paul living, working, and proclaiming on its streets.

A word, then, about Paul's troubles in Corinth. Paul stayed in Corinth for some time thanks to the patronage of Priscilla and Aquila. This pair of Jews from Rome were exiled by the Emperor Claudius when he declared Jews banned from the city (possibly due to intra-Jewish conflicts over whether to accept Christ); they turn up in Corinth, Ephesus, and then Rome once Claudius is no longer emperor and Nero is on the throne (thus ending the law of exile). Just from this, there are two things we might say about them: they were patrons to Paul, also engaged in his trade of leather-working and tent-making but in some way supporting him, with him as their client; they themselves were refugees and exiles. So how were they in a position to be patrons?

The Roman socioeconomic system was suffused with the patronage system. The gods were the patrons of various vocations with their official guilds; the highest gods were the patrons of the emperor, their client; the emperor was in turn the patron of the aristocracy and the citizens of the empire (SPQR), with the senators having own clientele of equestrians, and on down the ladder. Wealthy and aristocratic citizens, clients of higher authorities, were patrons of poorer citizens, non-citizens, freedmen, and even their own slaves. Slaves, for instance, might have once been free persons who sold themselves into slavery in order to become the client of a wealthy patron in the hopes that, once freed, they would be in a far better position in this social system of patronage than they were originally; of course slaves were just as often debtors or war captives.

The patronage system fundamentally organized life in the Roman world. So when we picture Priscilla and Aquila as Paul's patrons, there's no need to imagine them as wealthy; they might just be in the right place to offer aid, with the expected return being aid in their own project.

Where would refugee tent-makers work? Ancient neighborhoods were not divided between wealthy and poor neighborhoods; at Pompeii and Herculaneum the largest villas are surrounded on their street-side walls by storefronts on the first story and tenant housing on the second. The clients of the owners of the villa- lesser citizens, free persons, freed slaves, and their own slaves- all worked in these storefronts and lived in these rented spaces. One imagines Priscilla and Aquila latching on to these wealthy and powerful patrons as they move between Ephesus and Corinth, waiting for the day they might return to room; in order to rent a shop to ply their trade and live in the housing cluster above, they must make themselves into the clients of the villa's owners; and Paul, in order to have a place from which to base his mission, becomes their clients, working in their shop and sleeping in a corner of their home. It's beneficial to them because it relieves their workload; it's beneficial to Paul because it allows him to integrate himself into the villa's patronage network which, he hopes, will become a center of Christianity in Corinth.

And yet something goes terribly wrong.

While the problems addressed in 1 Corinthians are varied, they all trace back to a root problem: a fundamental misunderstanding of the body of Christ. This is either a misunderstanding of the relationship between male or female; or a misunderstanding of Christ's body in the Eucharist; or a misunderstanding of the relationship between members of the community on how to treat each other; or a misunderstanding of what it means to have Christ risen in his true body.

Without going into too much detail, I follow certain scholars in thinking that this misunderstanding arises because Paul's missionary strategy, which aimed at integrating himself into the patronage structure, was at first successful- the villa owners were converted and used their villa as a sacred space for the community gathering of Christians for worship- but never dissolved the patronage system. Rather, it carried over into the church.

So for instance, when discussing the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul rebukes the community for having a preference for the wealthy over the poor. In the common patronage system villa owners would have feasts with their clients, and these would be both opportunities for working one's way deeper into the patronage system and for visually and symbolically clarifying who was at the top of the food chain (literally). First, the seating arrangement would place the villa owner at the head place, with his (or her) clientele sitting close, and their clientele sitting farther away, until the feast spilled out into the the slave's quarters. So when he writes "there are divisions among you" (11:18), he's referring to a very recognizable system of dividing guests. Second, the villa owners would provide the food, but it would be a radically different quality depending on one's place in the system. Clearly, both of these villa patronage practices worked their way into the villa church's feasts (which came either before or after the ceremonial, solemn Eucharist). The situation seems to have gotten so bad that people were bringing their own food and eating it separately from everybody else (11:21).

As a result, Paul has to tell the villa owners that if they, the wealthy, must eat better food than everyone else, at least do it in their homes (11:22; 34), and to eat, worship, and partake together in a more formal and solemn spirit worthy of the church that treats the villa's patrons and everyone else in the system as radically and totally equal. The patronage system simply won't work within the church.

So as I walked around ancient Corinth and saw a building with a row of shops (above), but one door larger than the rest leading back to a villa back away from the street-front, I got excited. That was exactly the sort of place we might expect Paul to work, live, and preach, and I was downright giddy to view the archaeological remnant of that system which imported so many problems into the radically equal body of Christ.

Well, yesterday I headed to Patra and boarded a ferry to Italy. Now I'm stuck in Bari, Italy, the port town. I was given a train ticket to Cassino (where I was supposed to stay tonight) at the billet window which wasn't a ticket at all but merely a schedule (even though I checked it and asked whether or not that was the ticket). When I tried to board the train, I was told to go back and buy a ticket; by the time I was on my way back, the train was gone.

So, I booked another night in Rome tomorrow night. I'll be taking a night bus there tonight (oh joy) and hopefully get Cassino in as an excursion. Phew. If I'd known it was going to work out like this, I would have just flew from Athens to Rome. Oh well!
In any case, welcome to Italy. Country #6, ten days from home.

The Prayer of the Heart

2010-04-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

What in the world is the prayer of the heart?

The prayer of the heart, or the Jesus prayer, is an ancient prayer drawn from the Scriptures and expressed as the simplest petition one can offer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

The best-known work on the prayer is the anonymously authored classic of Russian spirituality, The Way of the Pilgrim. It's definitely worth reading, but it presumes certain convictions on the part of the reader. It assumes, first of all, that the reader is acquainted with repetitive, ritual, and liturgical forms of prayer, which most Americans just aren't. It also presumes belief in the Orthodox concept of salvation, called theosis, which most Americans don't.

So I offer this as my humble introduction to the prayer of the heart which has accompanied the way of this pilgrim for these four months. I also hope it will be a useful introduction to the theory and practice of prayer ropes and prayer beads as well as the deeper meditative nature of prayer. I write this not as an exhortation to conform to a spiritual practice, but as an invitation to join with me in a prayer that has brought profound comfort to me through the stress of my travels.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

Most basically, you need to know that you don't just say the prayer once. You repeat it over, and over, and over. It's a drumming beat.

The prayer is not meant to be a one-time petition; indeed, its less a petition than a meditation. American Protestantism has almost entirely lost the art of contemplative prayer, as opposed to the petitionary prayer that dominates our worship services and daily devotions: "Lord, I just want this; Jesus, I'd like that." And I certainly don't mean selfish petitions! By no means! "Lord, I want peace of mind for this brother and sister in Christ who is in deep need; Jesus, I just pray to you for the work of this Christian orphanage in such and a such a place."

But petitionary prayer is not the sort of deep communion with God that prayer has always offered. For that, we require the flip side of the coin: contemplative, or meditative prayer. In this sort of prayer we search for an inner silence so we can hear the still small voice of the transcendent and imminent God. Most often, we look for this by the quiet reading of the Scriptures; the ancient liturgical art of Lectio Divina, or Sacred Reading, is a contemplative, very slow, out loud reading of the Scriptures. Petitions are an important facet of prayer; but prayer-as-communion requires going further.

The Jesus Prayer stands as the hinge between petitionary and meditative prayer. It's a petition for Christ to have mercy on us, whether for our sins or in the hardships we face because of the fallenness of the world; but it's equally a reflection on the essential truth of the Christian faith: that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is boundlessly merciful to us wretched sinners.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

The repetitions of this prayer can go on silently, in the background of your mind, all day (and when you really get into it, in your dreams as well). When beginning, as advised in the The Way of the Pilgrim, one should take a significant time alone- several hours over the course of several days- in order to simply pray the prayer. Only then can it get into your subconscious in such a way that is spontaneously prayed in the midst of everyday activities, as I chat with others, as I wait in line for a bus, as I type this post.

The prayer, you see, is not meant to be something you pray in the forefront of your mind all day and night. We're not monks; we have vocations to attend to. Rather, it is meant to form a constant background to your life-experience. Repentance toward God is not a one-time event that 'gets us saved' or something we do after we've sinned; rather, it is an attitude we must actively cultivate in order to inform our everyday interaction with God, other persons, and the world.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

I say this specifically as I anticipate two objections to the practice of repetitive, nigh-subconscious prayer: one very American-Protestant, the other very Lutheran.

On the one hand, you might say, how can such a prayer be truly meaningful if it isn't prayed sincerely and in the foreground? This objection, I think, is a sad symptom of our American obsession with petitionary prayer, on the one hand, and authenticity, on the other. Yet as I said, the Jesus Prayer stands on the hinge between petitionary prayer and contemplative prayer. It is voiced in the words of a petition, yes, but contemplative prayer is as much a dialogue between us and God as it is a lone cry out to God. It is repeated over and over less because we are calling out again and again (and again!) to God than it is because in these words, from our tongue, God is crying out again and again (and again!) to us to live in the light of the answer of this prayer: Yes, I do! I shall always have mercy on you, my child!

Prayer does not begin with the presence of God, but with his absence. We cry to the Lord in our distress not because he is visibly there, but because he seems so far. The prayer is repeated because it is a seeking for the presence of God, ready to come to the foreground in the most difficult situations precisely because it is always there in the background. Many times on this journey I have found myself suddenly in a tight spot, in need of aid, and have found that rather than beginning to stumble onto words, the words were already on my lips! Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

But how can this been truly the authentic voice of the Spirit if its a ritual? And how can it be authentic if I'm hardly even aware of praying it? For that, I think we need to revisit our understanding of authenticity. What is truly real is not the glamorous or the spontaneous, the sudden ecstatic outburst or the words of our own mouths, but those deep things within us that inform our world and transform our lives, even when we're barely aware of them.

I think this response goes a long way toward meeting the Lutheran concern, which I myself have had to struggle with as a sincere adherent of Luther's theology. How can I pray this prayer for mercy, over and over, when I believe that God has already declared me as sinless as possible, and as righteous as Christ? And how, when that declaration came about not even by 'choosing Jesus' or saying the 'sinner's prayer' (as most evangelicals believe), but only by his unmerited grace?

In the first case, by I point to everything I said above. This is less a petition than it is a contemplation; and it is less my crying out to God than it is a lesson in the right order of things- Jesus of Nazareth is Lord, Messiah, and Son of God, and I am a sinner in need to his mercy- that shapes who I am and where I am in God's creation. So if you, like me, believe that justification is by grace alone through faith alone, and are concerned at the nature of this repetitive, ritual prayer of the heart, go back and reread what I wrote to our Protestant brothers and sisters.

But second, I would emphasize that if we, as Lutherans, are to be serious that justification is by 'double forensic imputation'- that is, our sin is legally credited to Christ crucified, and his righteousness is legally credited to us- and not by the growth in visible righteousness as Catholics believe, then we need to get serious about sanctification. For when we say that Christ is regarded as our sin, and we are regarded as Christ, the Catholic response is that we believe in a 'legal fiction' and are accusing God of willful ignorance; but if God is to be God, let us be clear that in legally regarding us as the righteousness of Christ, we have no doubt that we one day will be transformed from glory (of our legal partaking in Christ's righteousness) to glory (of our visible partaking in Christ's righteousness). For me, praying the Jesus Prayer means getting serious about sanctification.

But enough of arguments. After all, my point is not to convince anyone to pray this prayer, but merely to share my experience of it; I only counter these objections in order to defend my own actions.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

Back to the practice of the prayer itself.

One thing that helps me pray the prayer throughout the day has been timing it with my breathing, as suggested in The Way of the Pilgrim. At first this is fairly difficult, since during hours and days of practice you need to really pray it quietly, but out loud. That's how you drum it into your head. But eventually you let your voice fade away, and only your lips continue. Once I got to this point, I timed it as such:

(while breathing in): Lord Jesus Christ...
(while breathing out): ...Son of God...
(while breathing in): ...have mercy on me...
(while breathing out) ...a sinner...

And on the next breath, you start right over again, with 'Lord Jesus Christ...'

Eventually, you can even let your lips slide and just flick your tongue in the now-familiar motion. It is also said in The Way of the Pilgrim to time the words and syllables to your heartbeat; personally, I've never found this helpful, as my heartbeat and my natural breathing rhythm are simply off, and the syllables don't line up most of the time. But if it works for you, or if the heartbeat works better than the breathing, go for the other or both.

A note on the structure of the prayer: some time, word out the fullest meanings of each word of the prayer. It's fascinating, and for those of you, like me, who enjoy a bit of biblical, theological, and historical study, it's an excellent way to incorporate your intellectual interests into your prayer life. For instance:

Lord. In Hebrew, this could be Yahweh, the personal name of the one patron deity of the Hebrews, who we know under the name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It could also be Adonai, the term in Hebrew used when 'Yahweh' cannot be spoken aloud with a meaning of 'master' or 'suzerain.' This is a fun place to incorporate the scholarly work of an M.G. Kline or a Michael Horton on the parallelism between the covenant at Sinai and the suzerainity treaties of the Ancient Near East (if that makes no sense, don't worry). And then there's the Greek, Kyrie, which brings me back into the central spine of this prayer: "Kyrie eleison," "Lord have mercy." And then there's the Latin Dominus, where I incorporate the parallelism between Paul's 'Jesus is Lord' and Roman imperial ideology/theology's "Caesar is Lord," which in turn contrasts the Kingdom of God with the Imperium Romanum.

And you can go on and on, with each word of the prayer. I suppose if you really want to hear my personal reflections on each one, you can email me, but I won't bore you with them here. My simple point is that the prayer is absolutely packed with meaning.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

A second note about the structure: not with every word, but with its overall trust, the prayer descends from the highest heights of Godhead (Lord, Yahweh) down to me, a sinner. Strange to think about, given the Orthodox theology of sin, but as a Lutheran what petition better expresses the total depravity of humankind in contrast to its righteous Creator?

Indeed, if this were a prayer designed for one-time petition, it's a rather depressing one. It begins with the Lord, yes, but it ends with 'a sinner.' It's designed to be repeated: the final word 'sinner' demands that we run back to the 'Lord,' beginning the prayer anew with every breath.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

So a word about the chotki, the Orthodox prayer rope. It's a series of knots tied together in a circle, with a cross usually hanging off of it. They come in a number of varieties, with varying number of knots; mine is the 100-knot variety, with three blue beads and the cross punctuating each series of twenty-five petitions. It's not as though I need to keep track of how many times I've prayed (the Orthodox do, but I feel a little uncomfortable keeping track of a supposedly ceaseless prayer). Rather, the chotki reminds me to pray, and hear Spirit calling to Spirit within me. Moving my now-calloused thumb from knot to knot pushes me to continue these repetitions when my soul becomes, my body lazy, and my mind weak, so that when true laziness, or weakness, or exhaustion come, the prayer of the heart will be right there. I find it useful; you may not. That's fine!

Certain Lutherans going straight back to the sixteenth century have incorporated this ancient prayer into a theologically-acceptable version of the rosary, as well. Unlike the Anglican version of the rosary, which is physically different from that used by Catholics, Lutherans like me (hardly in the majority) use one that is identical in organization to the Catholic version. It is a loop of five 'decades,' or ten beads, separated by four distinctive beads, with a fifth central piece containing an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. From this Marian piece hangs another series of beads, five in all, with the two beads farthest up and farthest down on this hanging bit that are also distinctive from the inner three. At the bottom hangs a crucifix.

Yet whereas the decades on the Catholic rosary are used to recite the Hail Mary ("Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus Christ. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death), the Lutheran version employs these decades to pray the Jesus Prayer. Using the rosary, I work my way up from the crucifix, where I invoke the name of the Trinity ("In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen."), I pray the Nicene Creed on the first distinctive bead; three prayers of the heart on the next series; a Gloria Patri (Blessed be the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and evermore shalt be, world without end, amen.) on the chain between the uppermost of these three and the next distinctive bead; and an Our Father (i.e., the Lord's Prayer) on the second and uppermost of these distinctive beads.

Skipping the Marian image, I proceed directly to the first decade of ten Jesus prayers; at the chain between the last of the decade beads and the connecting distinctive bead, I pray the Gloria Patri, and then the Our Father on the distinctive bead. This process repeats five times until I reach the image of Mary again. Here, I pray the pre-Tridentine Hail Mary; that is, the first two sentences, taken from Luke 1:28 and 1:42, without praying the third sentence, added by the Council of Trent, which prays directly to her for intercession on our behalf. Then I just reverse the order down the last beads- the Our Father, the Gloria Patri, the Jesus Prayers, and the Nicene Creed- before finishing "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen."

Here's a very similar summary: http://www.giftsofaith.com/Files/lutheranrosary.pdf

Why this excursus into the Lutheran rosary? Well, besides the fact that I've mentioned it in my posts before without explaining, it helps illustrate the multifaceted uses of the Jesus Prayer. The prayer of the heart is there so that we can "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and it is largely meditative and contemplating. But it's also a petition, as it is most obviously in this Lutheran rosary. That is why I pray this version of the rosary before church; for that is when I most thoroughly need to ask for God's mercy upon this sinner, when I prepare my heart and mind to receive him who comes to us in his body and blood.

And here I note that as with all great spiritual practices, there is the threat of pride. What I must strive to remind myself is that praying the prayer of the heart does not bring about God's mercy; if anything, God's mercy is bringing about this wellspring of prayer within my heart. And it is not in actually doing deeds of righteousness, whether in saying the prayer or just being a good person, that I am actually made righteous; the righteousness of Christ, legally imputed to me, is rather the foundation of why I am transformed into a better person, first inside, then out. And still better, it is not in cultivating an attitude of repentance, or asking for God's repentance, that I am prepared to receive Holy Communion, but rather I am humbled by the declaration of 'righteous' which alone allows me to partake of the glory of God incarnate.

Even so, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner....

Athens

2010-04-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

The night train to Athens was only a night train inasmuch as it ran at night; fortunately, my first class Eurail ticket allowed me to sit in a quieter compartment with five other people rather than in a rowdy car. So between sleeping pills, earplugs, a facemask, and three days of exhaustion from Mount Athos, I think I got a good five hours of sleep before arriving at 6am.

From the train station I worked out the metro system (boy am I glad I took a little Greek) and found my way to Monasteraki Square. Monasteraki and Syntagma Squares are the two ends of Ermou Street, the main artery through Athens' nicest neighborhood, the Plaka. My hostel was right off Monasteraki; it's run by internationals, and called Athenstyle. Like Jimmy's Place in Selcuk and Fauzi Azar in Nazareth, I highly recommend it. Their lobby is part lounge, part cafe and bar, and part tourism bureau; better yet, they have a rooftop bar and lounge with a nightly happy hour and an unbeatable view of the Acropolis.

Since it was seven in the morning by the time I got there, my room obviously wasn't ready, but they were happy to let me crash on the couch downstairs in the pool hall. So after three hours of catching up on sleep, I got up around 10:30 and began my Rick Steves walking tour of Athens.

Athens can be magnificently charming, or horrendous. You have to have a good guide, and once again, Rick Steves didn't disappoint. I hopped the metro to Syntagma Square, and the tour took a meandering four hours before getting back to Monasteraki, a mere one kilometer away from the starting point.

If Monasteraki Square is the social and cultural center of Athens, Syntagma Square is the center of its political and economic life. Coming up from the metro station the first thing I saw was the parliament building. I'd arrived at the top end of the hour, so I got to witness the changing of the evzone guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (right), which sits just in front of parliament. The evzone guards left a little something to be desired (I mean, I've seen the British and the Danish do it), but the tomb was excellent: the shallow relief is of a dead Greek soldier, depicted with his shield. Spartan! Come back with your shield... or on it!

From here took me along Ermou street, a wide, brick-paved pedestrian thoroughfare with just the occassional moped- just like Ben Yehuda St. in Jerusalem, but like the pedestrian way in Istanbul, much longer. I walked around and saw three or four beautiful Greek churches. Unfortunately, after an earthquake, the Metropolitan Church of Athens, the leading church of Greek Orthodoxy (though not of worldwide Orthodoxy; that's St. George's in Istanbul), is covered in ugly scaffolding inside and out. However, a number of smaller churches are little treasures, especially the Church of Kapnikarea and the Church of Agios Eleftherios.

In the courtyard of the Metropolitan Church, though, is a statue of Greek Archbishop Damaskinos erected by the local Jewish population. During the Nazi occupation, he risked formally speaking out against the deportation of Jews to the rumored camps. When the Nazis threatened to put him before a firing squad, he said that he should be hanged instead, in proper Orthodox tradition. He survived.

Nearby to these churches is the wonderful Agia Filotheis St., which is sort of a Greek Orthodox emporium of church supplies. Vestments, icons, censors, lamps, and whatever else you can think of can be purchased on this street. I didn't have the time or money to shop, but I managed to snag a picture of an iconographer at work.

Dipping farther south, I walked into Hadrianopolis, the area outside classical Athens that was refounded by the Emperor Hadrian (much as he refounded Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, but here out of love for the native culture rather than disdain). The centerpieces of this area are the Arch of Hadrian and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The former was built to commemorate the completion of the latter; the side facing classical Athens contains an inscription "This is Athens, ancient city of Theseus;" the opposite frieze, facing Hadrianopolis, says "This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus." Ouch.

The Temple of Olympian Zeus is now a series of six or so clustered columns and two outlying stragglers; it's rather difficult to get the overall impression. What I think is really significant about it is that alongside the statue of Zeus that served as the object of worship was a statue of Hadrian himself, likewise worshiped as a god on earth. Once again, the imperial cult raises its head; I promise, that post on Jesus, Paul, and Caesar will come.

After winding me past the Lysicrates Monument and Lysicrates Square, and taking me through the quaint white-and-blue streets of the Hellenic islander neighborhood Anafiotika, the guide led me out to the Roman Forum and its Tower of the Winds. The Tower of the Winds is an octagonal, domed structure that has eight reliefs of persons representing the eight winds. The tower itself served as a sundial, waterclock, and astronomical chart.

Finally, walking past Hadrian's Library, I came back to Monasteraki Square. At this point it was already 3pm, and all the archaeological sites were closing down. So I got on the internet for awhile and eventually went up to enjoy the company of other young international travelers on the roof.

The next morning it was time to take in the heavy-lifting: the Agora and the Acropolis. Note, of course, that both of those are common nouns; but they get capitalized here, because Athen's agora is the Agora, and Athen's acropolis is the Acropolis.

The Agora was the central place of political, social, economic, and intellectual activity; only in the cultural and religious fields did the center of focus shift southeast to the Acropolis. The Agora contained places for public debates on philosophy; the bouleterion, the seat of the democratic leadership of Athens; stalls and arcades for merchants; a theater (properly an odeon) for musical performances; the ceremonial parade grounds leading up to the Acropolis; and even temples to the Mother Goddess (the Matroon) and Hephaistos. The Stoa of Attalos has been meticulously reconstructed and now houses the Agora Museum; the Temple of Hephaistos, god of blacksmiths (notice the mercantile theme, as well as the Matroon's agricultural patronage), has been blessedly preserved, much like the Parthenon. All of this made for an excellent two hour stroll through the site.

From there it was a very pleasant fifteen minute walk up the Panathenaic Way up to the Acropolis. I'm not entirely sure what to say about it. The Parthenon, dedicated to Athena the Virgin (virgin = parthenos), patronness of the city, is an unbelievable combination of sheer bulk and masterful architecture. It uses a series of optical illusions to keep its bulk from appearing unbalanced, by widening the columns at the end, having them tilt inward ever so slightly, and adding a gradual curvature to the floor so that the middle sticks up about an inch from the sides. So yes, I mean, it's the Parthenon.

The other structures were just as impressive, though. The Temple of Athena Nike, just to the right as one passes through the Propylaea, is dedicated to the victory of Athena and the Athenians over the Persians, and to ensure her continued support as the Athens fought the Persians in the Peloponnesian War. Note: the Athenians lost. Unfortunately it is currently undergoing extensive renovation; the entire temple is being disassembled, transported elsewhere brick by brick, where each bit will receive a thorough cleaning, and then it will be put back together again on site. At present, it's covered in scaffolding and cranes, and half the temple just isn't there.

There's also the Erechtheion and its Porch of the Caryatids. It occupies the oldest-inhabited site on the Acropolis where the Mycenaeans originally built their palace, and it was dedicated to Athena Polias, the 'Protector of the City.' When the Persians sacked the city and burnt the original Acropolis complex to the ground, Pericles took the statue of Athena Polias- an olive-wood satue dating to 900 BC- in order to save it so that she might, in turn, save them.

Oh, and of course, there's my own personal interest: the Romans decided to plop down their own temple, fittingly to the goddess Roma. Ah, the imperial ideology/theology rears its head again.

A fun note: the Acropolis' east side contains a large Greek flag with a history of its own. When the Nazis entered Athens in April of 1941, they ordered the evzone guard (the same unit at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) to remove the flag. He took the flag down, wrapped it around himself, and jumped to his death. A month later two Greek teenagers scaled the Acropolis, took down the Nazi flag, and raised the Greek flag back up.

Well, my camera ran out of batteries, so I wasted a few hours recharging it, by which time most of the sites were closed. So it was another afternoon on the internet and night on the roof. The good news: 1.80 euro will buy you a delicious gyro or souvlaki pita in Monasteraki Square. Seriously, you can do Europe on a tight budget, no problem, if you stay in dorms at hostels and let the staff point you in the right direction. I wasn't in a dorm here, but I've since switched my plans for Rome.

Anyways, this morning I went to the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, the greatest collection of Greek art and finds anywhere in the world. It was just jaw-dropping; and like the museums in Istanbul, they let you take pictures.

The highlights:

The Archaic-era Kouros figures (note the Egyptian influence), young nude men with a creepy smile:

The classical-era bronze Zeus/Poseidon, in mid-throw of a missing lightning-bolt or trident:

The ancient replica of the Parthenon's statue of Athena, holding Nike in her palm; for reference, the original Nike was six feet tall:

The Hellenistic-era bronze Paris, handing an apple to the winner of the ill-fated beauty contest that kicks off The Iliad:

And the Roman bronze of Caesar Augustus, with its return to the stoicism of classical Athens:

I was also a fan of the creepy bird-people:

There was also this other statue of Aphrodite and a satyr (I think), but I didn't get a look at the label because of a huge crowd of artists on the floor drawing it. If anyone can tell me its significance, much appreciated:

Well, I returned to the Roman Forum and the Library of Hadrian for the afternoon since I hadn't been able to go in before, but my Acropolis ticket happily covered those two sites as well as several others (including the Agora), so I figured I'd give those priority. I never made it to the Byzantine and Christian Museum or to the Acropolis Museum, but I certainly made the best of three days in a city that inexplicably shuts down at 3pm.

This afternoon I headed off by bus for Ancient Corinth, the village ringing around the ancient city's archaeological site about three miles outside the wholly uninteresting modern Corinth. With any luck, I'll be going up the Corinthian acropolis tomorrow morning and seeing the archaeological site and its museum before the 3pm closing. Wish me luck.

Christos anesti! Alithos anesti!

Athos, the Holy Mountain

2010-04-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

Mount Athos. The beating spiritual heart of the Eastern Orthodox world.

There's no summarizing. I'll just tell the story, and make some observations at the end.

Going to Mount Athos requires getting a permit up to six months ahead of time, which I did back in November. I then had to contact the monasteries by fax and telephone, getting up in the early hours of the morning (3 or 4am), in order to reserve stays at these prestigious monasteries. And thanks to the one day delay in Istanbul, I had to call the Pilgrim's Bureau in Thessaloniki and scramble to rearrange the three nights and four days during which I, one of eight non-Orthodox pilgrims admitted per day (compared to a full hundred Orthodox pilgrims), could go to the Holy Mountain. I spent a good deal of time worrying whether I had actually properly reserved my stays, and whether I would get into the monastery on the third, unanticipated day. When will I learn that providence and hospitality are a combination that overpowers even our deepest existential anxieties?

I arrived at Thessaloniki around 10am after a decent night's sleep on the train (better than I'd expected, despite wake-up calls from both Turkish and Greek border officials). Thessaloniki can be seen in a full day, but you've got to start earlier than 10. Nevertheless, I got around to Agious Dimitirous (above) and Hagia Sophia (right) churches; the former is the largest church in Greece and the site of the martyrdom of St. Demetrius, and the latter is a miniature copy of the eponymous church in 'Constantinopolis.'

There are also a number of third century ruins from the time when Galerius, a 'Caesar' (subbordinate to an 'Augustus') of the Eastern Roman Empire made Thessaloniki his capital. Among these are a Roman forum, the palace of Galerius, his rotunda which was eventually (and inevitably) a church and a mosque in turn, and an arch that was one bit of a colonnaded walkway between the rotunda and his palace. These aren't of any biblical interest, but they're something to see in a city that is largely gyro stands, icon stores, and next to those, well, 'erotik shops.' There's also something called the White Tower (left) which is somehow Thessaloniki's iconic symbol, but I won't bore you with that. I also managed to squeeze in a couple minutes each in the Museum of Byzantine Culture and the Archaeological Museum, which closed inexplicably (like everything in this silly country) at 3pm. Ah, well, that was Thessaloniki.

But forget that city. I woke up the next morning and caught a taxi to the bus station for a 6:15am departure for Ouranopolis. From here, all pilgrims (and monks) to the Athos peninsula have to catch a ferry that takes them along the coast to the autonomous monastic enclave farther down the coast. I'm lucky (or loved), because I fell asleep on the bus and woke up just in time to get off at the Ouranopolis gas station, just around the corner from the Pilgrim's Bureau. Here I picked up my diamonitirion, the permit that allowed me to entry Athos and stay at the monasteries. From there, pilgrims catch a ferry that runs down the southwestern coast of the peninsula to the port of Daphni, an illustrious seaside cluster of three shops and a meatless restaurant.

Well, I caught the 9:45am ferry and spend the next two hours watching the coast go by. About an hour in I started seeing minor settlements come into view. Before the monasteries were a number of sketes, which are monastic-like complexes where the monks have considerably more quiet- and solitary-time. They're more like the earliest monks of the desert, like St. Paul of Thebes and St. Anthony. There were also a few isolated cabins where monks from the monasteries go on retreats in order to be away from the clamour of the monasteries. All this was explained to me by a helpful fellow from Greece, pointing out things along the way.

Along the I got to see the monasteries of Dochariou, Xenophontos, and the Russian monastery of Padeleimonos, before docking at Daphni. From there I transferred onto another boat that runs farther along the south-western coast to my first night's stay: Simonopetras.

Simonopetras is, without a doubt, the most-photographed monastery of the holy mountain, and you can see why. It hangs on the side of a cliff near the top of a mountain ridge. From the dock where I hopped off the ferry, it was almost an hour-long walk straight uphill to the entrance. I had no idea what to expect, other than that I had my diamonitirion in hand and would need to present it to the archontariki (hospitality receptionist, a monk) upon arrival.

Oddly enough, the first persons I saw were not monks, but Greek construction workers. Thanks to the boom of interest in monasticism and the two-decades-and-counting spiritual revival on Athos, the monasteries are all undergoing renovation from various fires, Turkish and pirate raids (way back in the day), and normal wear-and-tear. So I asked the workers where I could find the guesthouse, and they pointed me in the right direction.

Remember the scary, paranoid Orthodox monks of Mar Saba, in the Judean desert? Nothing like that.

I opened with the standard Easter-season greeting, "Christos anesti!" (Christ is risen) to which the friendly monk replied "Alithos anesti!" (Truly, he is risen!). He then asked me where I was from- in English. Apparently my accent on just two Greek words was that bad.

Well, he showed me to my room, and noted that Vespers was at 5pm (and that I was welcome to attend, though not, of course, commune), dinner would follow immediately thereafter, and that Matins would be at 5am with the Divine Liturgy following seamlessly at 7.

He also served me the standard welcome meal: Greek coffee, hard liquor, and Turkish delight. When I sipped the liquor, not having a great taste for it, he laughed at me! I've had many odd experiences in my travels, but who would except a full-bearded, black-dressed Greek Orthodox monk in Simonapetra on Mount Athos to laugh at someone for being a lightweight? Fantastic.

More to the point, though, we chatted for a bit about my vocational direction: the ministry and academia. He told me there was an American monk about, Father Maximos, who was always up for a chat. So after dinner he introduced us, and I talked with this ethnic Greek native New Yorker for about two hours. He had some great words of wisdom today about the perils and promise of doing theology and biblical studies within the academy (more peril than promise, to be honest). We sat up on the gazebo higher on the mountainside, so I had a great view of the monastery from above- something he admitted that he'd thought of for my sake when picking out a place for a chat.

A word about dinner. Dinner in the monasteries means eating with the monks, sharing their diet, and following their rules. In the first case, there's no meat. They're not vegans (except during Lent), but they abstain from meat as a 'little thing' as they strive to be entrusted with the greater things (cf. Luke 16:10). More significantly, though, they take their meals in silence while a reader chants out a passage of the Scriptures (or perhaps the Church Fathers; it's in Greek, so I never could tell). And when the bell rings and the reading begins, you've got to start stuffing yourself, because whether that reading is two or twenty minutes, the second bell means the meal is over. I didn't finish the first night; you can bet I finished each other meal.

I'm happy to say that I was the first non-monk to arrive at 5am for the Matins. The Greeks and Russians filed in over the next two and a half hours, right up till the distribution of Holy Communion. From what little Greek I've had (during my months in St. Louis at Concordia, and my own studies since then) I caught only the barest fragments of the liturgy. It didn't matter; their chant and their song is some of the most beautiful worship music I've ever heard, especially at Simonapetras. I was perfectly content to pray to God in my thoughts and silently with moving lips as I worked my way round and round the Orthodox prayer rope, the chotki, ritually repeating "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." For three hours. It went surprisingly fast.

After being served coffee and hard bread for breakfast I took a short nap before heading out. Rather than going straight to the port in order to take the ferry to the next monastery, I walked along the mountainside for an hour or so down to the seaside monastery of Ouiso Grigoriou. I'd considering staying there back when I was faxing monasteries in November, so I thought I'd check it out. Like all the monasteries, it's architecturally impressive; but what struck me most was the flora all around the entrance and within the central courtyard.

I must have looked tired and hungry, because the monks who greeted me there (with Greek coffee, Turkish delight, and Ouzo, the Greek liquor of choice) insisted on feeding me lunch. That turned out great, not only because of the food, but because it gave me the chance to take a leisurely look at their refectory (dining hall). The fresco icons were, as elsewhere, extraordinary; but here, being a seaside monastery, they were open to raids by Muslim pirates who, according to their religious sensibilities, scratched out the faces of the figures depicted. Some wonderful restoration has been done, but the marks of ill-founded piety are still visible.

From there I caught the ferry to Dionysiou. Dionysiou Monastery is another cliff-hung monastery like Simonpetra, except right off the seashore. At Simonpetra I'd hiked up alone to the monastery, as all the other pilgrims had caught a complementary bus provided by the great monastery from Daphni; here, I got off with about thirty other pilgrims, all Greeks, Russians, and Cypriots. As a result, I got to experience the full welcome, which, of course, included the obligatory Greek coffee, Turkish delight, and Ouzo.

After a nap, I was (courteously) awakened by my roommates for Vespers, where I had an unexpected experience. Orthodox churches are not designed quite like the western model. In the first case, there is the division between the katholikon, or the area where the laity stands and worships much like the nave of western churches, and the sanctuary, the area where the altar is and where the priests do their thing. Between these is the iconostasis, a wall with doors covered in icons. However, there is often a double narthex which serves as a worship center as well, rather than as the 'lobby' it's used in western churches. The exonarthex is the vestibule, the lobby, where people simply pass through into the church and where announcements and such are posted (not, of course, in the monastic churches of Athos). The endonarthex is actually a worship area just as large as the katholikon, where worshipers stand along the walls if the wall-space (or the chairs) are taken up in the katholikon.

Why do I go into such boring (interesting!) architectural detail? Because what I didn't know was that the katholikon is only for Orthodox.

They never said anything at Simonapetras, but they sure did at Dionysiou. About twenty minutes into Vespers a scary black-bearded monk took me by the arm and asked me whether I was Orthodox. He apparently had been told by the archontiriki, who'd seen my diamonitirion and thus knew that I was 'Katholikos' (meaning Christian, but not Orthodox). I responded truthfully, and was escorted a few feet outside the katholikon to the endonarthex.

I won't pretend that I wasn't a bit hurt by it- after all, it's not like I was going to take communion- but I understand where they're coming from. The hardest thing was continuing to pray the Prayer of the Heart, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" through the knots of the chotki, in order to ask God that he calm my heart and make me tender and graceful, rather than bitter. After an hour of this ritual, repetitive prayer, it finally worked, and God allowed the coldness to pass out of me. What would I do without this repetitive ritual, which takes so long but rewards so much?

On a far more humorous note, my roommates at Dionysiou were hilarious. They were all from Cyprus, so two of them spoke passable English. One of the older guys with them was a fat fellow who slept in the bed next to me and snored louder than anyone I've ever heard. I got in bed around 9pm, fell asleep around 11pm...

..and woke up at 1am to the noise of the other Cypriots beating the fat man with sticks!

"He's snoring too loud!"

"Do you even know him?!"

"He's our spiritual leader!"

What?!

Remind me never to be a pastor in Cyprus, because apparently it means you get beaten with sticks if you snore too loudly. I was even handed a stick and encouraged to join in the fun.

Well, I skipped most of the liturgy the next morning, and just came in for the last hour. That meant I got breakfast- Greek coffee and cold bread again- before going on my merry way.

I took the boat back to Daphni, since my final monastery, Xenophontos (right), was between Daphni and Ouranopolis. After doing a bit of shopping there (I picked up some lovely icons), I caught the boat to Xenophontos, without a reservation (I'd reserved it for two nights earlier, but was delayed by the ash cloud). Here, I got off the ferry with just two other fellows. Yet I was welcomed openly by the very friendly monks there.

I'd heard good things about Xenophontos from several people I met over Easter in Jerusalem. I fact, I was told to say 'hi' to some of the monks there; unfortunately, the monk in question was away on business for the monastery, so I don't suppose I'll ever know if the message I left will reach him.

After the obligatory Ouzo, Greek coffee, and Turkish delight (I think the purpose is to get you drunk, caffeinated and on a sugar high so that you can have a more mystical worship experience), I met up with two great Slovak guys in their early twenties. Their names were Peter and Lubosh, although I was told to call the latter Bubo for some inexplicable reason. I'd been told by that friendly Greek man on the boat from the first day that I could take my afternoon at Xenophontos to walk to Padeleimonos Monastery, and it turned out they were doing the same thing.
So we hiked to Padeleimonos(right), the great Russian monastery complex of Mount Athos. Some of the Greek monks call it Putingrad, because it's undergoing construction work (not just restoration, but new construction) thanks to the personal bankrolling of Vladimir Putin.

Oh, and a note: Greek Orthodox aren't the Amish. They use electricity, drive cars, operate machinery. Indeed, as Father Maximos lamented, the monks of Ouiso Grigariou are blasting a road with freaking dynamite up Mount Athos itself in order to have ready access to their site there. So the construction workers and Putingrad? Take no note.

Well, it was a very nice walk, and the monks at Pandeleimonos offered us... tea? The Russians just aren't terribly interested in non-Russian visitors.

In any case, my night at Xenophontos was wonderful. I was even personally invited to go into the katholikon after the service was over, even though I was non-Orthodox. I think they were just pleased that a non-Orthodox person, let alone the only American around, was so interested in their spirituality.

And the next morning I headed back to Ouranopolis, and then back to Thessaloniki for a night train to Athens.

My time on Mount Athos was naturally engaging, but what did I take away from it?

In many ways, it simply clarified my relationship to Orthodoxy. It confirmed the many reasons I'm attracted to Eastern Christianity; it equally confirmed the many reasons I'm not and can't be Orthodox.

In the first case, the spirituality is unbelievably profound. The sound of the liturgy, the feel of the chotki, the smell of incense, the veneration of icons- these engage all the senses of the worshiper in the truest spirit of the incarnation of Christ our Lord (climaxing, of course, in his incarnate presence in the Eucharist).

But aside from the theological reasons why I cannot be Orthodox- and I'll post about them later- the ecclesiastical culture of Orthodoxy is something that I feel has certain serious faults. The weakest criticism is that for a Western Christian, schooled in the shape of the liturgy as it is found in the Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican churches, the liturgy of Orthodoxy is impenetrable. It simply doesn't follow the format around which my worship has been guided for the better part of a decade. I say it's a weak criticism, because that's mostly my own personal relationship to the Orthodox liturgy; the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, their primary weakly order of worship, is very ancient and venerable. It just isn't the liturgy that has evolved in the west and matches more thoroughly our culture and traditions.

More severely, however, the role of the laity in the worship of Orthodoxy falls under the same criticism I offer against the para-liturgical worship of Protestantism. It simply doesn't engage the laity. It's performance, not participation. Granted, Orthodoxy and Protestantism fall under the faults in very different ways. Protestant worship is shaped by the culture of Western European and American understandings of courtesy; one doesn't mill about during a performance at the theater, or talk on a cell phone, but watches attentively. However, it is largely watching; in Protestantism, there isn't the sort of ritual responsorial reading, chanting of the ordinary and propers, and movement of body (and thus soul) that one finds in Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Lutheranism. The 'worship service' is to be politely and attentively observed, not actively engaged.

In Orthodoxy, the performance vs. participation dialectic weighs against it in a very different way. It's much more like the pre-Tridentine Catholic Church that Luther so vehemently criticized in his works on the receiving of the sacrament in both kinds (that is, both the bread and the wine) and the importance of congregational singing. There are responsive readings, antiphonal chants, and the like in Orthodox worship; however, the movement and engagement is between choirs of priests, not between clergy and laity. The laity just stands around, observing the participatory worship in which the priests are engaged. This, I believe, is wholly improper and a distortion of the rich liturgical heritage of Orthodoxy. I'm sure it's partly cultural and less theological, but that doesn't make it any less harmful to the spirit of the liturgy.

That isn't to highlight the negative. It was wonderful to be in a place where incense, chant, and icons could be employed without some label of 'high church' being applied, as if that were just one option at the end of an equally valid spectrum. Mount Athos itself is a testament to the deepest traditions of Christian worship in Eastern Europe, an enclave of the thirteenth century where the Hagia Sophia has fallen to the Turks and Athens has fallen to the atheists.

And so I left Athos, spiritually refreshed and ready to take on my final weeks.

Istanbul (Was Constantinople)

2010-04-27T05:59:00.000-07:00

After the previous post, I'm sure you're wondering how exactly Istanbul turned out. I can definitely say that Istanbul, as a whole, was a lot better than the first half of the tour. There were also a couple far more embarrassing or egregious faux pas, but I'll try to mention them in passing rather than making those complaints the centerpiece of my post.

The day our three busloads of tourists left Izmir we buzzed through Laodicea and Colossae (the latter is a heap of unexcavated dirt) and flew from Denizli Airport to Ataturk International in Istanbul. We checked into our hotel at 10pm, the Kempinski of Ciragan Palace. Ciragan Palace was originally an Ottoman palace built under Sultan Abdulaziz 1863 and 1867. The sultan suite of the hotel is the second-largest suite in Europe (behind one in Rome), and costs 30,000 euros a night. My roommate and I slept in a room that was a modest 1250 euros, although I'm relieved under the certainty that our 150 travelers received a package deal. We had a bidet, but I never tried it out. We also had a pillow menu, in case the three different kinds of pillows already on the bed were insufficient.

The next morning we went to the Hagia Sophia. This, of course, was going to be a great highlight of the trip. The greatest church in Christendom, with two previous churches on the site (one erected by Constantine the Great) and the current one put up under Justinian the Great. It served as a church for nearly a thousand years until the brutal Turkish-Muslim sack of Constantinople in 1453, when it was ingloriously vandalized and turned into a mosque. But Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic, decreed that the Hagia Sophia should be made into a museum, and so it has been in the 1920s. Since then, restoration work has uncovered profoundly beautiful mosaics underneath the plaster that covered them during its time as a mosque, and these were indeed alone worth it all.

Dee, as I mentioned, took a whole semester course on the Hagia Sophia at Istanbul University. It showed. When the acoustics weren't quite right, she stepped a few feet in a seemingly random direction, and suddenly we could hear her perfectly. She gave us a wonderful tour lasting about an hour, and another forty-five minutes by ourselves in the church.

What did I feel at this? It's impossible to understand how I felt without going into my expectations.

The Hagia Sophia, despite its conversion into a mosque and thereafter into a museum, will forever remain in the hearts and minds of the faithful the seat of the Patriarch of Constantinople. It was another thousand years before Michelangelo's dome on St. Peter's pushed the Hagia Sophia's dome into second place; another three hundred before St. Paul's in London pushed it into third. Its engineering skill was unsurpassed. When Justinian oversaw the completion of it, he declared "Solomon, I have outdone thee"; conversely when the Turks attempted to outdo him a thousand years later with the building of the Blue Mosque, they failed to erect as grand a dome.

And oh, the many nights I've stayed up with assorted friends dreaming of a Fourth Crusade to reconvert it into a church and restore its former glory. I admit that, because it was so profoundly wrong.

The Hagia Sophia is a tomb.

Flashforward a week: I'm at Dionysiou Monastery on Mount Athos talking with a Cypriot fellow who speaks passable English. I mention that I've been to the Hagia Sophia recently. He asks me how it was. I give him the standard answer: "It was magnificent. The mosaics were extraordinary. The dome is spell-binding." He replies, sadly, "I've never been." I mention to him that it wouldn't be too hard to go. He says, "No, you don't understand. I've been to Constantinopolis (Istanbul). But I can't go there."

I would have never agreed with him beforehand, but I can't help but do so now. It's a little like the Holy Sepulchre: there are electric cords and scaffolding everywhere, and it's dimly lit throughout. The architects originally designed the church to work playfully with the light, in tandem with the candles and oil lamps lit during the liturgy and the reflection of shimmering mosaics; today, the light, however brilliant at times, hits flat. But it's also unlike the Holy Sepulchre: there is no tomb there to venerate, no worship commemorating the mighty deeds of our God, no monks in quiet corners folding themselves inside themselves away from the tourists, inviting you to join their. It's a museum; it's a tomb.

By all means, go. It's a magnificent museum, and perhaps you can, like me, conjure up a little feeling of times past by hearing a distant echo of the chants. But I came out wondering whether it was truly right to envision a reconversion of the church. On the galleries, the mezzanine floor where the ladies worshiped, there is a display of large boards showing the various icon mosaics uncovered and restored throughout the church. The entrance plaque reads: Hagia Sophia, A Vision for Empires. It's an accurate enough description of this church; but is that the proper role of any church? Perhaps as a museum it can be a testament to that unholy marriage between state and church; perhaps as a tomb, we can venerate it as the place where such a vision is put to rest.

But more on Caesar later...

That afternoon we were taken to an overly opulent carpet store called Matis. It's reputed to be one of world's leading exporters in Turkish carpets (whether from Turkey or the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, with whom they contract), and the store in Istanbul is their outlet. The talk on carpets was actually very interesting, and now I know the difference between wool, cotton-wool, mercerized cotton, and silk carpets. But then everybody headed out for four hours of shopping at the Grand Bazaar, and I just left and went back to hotel (after a brief stop in the train station).

That evening we had a particularly amazing dinner together in a Roman cistern, with live music and the best beef I've ever had outside the United States. It was a great time.

The second day we went back to Sultanamet (the central Old City district) to begin our morning with a visit to the Blue Mosque. To my absolute horror, the pastor in question began to give a public talk outside the entrance to the mosque on Islam. Now, before I'm mentally judged and berated for not being ready to face public scorn for Christ... well, once again, "by no means!" If it were the case that the massive group, or volunteers within it, were prepared to stand outside the mosque and witness for Christ, and risk time in a Turkish prison for religious provokation and proselytizing in the secular public square, or a riot of angry pious Muslims, that would be one thing. To proclaim the good news that Jesus Christ is the risen Lord and Savior, and that Allah is neither lord, nor savior, nor risen, that would be just the sort of thing that Christians ought to be doing, and we should all be so prepared to take those risks in order to announce that there is a very different sort of kingdom on the rise.

But that's not what this was. The speaker didn't address the Muslims at all. Rather, he gave an 'educational' talk about Islam to the gathered tour group, right outside the mosque, which included a good number of gross mischaracterizations of Islam. Islam is many things, and often many awful things, but his talk didn't go into dhimmitude, or jahaliyyah, or takfir, or any of the profane doctrines preached by Muslims radicals and derived from the Islamic mainstream. Rather, he just ridiculed the religion as stupid, talking about how all Muslims will get 72 virgins when they die (untrue) or how Muslims believe that all non-believers are to be killed (also untrue).

But forget that the facts were wrong; more importantly, it served no other purpose than to provoke. This was not a witness to Christ. It was just spitting in people's faces. Naturally, let's not forget, that this was all said in English; therefore, the only Turks who could understand it were those who have some education in English, most of all our wonderful Turkish Muslim tour guides!

Well, moving on.

The Blue Mosque itself (above) was amazing. Somehow, even though it was smaller than the Hagia Sophia, the smaller space brought it down to a human scale in which one could somehow better imagine it as a functional building rather than a monument (or a museum). It didn't hurt, of course, that the Muslims were just getting ready for their noontime prayer, with many people milling around and finding their place on the carpet. It was also a pleasure to finally see a mosque that didn't have that ramshackle feel to it, like so many have.

After the Blue Mosque we headed to Topkapi Palace, the grand estate of Suleiman the Great. If you don't know who Suleiman the Great is, he was the most powerful monarch of early modernity. To put things in perspective: his British contemporaries, the Stuarts, ended up dethroned... or decapitated. He presided over the Ottoman Empire when it stretched three continents, from Vienna in Europe through the North Africa deserts, across the entire Middle East to the borders of the Savafad dynasty in Persia.

And yet, the Osman dynasty (the ruling dynasty of the Ottoman Empire) retained certain features of their nomadic, tribal past. A good example: the sultan's divan, where he met with advisors and ministers, is miniscule in scale compared to any similar room in Versailles or Buckingham. Indeed, its dome is only the size of the tribal chieftan's yurt, an animal-hide tent the Turks traveled in from their origins in Central Asia to their settlement in Anatolia. The contrast between their power and their architecture was most striking.

Not to say the Osmanlis were humble. During the extensive free time we had at Topkapi, I forked out the extra couple bucks and went into the extensive rooms of the imperial harem. Here the concubines of the sultan were kept, serving both as objects for the sultan's pleasure as well as tutors for his children, workers in the palace, and other functionaries. They, in turn, were served by eunuchs also housed in the complex. The harem (that is, the building complex, not the concubines) contained not just rooms for, well, harem-stuff, but also galleries of the arts and chambers for schoolrooms. Pictured left is the Courtyard of the Favorites. It was certainly well worth the extra 10 lira or so.

We ended the day with a visit to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. This museum contains some of the most precious treasures from the Ancient Near East, as many of them were excavated or discovered during the period when the Ottoman Empire controlled Palestine and Mesopotamia. I'll just list them here:

The Gezer Calendar, the oldest example of Hebrew:
The Siloam Inscription, an inscription detailing the meeting of the laborers working from both ends to dig out Hezekiah's tunnel:
The Thanatos Stone, a Herodian-era warning telling Gentiles to keep out of the Jerusalem temple courts on pain of death:
The sarcophagus of King Abdalonymos of Sidon, with one of the earliest images of Alexander the Great in existance:

Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries, and I was unable get a picture of the Treaty of Kadesh, which established peace between Ramasses II and the Hittite King Muwatalli II, or the animal reliefs from the Ishtar Gate. Even so, the number of biblical-era finds in this place is unparallleled. I knew it was good, but I had no idea how much was packed in. After another long talk from pastor in question, we only got about forty-five scheduled minutes in the museum, so I said 'forget that,' and told them I was goign to skip dinner and would see them back at the hotel around 8. So I spent another two hours in the museum, and got to go through the extensive Greco-Roman sculpture section. Rick Steves- the excellent travel guide writer of the series Europe Through the Back Door, which I'm using in lieu of Lonely Planet from here on out- even had a detailed self-guided tour through the museum.

Well, it wouldn't be a long-term travel experience without something making everything go wrong, and I bet most of you can guess what came next:

That unpronouncable volcano in Iceland erupted.

Shouldn't be a problem for me, right? After all, my only plan was to take a night train from Istanbul to Thessaloniki after another full day in Istanbul. I'm not flying until May 10th, when I head home from Rome.

Well, the group had its plane canceled, so while they were stuck in Istanbul with no schedule for the morning except wait for news, I headed to the Sirceki Train Station (the terminus of the Orient Express, by the way) to reserve my ticket on the train. After waiting in an hour long line, and despite being one of the first in the door, I was told that there was no space on the train until the following night. The closing of air space had pushed several million stranded travelers onto trains. So, I had another day in Istanbul.

I ended up staying at a lower-cost hotel (lower-cost being all relative compared to the Kempinski) with my roommate and another tour member that night. But that afternoon, I devoted my attentions to getting to one of Istanbul's greatest attractions: the Chora Church.

If the Hagia Sophia is St. Peter's Basilica, Chora is the Sistine Chapel. It's a small church on the northwestern end of the Old City that was converted into a mosque after the Turkish invasion; however, its mosaic and fresco icons are magnificently preserved, and give the viewer a little glimpse of the glory that was the Hagia Sophia. If I no longer feel the strong urge to tear down the minarets and reconvert Hagia Sophia back into a church, all that fervor is now focused on this delightful little chapel.

As for history, the Chora Church was originally built as Holy Savior Outside the Walls during the Justinian era; its current form was brought about by the Byzantine prime minister Theodore Metochites in 1312 after extensive damage during the Fourth Crusaders (thanks a lot, the West).

I made my way there with the girls stranded in Istanbul, and man, even with my high expectations (and their moderate interest), we were all surprised.

Here's a rundown of its best frescoes and mosaics:

The Last Judgment:
The Anastasis (Resurrection):
The Deesis (Supplication):
The Dormition of Mary:

Well, they ended up having to stay in Istanbul two extra nights (they flew home the morning I arrived in Thessaloniki) so we had yet another free day in Istanbul. As I said, things turned out pretty well. While everyone else went on a Bosporus cruise offered by the tour operator (in order to give people at least something to do), we decided to follow the Rick Steves' guide on walks through the Sultanamet district, the historic sightseeing core of Istanbul, and the back streets of the Old City. That pretty much took up the whole day, and included the Spice Market, the Grand Bazaar, the Turkish and Islamic Museum of Arts and Culture, the hippodrome and its numerous towering monuments, and the graveyard of the Suleimaniye Mosque, where Suleiman the Magnificent is buried. It turned out to be a wonderful and relaxing way to spend a fourth day in the city. However much I wanted to get back to the Hagia Sophia to spend more time in there, and to the Archaeological Museum to get pictures of the Treaty of Kadesh and the Ishtar Gate reliefs, I think my time was better spent with my new friends wandering the old city.

That evening, I said goodbye to the wretched tour, the wonderful friends, and the exotic city of Istanbul, and hopped the 8:30pm night train to Thessaloniki. It was off to Mount Athos, to get my pilgrimage back on track.

Apologetic Note

2010-04-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

If anybody was offended by the final paragraph of the previous post, my apologies. I've edited the content to remove the degree of harshness in my tone. I was upset and am upset. I certainly didn't intend to lump all evangelicals and Baptists together into a singular 'negative' category. My mentioning of both referred to the theology of each, not the persons, and the thrust of the sentence was that differences should not be divisive.

If this unclear to anyone, my apologies. I've appreciated your support and prayers from every theological corner, as we each and every one of us know that God hears them all.

Together in Christ,

-Bill

Touring the Seven Churches of Revelation

2010-04-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

So, how shall I summarize my tour through the Seven Churches of Revelation?

Perhaps the most fair way to put it is: a largely foreknown mistake, the extent of which I'd never imagined.

This was the third and final tour I'd worked into my larger pilgrimage, in order to give myself a structured environment in which to see widely-dispersed sights (and sites) in a reputedly unsafe country. I ought to have known that neither was really true, especially after getting through three months on the Israeli bus system and staying on my own in Arab East Jerusalem, but I signed up for this exorbidantly expensive week nonetheless. It turned out to be just as much, if not moreso, a stupid move (on my part, I admit) as the AIT tour I took through Egypt, Jordan, and my first week in Israel.

My initial apologies: this is probably going to be a bit more unloading and catharsis for my sake than detailing the sites I visited. I'll try and work in some of the latter, and I have every intention of banging out a post on one of my pet study subjects- Jesus, Paul, and Revelation in the context of Roman imperial ideology- by way of reference to these sites and others in Greece at some point. By as for now, I just need to breathe.

Allow me to note a few good things first. I met a handful of fun people in their twenties and thirties to hang out with, and I'll probably end up getting together with some of them when I go home since a lot of them are from the D.C. area.

Also, I've can now say I've been to all seven of the churches that received letters in the Revelation to St. John.

Unfortunately, veiled within those two positives are two of the greatest (but by no means 'only') negatives: I got a lot of time to hang out with those people because we spent most of our time either on a bus or back at the hotel, and I can't say much more than that I've been to the seven churches. You see, the daily format went something like this: visit one of the churches with a major site there- Ephesus, Pergamon, Sardis, or Laodicea- and then visit one of those sites that is either an unexcavated mound, a modern city, a ruined Byzantine church, or all three- Smyrna, Thyatira, Philadelphia, or the other site we visited, Colossae. So half of our time was already taken up checking off sites from a poorly-conceived, arbitrary list of places to visit.

But that's hardly all the wasted time. Understand, we stayed the first four nights in the same five-star hotel in Izmir, so that rather than going from site to site day after day, we spent most of our days backtracking on the road to the same central location. This probably wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that we ate dinner in the hotel each night, so there was a policy of being back well before dusk. As a result, or days usually began at 8am, and ended by 4pm, minus an hour for lunch, minus 4 hours of driving, and then divided between a worthwhile site and a (near-)worthless site. Do the math, and that equals about an hour and a half at Ephesus, Pergamon, Sardis, and Laodicea.

Still, an hour and a half, right? Hardly. At each and every site the pastor of the church that sponsored the trip (I'll keep from mentioning his name here out of respect for my friends on the trip who attend his church; but go ahead and ask me privately if you're considering a tour) gave a 30-to-45 minute sermon on one of the letters to the respective church. Naturally, this wasn't a homily or a lecture, so there was no pretense at going through the letter point-by-point and carefully exegeting the text, and then matching it up with archaeological information at the site to provide a fuller picture of the early Christian community there. Rather, it was simply grasping on to the first phrase that resounds with Arminian-Pietistic theology (such as it is) and giving a long pep talk about either making a choice to believe in Jesus or, more often, making a choice to follow God's moral commands. Where's this 'choice' stuff coming from in Scripture, anyway?

All in all, that usually gave us between fourty-five minutes to an hour at each of those four sites.

Normally, as with the AIT tour through Israel (remember Dani?), there'd be another complaint at this point: then we were led around by a tour guide who was a complete idiot and could barely speak English.

To quote everyone's favorite saint in everyone's favorite epistle, "By no means!"

If there's one thing I can give this tour, it's the Turkish tour guide, Dilek (but we just called her Dee). Dee soars head and shoulders above all the country-native tour guides I've had on this whole journey. Well, I don't want to put Osama out, the guide through Egypt; so not head and shoulders above him, but still a cut above. You can just feel her passion for the information; she did her upper level graduate work at Harvard in the Greek archaeology of Turkey, and she took a whole class in Istanbul on the Hagia Sophia. That hopefully gives you a small taste of how extraordinary she was.

Above her sheer grasp of the information, though, she was a truly engaging speaker. From her hand motions I'd say she's been schooled in classical rhetoric. And she obviously has her own curious interests: each day during the interminable bus rides, she'd break up the doldrum by giving us a fun new fact about rural Turkish courting and wedding rituals. I'll have to post them at some point if one of the girls on the trip (who inevitably remembered them all) can list them out for me. A for-instance: when a Turkish father feels his daughter is of marriable age, he places an empty liquor bottle on the roof; in order to begin the courting process, one of the young men from the village takes out his rifle and shoots the bottle. Ah, romance and bottles and empty liquor bottles are in the air!

The only downside to being led around by her was on the first day at Ephesus. Ephesus is one of the best-preserved cities from antiquity. The main cardo (it has a site-specific name, but for the life of me I can't remember it) runs from the upper entrance to the park at the small theater all the way down to the grand theater, with a long series of temples and the amazing Library of Celsus between. Despite its expanse, or perhaps because of it, much of the site is still under excavation. Currently, archaeologists are restoring a series of villas with world-class mosaics on one side of the cardo; entering these requires an extra fee (only 10 dollars, though) and, naturally, free time. However, because the pastor gave an endless talk about missionary strategies before we actually got into the site, and because we were led around, there was no free time to see one of the things I'd come halfway across the world to see.

Still, check out the Library of Celsus:
Fortunately, the complete absence of free time did not repeat itself at Pergamon, Sardis, or Laodicea (unfortunately, I might add, it also failed to repeat itself at Thyatira and Philadelphia, so we took up even more time amid the formless ruins of unimpressive Byzantine basilicas). At Pergamon I was even able to get around to a good number of scattered ruins in the thirty-or-so minutes afforded after the guided tour. Pergamon is marked, in particular, by the impressive Trajaneum,
a temple of the imperial cult begun by the Emperor Trajan (to himself, of course) and completed under his successor Hadrian. It's an archetypal example of how the imperial cult of emperor worship, and Roman imperial ideology/theology more generally, came to supplant traditional Greek polytheism throughout the Pax Romana. But that's for another post.

By the time I'd gotten to Sardis I'd picked up a handbook called Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey, and I'd had enough of sitting around listening to this fellow talk while glorious cities of antiquity were towering around me. So, with the book in hand and a likeminded fellow-traveler walking alongside, we asked Dee where she would be taking us so that we could go see the other sites first. We headed across the road to a place labeled by archaeologists as the Bronze House, so called because a number of bronze liturgical instruments were found there; together with that and the fact that it has a Byzantine-era prayer niche with frescoes, it's thought that the house belonging to a high-ranking priest or bishop.

But the most impressive monument at Sardis though, as at Pergamon, was the site of the imperial cultic shrine. Here, however, it is the facade of the bathhouse (below) rather than a freestanding temple. It does, however, contain a wide courtyard suitable for the public sacrificing of animals to the emperor, represented as a (long-gone) statue in the highest niches of the wall.By Laodicea, I'd started something of a silent protest against the format, as four other people followed me on my lecture-skipping adventure. Even so, at none of these sites was I able to see the many temples, shrines, bathhouses, villas, and later synagogues and churches each had to offer. Some day I'll have to go back.

Which brings me to my greatest regret about Turkey as a whole: by doing the tour and scheduling my pilgrimage according to its timing, I completed missed central Turkey and the great many sites there. Syrian Antioch, Antioch-at-Pisida, Aphrodisias, Derbe, Perga, Lystra, Attalia, Ancyra, Iconium, and, naturally, the entire country of Cyprus. Before anybody says it, I know, of course, that many of these aren't worth visiting, just like Philadelphia or Thyathira or Colossae; I know, too, that I'd never make it to them all on one trip. After all, no matter how much I saw in Israel, I still missed the Horns of Hattin and Tel Hazor. But still, I'm going to Athens and Rome because St. Paul did, and to miss these central sites in order to pay an ungodly amount of money to spent minutes at equally compelling sites was an incredible disappointment.

A final and particularly sad note. What is less Christ-like? To tell another, self-professed Christian that they're not a real Christian because of a theological difference, or to pass by beggars on your way to a 1250 euro a night hotel room (and if I'd known my money was going toward accomodations rather than getting around the sites, you can bet I'd never have signed up)? Honestly, I don't know, but I was on the receiving end of the former twice in just one week from various individuals in the group [edit: removal of caricature], and was ashamed beyond belief to be walking around in a group like yet another 'ugly American' doing the latter. I may be able to sit up for days on end- yes, literally- and go through all the reasons I think evangelical/Baptistic theology is wrong [edit: softening of statement], but you'll never hear me question someone's faith; and yet, somehow, we should instead bury our differences under a veil of unity while questioning the heart of anyone who brings them up? [edit: sentence removed]

More on the Istanbul half of the week to follow.

Update

2010-04-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hello all. I'm safe in Thessaloniki, and headed to Mount Athos bright and early tomorrow morning at 6am. Pictures aren't loading on to either Facebook or the blog here, so I suppose you'll hear about the Seven Churches, Istanbul, and Mount Athos from, sadly, Athens. Still, despite a brief delay due to overloaded trains (thanks to the ash cloud), I'm back on track and on my way.

How Can We Go On Pilgrimage Away From Jerusalem?

2010-04-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

A while ago I wrote a post asking the question, 'How does a Lutheran go on pilgrimage?' I'd like now to expand on that, not by elaborating on my answer, but by posing a related question: 'How it is that we, as Christians, can go on pilgrimage away from Jerusalem?'

After the political-religious consolidation of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah of Judah, Jerusalem became the sole legitimate pilgrimage site for the people of Israel. This, of course, had long been the vision, but the local shrines of the tribes and alternate sites of the first northern usurper king, Jeroboam, had fragmented Israel's religious centers.

Yet by the Second Temple Period, the time of John, Jesus, and Paul, Jerusalem was the center of the great pilgrim feasts: Passover, Shavout, and Sukkot. These three feasts celebrate the events of the Exodus and the desert wanderings of Israel, which was the prototypical pilgrim experience. Therefore, for each of these spring and summer festivals, the family heads would trek from throughout the land to Jerusalem to sacrifice and participate in the temple worship.

It seems, even, that Luke uses the pilgrimage to Jerusalem as an overall structure in his gospel. After traveling around Galilee for the first nine chapters, Jesus, in Luke, turns south and spends the remainder of the gospel on a journey towards Jerusalem. This walk, of course, culminates first in the triumphal entry, but then in the totally different Via Dolorosa, ending in the crucifixion and the tomb.

Just as Matthew emphasizes Jesus as a successor to Moses through his fine techniques in describing the Sermon on the Mount, and as John depicts the true-to-life movement between Judah and Galilee throughout Israel's thrice-annual pilgrim cycle, Luke wants to tell us that Jesus stands at the head of the law and the prophets. Jesus embodies Israel, and is yet more than Israel. The exodus is repeated.

However, this time, the exodus does not lead from the desert into the promised land, at least not at first. Rather, Jesus goes from the relative serenity of Galilee into the world of political turmoil and religious controversy. His exodus is not from captivity to the land, but an exodus into exile.

Yes, Jesus takes on the Babylonian exile: a foreign power (Rome) drags him from the holy city (Jerusalem) to a place outside its walls, where he dies the death of the suffering servant (the vocation of Israel). And specifically because he takes on the role of Israel, he does not replace Israel, but redeems her.

But let's back up, first.

I mention John the Forerunner (that's 'the Baptist') and Paul of Tarsus specifically because of their roles in reversing the direction of pilgrimage.

Whatever unprovable theories come up about John and his relationship to the Qumran community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is one fairly interesting thing we can say about him: he was the son of a priest who rejected that priestly heritage. This means that like the Qumranites, he somehow rejected his priestly heritage and the Jerusalem temple in favor of an ascetic lifestyle in the desert. Can Jesus' own attack upon the temple cultus be far behind?

Back to Christ himself.

His pilgrimage to Jerusalem and taking on of the exile has two correlates. In the first place, the exile into the tomb is not the end of the story. The story ends (or for us, continues) in the resurrection and Pentecost. In the resurrection, God's glory shines into this world in a way that the New Testament authors could not describe with any vocabulary short of 'new creation'- and Genesis 1 is nothing compared to it. At Pentecost, the Spirit that Christ's resurrection and ascension has released into this new creation brings the full-bodied power of God into the church in a way Israel's prophets only experienced in fleeting moments.

Second, the pilgrimage of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem is only one small part, and one insufficient icon of, the much larger pilgrimage that Yahweh himself makes into this world. For Yahweh comes to us in the flesh of Jesus Christ, and continues to make pilgrimage into this world each and every time we celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion. And he does so, and can do so, precisely because the Father has poured our his Spirit through Jesus Christ- together all Yahweh- into the communities that celebrate the feast of the sacrament.

And what of Paul? Saul of Tarsus was not on pilgrimage when he was on his way to Damascus. Indeed, he was going there in order to force Jewish heretics (Christians) into doing pilgrimage the 'right' way: going to Jerusalem. Yet a pilgrimage is exactly what that mission ended up being. When he encountered the risen Lord, he met the same Christ who poured out his Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, to the Pentecost community. And thus how perfectly natural that the same Spirit who allowed the Christ-community to speak in the tongues of the Gentiles should enable Paul to make mission to the Gentiles.

And it was this same Paul, of course, who eventually went on to Rome.

For Luke's great gospel has a sequel. In the gospel, Luke begins by setting the events of Christ's birth in the context of the global empire of Augustus's Rome, and then narrows it all down to Israel, to Galilee, to Judea, to Jerusalem, to the cross, to the tomb; and from there, he begins an explosion that goes out to all corners of the earth, ending back in Nero's Rome. And this, then, is the message:

God has entered human flesh to consecrate the cosmos and indwell space-time with his transformative glory. And every time we proclaim the Word and celebrate the Sacrament, we are graciously brought into that process of renewing creation; a process that will never be finished this side of the eschaton, but will be completed in a flash of triumph at the return of Christ.

In the meantime, because Yahweh has gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, we can go on pilgrimage away from Jerusalem to all the world.

The Churches of Antonio Barluzzi

2010-04-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

So, if you've been to Israel, you may not have heard of Antonio Barluzzi, but you've definitely encountered his work.

Barluzzi was an Italian architect commissioned by the Franciscan order to design and build churches atop the ruins of Byzantine and Crusader ones that had been destroyed or fallen into disrepair during the Ottoman period. His work fundamentally shapes the pilgrim experience by defining how we encounter sacred space in the Holy Land. For instance, they're almost all built in the light stone of Jerusalem with an open feeling and bright lighting, and contain mosaic panels with healthy dose of blue. I think this is one reason the Holy Sepulchre, with very different mosaics, dark stone, and dim lighting feels so out of place.

Here are the churches of his that I encountered:

The Church of St. Lazarus, BethanyDominus Flevit, Mount of OlivesThe Basilica of the Agony, Kidron ValleyThe Church of the Visitation, Ein Karem
The Church of the Angels, Beit Sahour
The Church of the Beatitudes, Mount of BeatitudesThe Church of the Transfiguration, Mount Tabor

This is hardly all of his churches or architectual achievements, but they're all the ones I encountered. I wish I had more time to elaborate on each one- for instance, the Church of the Beatitudes was funded entirely by Benito Mussolini, and Dominus Flevit ('The Lord Wept') is his only church that faces west, so you can see the city over which so grieved Christ- but I have been in Turkey for two weeks and it's time to catch up. If you ever go, though, read up on him first, and make it a challenge for yourself to try to see as many of them as possible.

How to Experience the Holy Sepulchre

2010-04-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

I know I'm almost two weeks out of Israel and into Turkey, but I have a few final reflections on Israel that I'd like to share.

I also know that my post on the Holy Sepulchre vs. the Garden Tomb says a lot more about the latter than about the former, and since the Sepulchre is the far more important place, it's worth offering a few words about it.

The Holy Sepulchre is a dark, cramped church that looks a little ramshackle. It's terribly hard to have the sort of Western spiritual experience- a sense of serenity and joy, closed eyes in silent prayer, individual feelings and thoughts- that we all expect in religious spaces. The Holy Sepulchre is just not that sort of place.

In order to overcome this, I have two recommendations.

The utter, vast, overwhelming majority of people experience the Holy Sepulchre first in the midst of flashing cameras, tour guides holding up umbrellas, lightsabers, or Pepsi cans on sticks, and hordes of tourists. That's simply what the church is like throughout the day.

And my first recommendation is to embrace the church as it is. The Holy Sepulchre is a great and terrible challenge to our western ideas about spirituality, whether the ideas of charismatic evangelical Protestants or traditionalist Roman Catholics.

To evangelicals, the church has to offer the catholicity of the church. Present within its walls (or in one case, upon its roof) are chapels and monasteries of Latins (Catholics), Greeks (Orthodox), and the Oriental Orthodox communions of the Armenians, Copts, Syriacs, and Ethiopians. These groups only get along because of the centuries-old Status Quo agreement, which determines the precise schedule when each can worship in certain areas, especially the common areas like the Edicule or Tomb itself. This, in addition to the broader view of the worldwide church that shakes us out of our largely evangelical American atmosphere, teaches us also to appreciate ritual. These rituals are deeply important to these people. They are hardly vain; they are the very heart of their lives, and they would die to defend their right to perform them. The habitual repetition of song and prayer are far more authentic than any spontaneous outburst of ecstatic spirituality.

To Catholics, or Lutherans, or Anglicans, the Eastern and Oriental churches of the Holy Sepulchre, and the way the Latins deal with them, challenges our polite, proper way of liturgy and spirituality. There's something chaotic about it that just doesn't fit our very orderly liturgies. Eastern liturgies are strictly patterned and performed, to be sure, but the laity has a different way of participating (and keeping silent, or not) than we do in the west.

This second point speaks to a deeper way of embracing the Holy Sepulchre as it is. For Christ did not go silently in solemn procession to the crucifixion, and was not risen back into a world that immediately transformed into the kingdom of God. Rather, Christ went to the cross about tourist-pilgrims there for the Passover, soldiers monitoring the crowd, sobbing women, leering men, and mocking crowds; and, despite the quietude of Easter morning, he was risen to and remains alive in the world we all live in now. The Holy Sepulchre stands as a monument not to a deep spiritual truth which we encounter silently in the solitude of a private encounter with God, but as a liturgical center where we repeat through Word and reenact through Sacrament the physical chaos of Good Friday and physical transformation of Easter.

So despite my recommendations below, I recommend waiting in the two hour line to get into the tomb in the middle of the day, to experience the church as Christ encountered the ground beneath it. Perhaps the great grace offered to us is that we might still find serenity and joy through ceaseless interior prayer in the midst of flashing cameras and tacky tourist guides all around us.

But of course, we want more than that, and here's what I recommend.

On a Sunday, the various chapels are open to worship. The Latins hold a Mass in front of the Edicule at 5:30am (check the Christian Information Center online for official times), in which the Edicule (the structure in the rotunda built up around the tomb) is used as the altar-space (properly, sanctuary, or holy of holies). This means that after the consecration of the Eucharist, the priests can emerge from the tomb for the presentation- the holding up of the body and blood of our Lord. There is the risen Lord, emerging from the tomb, really and truly!

Once this is over, head over to the Ethiopian chapel. Here the Ethiopians, probably the most serene group in the church, alone on the roof, are holding their three hour Sunday liturgy. It was extraordinary to listen to their worship. It was unmistakably, authentically liturgical; it was also unmistakably, authentically African. Let no one say that Africans have to worship like American evangelicals because 'stale, old liturgies of Europe' aren't suited for them. The Ethiopians have not only managed to blend the two, but have one of the oldest liturgies in the church. They haven't made the liturgy authentically African; the liturgy is authentically African in its earliest stages. The Nigerians who sing praise and worship songs that are more American than anything else could learn a thing or two from them.

Another day to visit the Sepulchre is Friday, without a doubt. The Latins (that is, the Catholics) hold a service at 6:30 in front of the edicule. This is also an excellent opportunity to go back into the tomb, since if you sit in the front row of the Mass, you're right in front of the line when they clear away their liturgical implements. The giant pilgrim and tourist groups have to form up behind you. A very Rick Steves recommendation, I know, but totally worth it.

Later in the day, on Fridays, the Franciscans hold a massive procession along the Via Dolorosa starting from the first station of the cross at 3pm. To get through it all, it takes about three hours, straight into the tomb. Don't worry, it's totally worth it. They read out the gospel readings in Latin, English, French, Italian, Arabic, and whatever other languages are well-represented by pilgrim groups joining them for the day.

A great plan, here, is to visit the Franciscans in the Holy Sepulchre the day before (on Thursday) to see if you can do a lock-in.

At 7:30pm each evening the Greeks, together with the Armenians, close the doors of the church for the night. If you're on the Franciscan list for a lock-in, you can get yourself locked in the church at this point. You're in there until 4am, or until 11pm if you've made sure the Greeks are opening the doors for a Russian group that comes to worship at the tomb at midnight.

If you want serenity and silence, this is your opportunity to be alone in the tomb of Christ. Maria and I did this, and we were really alone in there with maybe a half dozen other pilgrims and the random monk or nun cleaning the church. I recommend bringing a Bible and a rosary or chotki, because without repetitive, ritual prayer, you're going to run out of petitions fairly quickly. But to go around and pray the (Lutheran) rosary all the way through in each and every chapel of the church was an experience that will stick with me all my life.

And, best of all, you can go in the tomb, kneel before the corpus bench, and read straight through all the passion and resurrection accounts. Remember that the Russians take over the tomb at midnight, but until then, it's all yours.

If you go with an unwieldy, giant tour group, you probably won't get this chance. This is one of many reasons I recommend going with St. George's, since they allow you to stay in the dorms for several days after the end of a course. And during these days, I recommend taking these hours to see a whole different side to the Holy Sepulchre than you get during the day. Take photos during the one, but pray the hours away for the other.

That, anyway, is my recommendation on how to experience the Holy Sepulchre.

My Weekend Around Selçuk

2010-04-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

So, I spent the weekend in Selçuk, and it was very relaxing. Before you read this post racked with anticipation: no, I did not go to Ephesus. Yet.

When I arrived there Saturday morning I made my way to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. This is one of the quirkier of the many quirky Byzantine legends, but it deserves mention for its widespread popularity both among Christians and Muslims. So the story goes, seven Christians were given the choice to suffer death or recant their faith. They went up to a cave to pray, fell asleep, and were sealed up in a cave by the Emperor Decius. They woke a hundred fifty years later during the reign of Theodosius II to discover a Christian empire. Their cave in Ephesus is the most prominent and widely accepted of the many sites to claim the (somewhat dubious) honor of being that very cave. Well... there it is.

Having taken a cab, I had the driver drop me off at the ruins of the temple of Artemis, just on the edge of town and an easy walk back to Jimmy's Place. This was a truly magnificent building in its day, with 127 Ionic columns. Today, it's a single column in the middle of a particularly sad swamp. Lots of cute turtles, though, as well as considerably less cute locals trying to hawk off genuine fake ancient coins (I bought a couple anyway).

Well, I was walking back through town past a couple of sites I was resolved to see later when a few young guys about my age began yelling in my general direction. At first I pretended not to hear them since I had my iPod on (always a good bet), but eventually they persisted, so I turned. After chatting for awhile and finding out that they were actually Kurds, I decided to hear out whatever it was they had to offer. The older of the two (still younger than me, I think), named Salatin, pointed out the castle on the hill. He told me it was an Ottoman citadel, and offered to show me around.

Knowing that I was going to have to pay for it, I thought I'd have some fun anyway. Turned out to be an excellent choice. The Selçuk citadel isn't exactly closed off, but it's not open to tour groups; they're getting ready to begin a major renovation and will hopefully turn it into another one of the town's many sites. As it was, I got to see it first.

Salatin took me around the walls, some cisterns, and even a hamam (Turkish bathhouse), but the real treat was going inside the abandoned mosque. I even got to climb up the minaret!

After throwing a couple of lira his way I went to the Ephesus Museum. This is a collection of artifacts from excavations that have taken place since the English stopped pillaging things for the British Museum in London, as well as a few items the Turkish government has managed to reacquire. The most impressive pieces, undoubtedly, are the many-breasted statues of Artemis:
After a good nap that turned into a good night's sleep (much to Maria's dismay), I got up the next morning and headed by taxi for the only church in the area I knew of: the Catholic shrine on the supposed site of the House of the Virgin Mary. The shrine is actually quite nice, although no pictures were allowed inside. The Mass ended up being outside, in the cold, but there were large Irish and Italian pilgrim groups there who were happy to smash me into the warmth of their crowds.

Later that day I took a dolmuş (mini-bus) to the nearby village of Şirince. This lovely little town tucked in the mountains was originally a Greek village until the residents were driven out in the forced population transfer after World War I. Since then it has been repopulated by Turks and is a center of wine-making in the region. It also hosts a partially restored church, St. John the Baptist, once attended by the Greek population.

Having calling the tour group I'm going around Turkey with, I knew that I would have Monday (today) largely free. Therefore, when the folks at Jimmy's Place offered to book me on various tours, I jumped right on it.

So today I was able to get to three unexpected finds: Priene, Miletus, and Didyma. These were all once on the Aegean coast, but because of silting and earthquakes they are several miles inland, just like Ephesus. Priene hosts a well preserved theater, bouleterion (where the civic leadership, called the boule, met; pictured left), and a prytaneion (where the upper leaders met and where the eternal flame of a city was kept on a hearth-shrine to Vesta), as well as a grand temple to Athena. Interestingly, an inscription found at Priene (though no longer at the site) contains the word euaggelion, pronounced eu-an-ghel-e-on, which we translate as 'gospel' and from which we get the word 'evangelical.' However, it is not used in any Christian context; it refers instead to the gospel of Caesar Augustus. The good news, that is, of Roman rule. In ancient Rome, you see, you'd be far more likely to fill in the blank with 'Caesar Augustus' than with 'Jesus Christ' is you ever heard the phrase: "Hear the Gospel of our Lord and Savior [BLANK], Son of God."

But I digress. Miletus has a great theater on site complete with prostitution cavities inside the vomitorium (I'll leave it to you readers to piece that one together yourself) as well as a great port half-enveloped by a swamp, but the truly interesting thing is the various persons the city has sired in its long history. To name but two: Thales of Miletus is considered the first philosopher in western history, standing at the head of the many presocratics who asked such fundamental questions about the nature of existence; and there is also Isidore of Miletus, one of the two chief architects who designed the Hagia Sophia (which I ought to see later in the week).

After a rather mediocre lunch (but who can complain at 80 lira for the whole day?), we visited the final site of Didymus. This was not a city like the former two, but a large sanctuary to the god Apollo. The oracle of Didymus contended with the Apollonarian site on the island of Delos as being the second most important prophetic site in the Greek world behind the oracle at Delphi. Amazingly, the shrine as it stands today is largely unreconstructed, preserved merely by (as the oracle might have told you) fate:
Each year in what eventually became a panhellenic festival, the site was the end of a mass procession 23 kilometers long starting in Miletus, the last 17 km of which was known as the Sacred Way.

After the end of the tour and spending a little more time in the lobby of Jimmy's Place, I caught a dolmuş up to the large Aegean coastal city of İzmir, ancient Smyrna. Here I've met up with the Seven Churches of Revelation tour.... and all its 150 travelers.

The Holy Sepulchre vs. the Garden Tomb: The Knockout

2010-04-11T09:05:00.000-07:00

It has been three months since I visited these two sites, and since I've been wanting to do a post on their contending claims. However, since the contest is so one-sided, it just seemed mean, and as a result I've been putting it off. You see, it's less an academic question of two sites with contending if uneven merits debated between scholars than it is a social contest between two claims, one borne of sentimentality, politics, and propaganda, the other of history, archaeology, and tradition.

The two sites of which I speak are the two contending sites of Calvary-Golgotha and the Tomb of Christ.

The Holy Sepulchre is a massive Crusader-era renovation of the original church built by Constantine and his mother Helena in AD 326. It sits at heart of the Christian Quarter within the walls of the Old City, and is one of the world's greatest pilgrimage sites for Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and a good number of other Christians. It is the chief religious shrine of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, standing alongside the Haram al-Sharif (the 'temple mount) for Muslims and the Western ('wailing') Wall for Jews. It's name is an antiquated English term meaning 'the holy tomb.' The original Greek name was Naos tis Anastaseos, meaning the Church of the Resurrection.

The Garden Tomb is a very, very different site. It conforms to our western images of simplicity and piety. Unlike the Holy Sepulchre, which is covered in icons darkened from age and accented in ecclesiastical silver, as well as monks from various factions holding together the precarious status quo, the Garden Tomb is a serene collection of tastefully-labeled flora and small chapels where tour groups are offered space for worship. It is outside the city walls, near the Arab bus station across from Damascus Gate. The tomb at the site is actually embedded in the rock face in the open air, rather than being chiseled out of its surroundings and enclosed in an edicule within a rotunda as at the Holy Sepulchre. And, unlike at the Holy Sepulchre, there aren't hordes of Russian pilgrims and tour groups causing a two hour line.

So why this Garden Tomb, this alternative site? This tomb was discovered when General Charles Gordon, at the end of his career, took up a year's residence in Jerusalem in 1882. His residence was in an apartment in the Old City above Damascus Gate, with a view looking out of the city to the cliff face beyond. Gordon was deeply dissatisfied with the site of the Holy Sepulchre. For one, he was an evangelical, and Protestants of any kind were not represented in the church (this, of course, because there were no Protestants to speak of when the chapels of the church were first claimed and allotted); therefore, he had a strong desire for a Protestant site of Calvary and the Tomb. Second, the Sepulchre, even if it had had Protestant representation, did not conform to his images of religious devotion, what with all the icons, the silver, the gold, the monk fights, and the dark caverns.

But third and most ridiculously, he refused to believe the Holy Sepulchre could be the site because the church is located within the city walls. What he didn't know (and apparently didn't learn there during a year's stay) is that the current city walls are Ottoman-era, built under the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. The first century city walls, on the other hand, were closer in to the temple mount than the current site; the Holy Sepulchre and the vicinity were only taken within the walls between AD 41 and 44, when Herod Agrippa I built the so-called 'third-wall' that enclosed much of the present Old City.

Looking out from his apartment, Gordon eventually convinced himself that he could see the shape of a skull in the rock face. Today there are about six different angles from which visitors can convince themselves they can see about forty different skulls, none of them the ones that Gordon saw; for the topography has changed significantly in the past one hundred thirty years, both due to natural soil erosion and the construction of the Arab bus station. One wonders, if this can happen in 130 years, what has happened in 2000.

Nevertheless, people searched the site and found a tomb. If this seems too amazing to be coincidence, then you might try spending more time in Eurasia: tombs are everywhere. Finding a tomb within the vicinity is like finding a drunk in Central Park, it's bound to happen.

But isn't this tomb, as my AIT group and countless other visitors are told at the site, a first century tomb? Oh dear...

No, and I'm really not sure where they get that idea. When you enter the tomb from the exterior, you step inside to a mourner's vestibule. Here people would come to further anoint bodies and remember their loved ones. Where were these bodies? In Gordon's Tomb, one has to enter through the straight door from the exterior into the vestibule, and then make a ninety degree turn right to look into the burial chamber where the bodies lay.

This configuration is unheard of in the first century. In the first century, tombs were carved out such that one would enter from the exterior into the vestibule with the burial chamber straight ahead. Door, vestibule, and burial chamber are all lined up in first century tombs. But here, the vestibule is the fulcrum on a right angle turn between door and burial chamber.

This is the configuration of a tomb from the 9th to 7th centuries BC: the Iron Age. This was certainly not a newly cut tomb at the time of Christ.

What, then, of the 'baptismal' pool that visitors are shown? As Jerome Murphy-O'Connor says in his excellent The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide: "...one would except each body bench [in a first century tomb] to be set within an arch (arcosolium). Here on the contrary the body benches simply extend from the wall, as in other Iron Age tombs.... Moreover, in the Byzantine period the benches were cut down to create rock sarcophagi. Such radical disfigurement of the structure clearly indicates that Christians of the C4-C6 did not believe that this tomb was the burial place of Christ. The Crusaders lowered the rock surface in front of the tomb in order to ensure that the vaults, which they built against the rock escarpment, should not project above it. They used the site as a stable." So what is that 'baptismal' channel? It's a water trough.

So Gordon's tomb is most certainly not the tomb of Jesus Christ. It's just a random tomb from a totally different era. What, then, of the Holy Sepulchre?

The Holy Sepulchre, as I've mentioned, was built on orders of the Emperor Constantine and under the supervision of his mother the Empress Helena in AD 326 (or thereabouts). Helena had a rather obsessive interest in relics and holy sites, and her personality quirks have undoubtedly shaped the excesses of Orthodox piety ever since.

Yet why this site? Following the defeat of the zealots in the Great Jewish Revolt of AD 66-73, the radical Jewish nationalists did not entirely abandon their hopes for redemption. In AD 132 Simon bar Kokhba, with approval of the great Rabbi Akiva (whose tomb I visited in Tiberias, if you recall), led another revolt against Rome. When this was put down in AD 135, the Emperor Hadrian began an empire-wide campaign to stamp out divergent religious movements. Among these movements was nascent Christianity.

On the site that is today the Holy Sepulchre he ordered the construction of a temple to Aphrodite, just as he erected a sanctuary to Jupiter on the temple mount (and another shrine to Aphrodite in Bethlehem). He slapped all these pagan and imperial temples down on cultic centers and religious sites in order to smash whatever movement was centered on the site. The temple to Aphrodite he ordered built in Jerusalem was placed specifically to eradicate a Christian shrine celebrating the resurrection of Christ. This is in AD 135.

When Helena had the Aphrodite temple torn down, she and her excavation team (unscientific as it was) discovered a quarry of white stone that had been exhausted in the late first century BC. Following that time, it was used as a graveyard (with first century-style straight door-vestibule-burial chamber arrangements; you can still see two of these in the Syriac chapel). One of the graves, they found, had been extensively marked by Christian graffiti that singled it out as a site of Christian veneration of the tomb and resurrection of Christ. This graffiti, like everything under the temple, dated to the time before AD 135.

This is a mere hundred years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And lets not forget that that graffiti and the associated shrine did not appear the night before Hadrian's temple of Aphrodite was plopped down. Of all the various centers of Christian devotion in the city, this was the site a Roman Emperor decided was worth stamping out. In order to disregard the Holy Sepulchre, therefore, one needs to posit that the original Jerusalem community that knew the site of the tomb was wiped out in AD 70 or thereabouts, but that immediately afterward a new Christian community came into being that selected a totally fictitious site that built up enough pious momentum to warrant the wrath of a Roman emperor.

We cannot say with certainty that the Holy Sepulchre is the site of Christ's tomb. We can only say that it has a very high probability of being the site. On the other hand, we can be most certain that Gordon's tomb is not it, but is a mere combination of wishful thinking and pious propaganda.

The Turkish Coast and the Greek Islands

2010-04-11T02:01:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning I left Israel via Ben Gurion Airport. Far easier said than done.

Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport must be the most secure public-access facility on the face of the planet. A kilometer away from the entrance I was stopped with my cab driver and checked. There I was assigned a number 6 on all my bags and on my person, indicating that I was marked as the highest threat level and in for the more thorough security check. Upon arriving at the building I was questioned about the origin of my name, travels in Israel, why I had three Israeli visas, two Egyptian visas, and one Jordanian visa in my passport in the past three months, who I knew in Israel, and asked to go through a complete itinerary of places I'd stayed and traveled. I offered to show them my blog and Facebook albums to confirm that I was indeed seeing the country, but they just couldn't believe I could find a month and a half worth of things to do in Jerusalem. "I live there, you know," said the admin woman they'd called in. So I just started listing off all the sites to see, until she eventually interrupted me and began asking me how I knew the city so well! Well, I'd been there for a month and a half!

I can't blame them, of course. It's the primary airport in the most frequently bombed country on the planet. At that point they completely emptied my checked luggage and carry-on bags and went over the surface of all non-clothing items with a bomb sniffer. I don't just mean they hovered over the items; no, they checked all surfaces. As it turned out I had to transfer my deodorant, electric razor, and laptop into my bag. The latter was a bit inconvenient, since I'd hoped to take advantage of their free wireless; note that there is wireless, and other people were using their laptops, which means they just weren't able to check it thoroughly enough for someone with the dreaded number six.

Then came the final check of my person. I was taken into a back room that looked like a dressing room, and the curtain was closed. 'Oh God,' I thought, 'here comes the cavity search.' Fortunately, it didn't go quite that far. Instead, they asked me to empty my pockets, take off my belt and all jewelry, and remove my shoes. Then I was patted down, and they were particularly concerned about my thick socks. I suppose something could have been woven into them, but I was wearing my hiking boots and you just don't wear ankle-high socks with boots that rub against your calves.

Well, after about two hours I was cleared and made it into the terminal. From there things were very easy, and I must say, Turkish Airlines is very, very nice.

After a transfer in Istanbul, landing in Izmir, and a cab from there to the Turkish port town of Kuşadası (Ku-shah-dah-suh), I was pretty much ready to go to sleep. However, before sacking out, I managed to grab some doner (which is Turkish street food, a sort of cross between shwarma and gyro meat) and arrange a ferry to Patmos through the very helpful owner of Sezgin's Guest House.

Patmos, for those who don't know, is the Greek island onto which St. John the Divine, the author of the Apocalypse, was exiled for his public declaration of Christianity, and is where he received that revelation. Tradition regards St. John the Divine as synonymous with St. John the Apostle, and these two are known together in Orthodoxy as 'St. John the Theologian' (a rare title granted only to St. John, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Simeon the 'New Theologian').

The following day saw me up at 7:30 and on a ferry from Kuşadası to Samos an hour later. Samos is a Greek island, as the overwhelming majority of Aegean islands are, so I had to pass through a (very easy) passport control. The Kuşadası-Samos ferry arrived in the main town of the island, called Vathi but mostly called Samos town, and I had to catch a bus to another port on Samos, called Pythagorio. While waiting for the ferry I found myself a place to get a gyro, which blew me away. I also wandered into a Greek Orthodox church still decorated for Easter, and found out the origin of the town's name: the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras was from Samos.

Well, I then caught the three hour ferry from Pythagorio to Patmos. That ride pretty much consisted in me sleeping. Upon arrival, though, I quickly fell in love with Patmos and its sole port, the town of Skala (right, seen from Chora). I checked in to Villa Knossos, where I'd arranged a two night stay, and had a nice stroll.

If you imagine Patmos like a figure eight, Skala is on the eastern coast at the skinny middle part. In the middle of the lower bubble and atop a mountain is the medieval town of Chora, with the Monastery of St. John the Divine (also 'the Theologian') at it's heart. Down the hill, midway between Chora and Skala, is the Monastery and Cave of the Apocalypse. It was recommended that I take a bus up to Chora and work my way down along the old Byzantine road, which is precisely what I did.

These three sites together- Old Chora, the Monastery of St. John, and the Cave of the Apocalypse- constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I feel like I'm checking them off a list, which is fine by me. The iconic scene (left) is of the white buildings of Chora surrounding the fortress-like Monastery of St. John. They're just as white and blue when walking their streets, too.

The Monastery of St. John itself was rather spectacular. The main church of the monastery has a double narthex: an exonarthex that is like a porch, but with its own iconographic frescoes and such, and an endonarthex, which is more like the traditional narthex.

Most impressive of all is their sacristy museum, much like the one at St. Catherine's Monastery at Sinai. It is here that many manuscripts and treasures of the ancient world- plays by Aeschylus, works of Aristotle- have been preserved. Liturgical vestments and tools from churches sacked by the Mamluks and Otomans were also moved here and are now on display.

After wandering through the streets of Chora (good example to the right), I set out on the Byzantine road. As it turned out I passed the cave and surrounding monastic complex, but managed to find it. The monastery has been built around the cave, which is in its deepest recesses, and there is a modern entrance office and shop clinging to the monastery's exterior walls. Passing through both, as the monastery itself is entirely closed, I walked down several flights of stairs.

At this point in my pilgrimage, I've realized that there are many places of deep significance that you really can't experience without some form of prayer or worship. In so many of these places- the Holy Sepulchre, the Cave of the Apocalypse, the House of the Virgin Mary- there's very little to see, but if you're willing to engage the place through worship and prayer, there is so very much to experience.

That's why I left almost immediately after asking whether the cave would reopen as scheduled later in the day. I hadn't brought my Bible, or my rosary, or my chotki with me, and I knew that the only way my spirit was going to make sense of this little cave with two iconostases built against natural crevasses would be if I allowed the Spirit to speak to mine. So I left and came back later, whence I spent some time alone and in the quiet of the cave.

A quick note: the Eastern Orthodox leave the Catholics in the dust when it comes to relics and holy sites. The Catholics may have a site for the House of the Virgin Mary, but the Orthodox have a site within the cave where St. John rested his head in the evenings, and a little niche in the wall he used as a handhold to pull himself aright in the mornings! And these are all outlined in ecclesiastical silver.

Still, a very nice site (as you can see left), and quite peaceful if you just grin and let the site speak to you.

The following day I traveled back to Kuşadası. While waiting for the ferry to arrive in Skala I met some Americans, Jeff and Rita, who are on an amazing tour of their own. They started in early January in Australasia and have worked their way through Southeast Asia, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, through eastern and southern Africa, Istanbul, and are ending with the Greek islands and Ephesus. It was great to compare notes with them and get a number of recommendations. As it turned out, I showed them to Sezgin's Guesthouse where I'd decided to stay another night. They'd wanted to get to Ephesus, but were not sure whether it could be done in a day trip from Samos. I assured them it could not, so they decided to stay in Kuşadası for two nights; they should be back in Samos by now, or on a flight from there to Athens. Their trip will end Thursday.

Yesterday morning I said goodbye to Kuşadası and headed by dolmuş (mini-bus) for Selçuk. This is the town nearby modern Ephesus, and I'm staying here now. The place I'm at, called Jimmy's Place, is comparable with Fauzi Azar- warm (though not hot) water, free wireless, included breakfast, and at $30 a night, a serious deal.

Well, hopefully, I'll get a few final thoughts in on Israel this weekend, and then update you on the happenings in Selçuk. Until then, Christos Anesti!

Easter Monday

2010-04-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

Ah, my final day in Israel.

I decided to go to one last event with the St. George's Easter Week group and go to the Easter Monday service at the Romanian Orthodox Church. This turned out to be a great choice, as the Romanian church was painted with beautiful frescoes (right) and probably had the most gorgeous liturgy in Jerusalem aside from the Armenians; and solely in terms of music, they're likely the best. I could have stayed for the full three hours, but it was my last day, and I had a number of churches left to get to.

From there I walked to the Ethiopian church hidden in an alleyway near Ben Yehuda St. After hearing about the Ethiopian service at night on Holy Saturday and experiencing their generosity with food on the roof, I had to try and finally find this Ethiopian church I'd heard about. On my way there I ran into a fellow with an Ethiopian cross on (even-sides with an icon imprint) asking for people who speak English. I gave him some directions and information on bus routes, and when I asked him if I was on the right track he pointed out the way to get there. Quite providential, and convenient.

Upon arriving I found of mass of people arrayed in white pouring out of the round, domed church (left). It turned out that it was a wedding! I worked my way through the crowd and into the church, where a few people were still lingering. When I asked whether I could go on, I was told that that was perfectly fine, but that it was custom for me to remove my shoes first.

The interior is a rotunda with an open space for the laity around the rim of the walls, with a central edifice surrounded by veils and an iconostasis; the sanctuary was, as in all Orthodox churches, inside. As it turns out, that's how all Ethiopian churches are set up. The icons I found particularly interesting; just as their worship is deeply liturgical yet unmistakably African, their icons are obviously Ethiopian but affirm the catholic-orthodox traditions of the church. In other words, the style is Ethiopian, and there are many black Ethiopian saints, but the figures in standard iconic scenes are still Semitic and Mediterranean. No radical recontextualization here.

The wedding was held on an elevated platform in front of the primary entrance to the sanctuary, so they'd set up chairs in the rotunda in that quadrant of the circle going round the sanctuary. A single elderly priest was putting them away, so I decided to lend a hand. I ended up putting away the folding chairs, and got a peek into the sanctuary since I was standing at the threshold, handing him some liturgical elements they'd brought outside and now were being put back in their proper place. I wonder just how many white people have ever been able to get an unobstructed look into an Ethiopian sanctuary.

Well, from there I went to the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church. This church is in the Russian Compound, which was the original pilgrim center for Russians but later evolved into a British police station and notorious prison. The church remains, however, in the hands of the Russians. I hadn't expected to get in, as its hours are irregular on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this Easter Monday, of all Mondays. But the doors were unlocked, and I wandered in to find the gift stands in the narthex open for business and about four Russian tourists milling about. I didn't let on that I don't speak Russian.

The church has a white interior accented in bright, well-polished gold. After the darkness of most Greek chapels I'd seen, it was a very welcome change in the architecture of Orthodoxy. It also has a beautiful, realistic-yet-Eastern icon of Pentecost on the dome of the northern apse:

Well, at this point I wanted to do some things on the Mount of Olives, since I won't be on pilgrimage for Ascension Thursday and all the ascension sites are up there. In the first case, the Lutheran Augusta Victoria Church is officially the Church of the Ascension, and its tower is the Tower of the Ascension. Alas, it was closed for Easter Monday.

However, from there I walked down the road to the Russian Church of the Ascension. Like Holy Trinity, this is normally only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However there was a Russian pilgrim group there for Easter, and they'd opened it specially, so I actually got in.

The church was like Holy Trinity, white with gold, but even more tasteful and elegant. There was also an icon of the entire murdered Romanov family, which was particularly interesting.

On the site was also the Church of the Head of St. John the Forerunner, which I found morbidly amusing. There was some sort of indentation in the mosaic floor, which I assume was a burial place for his head before it was removed and placed elsewhere. That's what I gathered, anyway, but I could be entirely wrong. In any case, the nice Russian nun working the icon-selling stand encouraged me to stick my head in the hole. Well, ok...

From there I hit the rather unimpressive Mosque of the Ascension, unhelpfully called the Chapel or Church of the Ascension. It's basically a squat octagonal building with a dome, with an exposed piece of bedrock inside lit by candles and a mihrab. And I had to pay to see this?

After discovering the Pater Noster Church was closed either until 2:30 or for the day, and unwilling to wait around for half an hour in a bad neighborhood to find out, I headed down the familiar path to the Kidron, past Dominus Flevit and the Basilica of the Agony, to the Orthodox Tomb of Mary. This, of course, is one of two Orthodox Tombs of Mary, the other being a few miles away from where I write this post (the Turkish port town of Kusadasi), just outside Ephesus. It reminded me a lot of the Holy Sepulchre, with its dark icons covered in ecclesiastical silver, hanging Armenian oil lamps, and even an edicule built around the supposed tomb (right).

Well, I spent the rest of the evening taking a final walk through the Holy Sepulchre. I didn't go in the tomb because the line was packed by Russians, but that was fine. It meant my final time in the tomb was with Maria during our lock-in, and that will be a memory I carry with me until the next time I get back to Israel, and forever.

Instead, I walked around to all the smaller, lesser chapels and took pictures of them. The end of my second Holy Week album is a series of wonderful pictures of all these tiny chapels and altars clinging around the church. It was a wonderful way to spend my final hour in the Old City, and I'll never forget it.

Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

2010-04-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

Throughout the Eastern Orthodox world, this is the standard greeting during Eastertide. And let me tell you, here in Greece, on the isolated and pious island of Patmos, I think I've encountered the one place in Europe where people still greet each other in this fashion. It's a perfect place to spend Easter Week.

But I get ahead of myself; most of you still have no idea how I spent my Easter.

In a word? Blissfully.

After the ceremony of the Holy Fire I took a nice long nap that pretty much wiped out the afternoon and evening. It was just as well, since the Eastern and Oriental Easters begin when the day begins: midnight.

It's a shame that I didn't wake up early enough to go to the Ethiopian reading of the resurrection gospel on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre; I heard it was fantastic, filled with liturgical drums and ritual dancing. However, the Ethiopian Divine Liturgy of the Resurrection began at 1am, and I showed up in time to begin that.

Of course, in my utter exhaustion, I'd totally forgotten that worship just doesn't go according to one's western, American expectations in the wholly other world of the Holy Sepulchre. You see, the Ethiopians are probably the most true to the worship traditions of the ancient Jerusalem temple, for good or ill. There's a court of the men, and behind that, a court of the women. In front of them both, beyond the iconostasis, is the holy sanctuary of the priests. What I'd forgotten was that in the ancient temple, the priests did all the religious duties while the laity pretty much milled about in the temple courtyards.

Therefore, upon arriving on the roof, I found that the Ethiopian monks had set up a large tent that served as a sanctuary, while the laity were packed in wall to wall in the open courtyard. While the priests and monks conducted the service inside the tent, the rest of the Ethiopians had a massive feast, passing out those extraordinarily messy foods that they eat. I was ushered forward in line by one kindly old man who seemed determined to make me feel welcome, and boy, was I ever. That stuff is delicious.

After eating I got swept up in the current of the crowd and was forced out the door. At this point the Greek service was starting around 2am, so I headed back down to Souq Khan es-Zeit toward the main entrance of the Holy Sepulchre. Knowing that the Greek service would go on for hours, though, I stopped for a cup of (absolutely necessary) Arabic coffee. I also bought a nice icon of the Last Supper.

I took this inside and found a nice spot to observe the Greek liturgy. The main sanctuary of the Greeks, which is the Greek Orthodox chapel, was entirely filled with people spilling out into the rotunda. Oddly enough, however, no one was perched on the side platform leading out from the Edicule. I perched myself there for awhile, and managed to get an excellent picture of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the internet here isn't cooperating like it was last night, so I can't get the picture up. It's on Facebook, though.

I'd planned on attending the Armenian Orthodox liturgy at 4am, but by the time it started it was clear that there was no getting in. You see, rather than holding their liturgy in the Cathedral of St. James or in the main Armenian chapel, one flight of steps down from the main floor of the church, they hold their Easter service in the Chapel of St. Nicodemus. The Chapel of St. Nicodemus is the tiny chapel used by the Syriacs but owned by the Armenians; and when I say tiny, I mean it's smaller than my bedroom. It also suffered extensive damage from a fire, which both the Syriac Orthodox and the Armenians claim the other party (as owner and tenant, respectively) has the responsibility to repair. In any case, the Armenian clergy squeezed in there, and the laity was left milling about the rotunda (albeit more reverently and attentively than the Ethiopians). So I decided to go and pray up in the Latin chapel on Calvary and finish watching the Greeks do their thing, and then went to get another cup of coffee.

By the time all this happened, it was about 5am, so I made my way via taxi up to the top of the Mount of Olives, to Augusta Victoria Lutheran Church, also known as the Lutheran Church of the Ascension. Here the local Lutherans were holding an English-language sunrise service out on the lawn, facing east; and being Lutheran, after all, I couldn't help myself.

I must admit, it may have been the only time when the lack of high church accouterments didn't really bother me. It was, after all, an outdoor sunrise service. In many ways, the lack of smells and bells and the soft, light hymns really harmonized well with the setting. There isn't too much to say about it except that I ran into Laurie Blank, the girl working in Ramallah with whom I'd been on the AIT tour way back in the beginning, and whom I'd also run into on Palm Sunday. Jerusalem really is a small world.

In any case, the smells and bells were soon back in full force at St. George's 10:30am service. Full processional, censors, icons, chant in Arabic and English, and a truly spectacular sermon from Bishop Suheil. It was a glorious accompaniment to the far more low-key service at Augusta Victoria and a perfect climax to a long, sleepless vigil.

I know this is the point where I'm supposed to reflect on the meaning of the resurrection, or something. However, I think my previous posts say it all. The new commandment of Maundy Thursday, and the propitiatory horror of Good Friday, and the deafening silence of Holy Saturday together point toward the meaning of the glorious resurrection that comes next. I'm sure I'll have something to say about it when I get to a post on my Lutheran faith, but as for now, lets skip the reasoning and go straight to the affirmation:

Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

Holy Fire on Holy Saturday

2010-04-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of the Holy Fire? If you're not Eastern or Oriental Orthodox, chances are you haven't. But boy, what a show.

The Holy Fire is an annual event serving as the climax of the Eastern Easter. It is a supposed miracle, taking place each year at 1pm (Holy Sepulchre time; 2pm if you're in the surrounding buildings and elsewhere, i.e., everywhere else in Israel). The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, followed by the Armenian Patriarch, go into the Edicule (that's 'the tomb' for non-geeks) with unlit candles and emerge shortly thereafter with lit candles. The fire spreads from there throughout the church as people attempt to demonstrate the miraculous nature of the fire by holding it to their bare skin, and the real miracle is that year after year the place doesn't burn down.

But lets face it, this is something to see!

Getting into the ceremony without clerical connections- and even with them- is nearly impossible. Several years ago the Greek Orthodox, fearing the combination of lunatic Russians, religious piety, large crowds, and fire, invited the Israeli police to do crowd control. The Russians are a particular problem, since forty thousand of them descend on the Old City and they're the ones who try to light themselves on fire. The police, in conjunction with the Greeks, have therefore set up certain rules: no Russians are allowed into the Old City until 2pm (Israeli time); lock-down of the Old City at all gates, with passage only for Old City residents and workers, persons with non-Christian religious destinations, and approved guests; entrance to the Holy Sepulchre only with official badges.

Thank God, the students at St. George's attending the Eastern Holy Week course were in the process of getting badges from the Armenian delegation, and I was graciously added to the list. Father Andrew, you see, studied Armenian spirituality for nine months in the Armenian seminary in Jerusalem. With the ceremony starting at 2pm and the ceremony of the Sealing of the Tomb at noon, we had to head out for the Armenian Quarter as early as 9am.

Now other than being in the Armenian Cathedral of St. James for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and Solemn Burial services, I'd never been in the Armenian Quarter 'proper.' I say proper, because the majority of the Armenian Quarter is located within what is known as the Armenian Compound. This is a sealed communal living area that is largely private and inaccessible. The Armenian residents run various shops and restaurants along Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate Rd., such as the Armenian Tavern where I'd eaten with Maria during our first night in Jerusalem, but the majority of the quarter lies within this compound.

The compound was originally a monastery attached to the cathedral which also housed a seminary. To this was eventually attached a pilgrim guesthouse for Armenians. During the Armenian genocide by the Turks in World War I, refugees fled south into Palestine, which had been taken by the British under General Allenby. The guesthouse was transformed into a refugee camp, and the monastery compound became a general living quarters. The fortress-like character of the quarter has been definitively shaped by those horrible events; one cannot walk along the street without seeing maps of Turkey and the Levant detailing the routes of forced marches and refugee trails and the locations of massacres and depopulated villages. I might note, too, that Israel and Turkey are very strong allies, being largely secular, westernized states in the Arab-Islamic Middle East; as a result, Israel has not officially recognized the tragedy of 1915-1917 to be a genocide. The continued existence of the Armenian Quarter is a sort of silent protest against this equally deafening silence from a people, of all people, who know what genocide means.

The Armenians have a particularly tough go of it because the Jewish Quarter has been slowly moved up the hill, to the west, encroaching on traditionally Armenian neighborhoods. To my knowledge there have not been any official settlements or evictions; however, the transfer of property from one ethnic group to another is not the problem. The problem is that the Armenians continue to hold liturgical processions along their main streets: Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate Rd. and Ararat St. These are also routes by which Orthodox Jews get from Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall. As Armenian processions solemnly go by, they are spat upon and cursed at by fanatical religious Jews. Like the kind, loving Christians they are, they take it in silence.

This brings me back to my day. The normal route for non-Armenians into the Armenian Quarter is through the Cathedral of St. James, so that the population can monitor foreigners in their compound. There is another entrance across from New Gate, however, barred by a locked metal door; only residents of the compound- three hundred or so Armenians- hold the key. The door also has deep historical significance. During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Old City was overrun by the Jordanian Army and allied Palestinian militias. The population of the Jewish Quarter faced massacre. The Armenians opened this door to them, and smuggled Jews, saving hundreds of lives. Their descendants are now spat on by the people they saved.

It was through this Armenians-only door that the St. George's group and I entered the compound. It was very humbling.

Inside, the Armenian Compound is a series of academic buildings, apartments, secret passageways leading in and out of the cathedral, and wide, open courtyards. The only other place in the Old City you can find such open spaces are the Western Wall Plaza, the Jaffa Gate entrance, and the Haram al-Sharif (temple mount)- and none of them are so serene. While waiting for an hour to line up for the procession, I had a walk around, and bought two Armenian-style icons: a Christos Pantokrator and Theotokos and Child. They're quite beautiful and unlike any other icons I've seen.

Now, I use the term 'procession' pretty loosely. You see, even with a badge, the Israelis have been known to turn away people. There are about four hundred badges given out, and the Israelis are supposed to let all four hundred in; however, sometimes they only permit entry for two or three hundred. As a result, there is absolutely nothing ceremonial about the procession. The priests at the front, seminarians and choral troop behind them, followed by a mass of Armenians and invited guests, sprint through the Old City along Armenian Patriarchate Rd., down David St., across Christian Quarter Rd., and into the Parvis of the Holy Sepulchre.

Once there, the Armenian clerics attempt to hold the mass of people back while the Israelis individually check everyone's badges. The press of the crowd from both sides is so intense that I was literally crushed between several people and lifted entirely off the ground, my feet dangling a few inches above the pavement. Once in, though, Andrew and I found the perfect spot: one of the pillars to our backs, with the entrance to the tomb clearly visible. It was probably one of the best seats in the whole house.

By the time the Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Syriacs, and Ethiopians had their delegations in, there were almost eight thousand people crammed into the church. Only the Latins don't participate in the ceremony, although they watch from their gallery high up in the rotunda. In this picture you can see a lone Franciscan, looking like his hands are folded in prayer but actually taking a picture, serenely looking down on the maniac chaos going on below:
And boy, was there ever chaos.

You see, after the house is filled, the Greeks seal the tomb with beeswax in a symbolic reenactment of the rolling of the stone in place. Between this ceremony of the Sealing of the Tomb at noon and the Holy Fire at 2 (11 and 1, Holy Sepulchre time), the various parties have their locals process around the tomb chanting nationalistic and ethnic slogans: Greek, Armenian, what have you. This is another reason the Russians aren't allowed in: the Greeks are severely threatened in their status as masters of the Eastern Orthodox world by the resurgence of religion in post-Soviet Russia and the sheer numbers of Russian faithful.

Now, I don't mean to put a negative spin on these two hours. It was actually great fun to see each party enjoying themselves. A minor fight did break out somewhere over by the Coptic chapel (the one stuck on the rear of the Edicule), but who knows why. The Israelis dealt with that promptly, and I must say, they were very professional throughout the entire ordeal. On the whole, though, I couldn't help but appreciate that what was going on was the celebration of varied and often-rival ethnic groups, who nonetheless could celebrate the same ceremony together in the same church.
Well, it finally came time for Holy Fire. There isn't too much to say, as it all happens quite secretly in the tomb. There's considerable speculation as to how the Greek patriarch actually makes the 'miracle' happen, but that's really not the point. For me, the Holy Fire means that although Saturday is the day when Christ takes his Sabbath rest from this life and we commemorate those terrible hours when his corpse lay dead in the tomb, we are nevertheless reminded that now, since Easter morning, we can pass through Good Friday and Holy Saturday confident of the Sunday morning that lies ahead.

That, and it means lots and lots of fire!

Quick Travel Update

2010-04-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

Hopefully I'll finish posting on the Paschal Triduum soon, but I wanted to offer everyone concerned an actual real-time update.

I left St. George's at 6:45 this morning, and after the most thorough and invasive security check of my life (more later) followed my two flights, I arrived in Kusadasi (Ku-shah-da-suh) this evening around 6pm. Judging from the delightful experiences aboard Turkish Airlines, the friendliness of the staff here at the hostel, and the absolute, unbelievable beauty of the countryside between Izmir Airport and here, Turkey is going to be a lovely country.

Well tomorrow I'm going by ferry to the island of Patmos, and I have no idea whether I'll have internet there. But I'll be back here two nights later, so I should be in reasonable contact.

Happy Bright Week, everyone!

Good Friday

2010-04-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

I wanted to name this post 'Black Friday,' which is the proper name, but alas, it's been usurped by the chaotic shopping day after Thanksgiving.

It was indeed good, though, just as it was truly black. I awoke at 5:30 am, in preparation for the Via Dolorosa. Starting at 6:30 from the first station of the cross (and departing St. George's Cathedral at 6:00 as a group), the Anglicans of St. George's, Lutherans of Augusta Victoria and Church of the Redeemer, and Reformed from St. Andrew's Church of Scotland joined together in a mass, multilingual procession through the Old City.

I've already mentioned the meeting of Bishops Suheil and Munib and posted the pictured, so I'll forego explaining that again. In any case, we used the text found in John Peterson's book A Walk In Jerusalem, which contains appropriate biblical readings and accompanying prayers (which often relate to issues of injustice and suffering in today's world as well as sin and the propitiation thereof). It was extraordinarily moving, especially that early in the morning. Hearing it all in Arabic, English, and German, while yet being able to read along, as well as American, English, and Scottish accents, gave me a sense of catholicity I rarely find outside Catholic and Orthodox churches.

It was quite impossible to get into the Holy Sepulchre to read through the final four stations- Jesus is stripped of his garments, Jesus is crucified, Jesus dies on the cross, Jesus is laid in the tomb- but fortunately the Lutheran's church, Redeemer, is right next door. We finished up in the main sanctuary, with the priests and bishops standing together at the front:
After returning to the college and a rest I went back into the Old City for a 10:30am service at the Melkite church. The Melkites are Greek Catholics, who perform their worship according to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (the Orthodox liturgy), but are Catholics in communion with the pope. Oddly enough, these Melkites don't do the Chrysostom liturgy in Greek at all, but in Arabic.

The service that morning, though, was not the standard weekly Divine Liturgy but rather an adaptation of a Vespers service called the Descent of the Cross. In this service a wooden cross is placed in front of the congregation with a flat icon of Christ's deceased body hung upon it. I had to leave after forty-five minutes, but at the climax of the service they remove the iconic corpus from the cross and place it on a sort of burial slap where the congregation can go forward to venerate it through kisses, prayers, and anointing.

The reason I left early was so that I could rush back to the St. George's Good Friday service. Alas, this weekend remains something of a blur due to a severe lack of sleep throughout the Paschal Triduum, but I can tell you that we read the entirety of St. John's passion account in both Arabic and English. I had thought about not going and instead doing the Via Dolorosa with the Franciscans, to be followed by their 4:00pm Good Friday liturgy in the Holy Sepulchre; but honestly, the Way of the Cross I'd walked that morning with my Anglican and Lutheran (sigh, and Calvinist) brothers and sisters had been so deeply touching, and the Maundy Thursday service at St. George's with the stripping of the altars really is a big setup (in a way, the 'first half') for the Good Friday service, I decided to skip it.

In the end, this turned out to be an excellent decision, because rather than packing into the inevitably crowded Catholic pilgrim groups in the Old City's tiny streets and in the Holy Sepulchre, I went instead with the Eastern Holy Week course group to the Armenian 'burial service.'

I'd only been in the Armenian Cathedral of St. James- the heart of the Armenian Quarter- once before, back during the Palestine of Jesus course when they held their service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. As I mentioned then, it had been quite wonderful, especially to receive the final benediction in Armenian, Coptic, Arabic, Latin, English, German, Ethiopian, Greek, and Syraic. I also got the chance to experience Armenian architecture and liturgy for the first time, in all their solemn beauty.

You see, among the churches of the East- whether the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox (Greeks, Russians, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.) or non-Chalcedonian Oriental Orthodox (Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, and Syriacs), I really, really must say: the Armenians have the best and most outstanding sense of dignity in worship (closely followed by the Romanians, but more on them in a later post). It doesn't hurt, of course, that their choir is one of the best church choirs in the city; it also doesn't hurt that while their cathedral has electric lighting, they make sure that only candles and oil lamps are lit during the liturgy; and lets not forget the simple sense of politeness and gentleness that their clergy, monks, and laity simple exude, guiding people out of the path of some procession rather than shouting and pushing. Really, the high church Anglican liturgy and the Tridentine Mass, while topping them, I think, are given a run for their respective money by the Armenians.

The Armenian Good Friday service, though, puts the rest to shame. You see, they don't simply read the passion narratives. They act it out through what is known as the Solemn Burial Service. They assemble a casket filled with lilies- lilies!- place it in a sarcophagus lined with candles, sing chants recounting and eulogizing the life and death of the deceased, Jesus of Nazareth, and cense the 'body' (the lilies) with incense. I cannot express how touching it was, and how appropriate it was after the reading of the passion at St. George's. First we remember, then we reenact.

After this and dinner we made our way to the Holy Sepulchre. The Parvis, the courtyard, was packed wall to wall with people. There we watched as the Greeks processed three times in circles through the crowd carrying banners with icons embroidered onto them, followed by a glass box with flowers. It was a little chaotic, with hoisted banners getting caught in electrical wires suspended above the Parvis to provide spotlighting, and not nearly as moving as the Armenian service. Perhaps it was because of the mass crowds of tourists, but maybe I need to reevaluate my perception of the sacred; perhaps it's because they were just walking in circles, but I know that I need to think through my theology of procession. Yet I think it was also because the Armenians just really are tops.

Allow me to reflect for a moment on my above statement, though: first we remember, then we reenact. This, I think, is the essence of liturgical worship, where we first listen to the reading of the Scriptures, which serves as a 'script' for the reenactment of grace that follows in the Holy Eucharist. We participate in the events of Scripture by following that script, first in the liturgy, and then in the world. And the reading of the Word is not and can never be the central feature of worship: the Scriptures are there 'to prepare our hearts and minds to receive him who comes to us in his body and blood,' as we say in the liturgy. So when we fast, for the only time in the whole year, for the only day in the whole year, from Holy Communion, we came together for a very different sort of reenactment: the Via Dolorosa and the Burial Service.

Granted, very few people perform the Via Dolorosa as a spiritual devotion, and no Western church, Catholic or Protestant, has a form of a burial service. Yet I think we must reinvigorate the former as a tradition of our churches and perhaps introduce the latter. For only when we reenact can we truly participate; one does not participate by sitting back and listening, after all. Participation involves not being a spectator in the audience, but an actor on stage. And when our worship conforms to the liturgical pattern in the Eucharist, the Via Dolorosa, the Solemn Burial, and the many other enriching ceremonies the tradition of Mother Church offers us, we are all the more prepared to follow the mandatum of Maundy Thursday: love one another as I have loved you. These outward rituals shape our behavior, exercises in the visible that reshape the essence. By replaying the events of Good Friday as the church, we are all the more prepared to share the love of Good Friday in the world.

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-04T03:03:00.000-07:00

This ought to be rather brief as I did virtually nothing on Maundy Thursday other than attend the evening liturgy. The previous night I stayed up with Ben, as it was his last evening the country (before his departure early this morning) before the Paschal Triduum, and thus the last evening for us to share a bottle of wine and have a chat. It ended up being a very late night, so my plan to get to all the various churches on the Mount of Olives- the Lutheran Augusta Victoria, the Russian Orthodox Churches of the Ascension and of St. Mary Magdalene, the Chapel (mosque) of the Ascension, Pater Noster, and the Tomb of Mary completely went up in smoke. Oh well, I ought to be able to do a good deal of that tomorrow (Monday), anyway. The real trouble was that I didn't make it to any of the Oriental Orthodox (Ethiopian, Armenian, Syraic) foot washings that I'd hoped to observe and participate in. I suppose that gives me a good excuse to return for a second pilgrimage (as if I'd needed another one).

In any event, I overslept late into the day, so I really just milled about until the Maundy Thursday service began at St. George's Cathedral.

For a bit of background: Maundy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper of our Lord with his disciples, and in particular the washing of the feet and the institution of Holy Communion. Maundy is a corruption of that Latin word 'mandatum,' from whence we get our English 'mandate.' This refers specifically to the 'new commandment' that ties together Christ's deeply symbolic and ritual actions of the washing of the feet and the breaking of the bread: "A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34).

The washing of the feet, pointing back to our baptisms, prepares us to go forth to confront the absolute horror of Good Friday, the deep anxiety of Holy Saturday, and the joyous triumph of Easter Sunday; the sacrament of the Lord's Supper which follows is to sustain us in this period in which we fast and abstain from Holy Communion throughout the next nights. Thus the Maundy Thursday liturgy begins the Easter Triduum buildings through the next days to the climax of the Feast of the Resurrection, with its final denouement in the Sunday evening Vespers.

At St. George's, unlike in the Oriental services I'd hoped to attend, the foot washing is ceremonial and representative; not all participate. Rather, in view of the congregation, the bishop, Bishop Suheil, got down on his knees and washed the feet of the priests, deacons, and acolytes. I thought that was a bit of a shame, but I suppose this proper English service couldn't have laity wallowing around on the foot with sloshing water. "That just wouldn't be cricket."

Most moving, though, was the finale of the service. Stephen, the Dean of St. George's College, read in a loud voice the entirety of Psalm 22, "My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" while the rest of the clergy and church workers engaged in the Stripping of the Altars.

If you haven't witnessed a full Stripping of the Altars, find a good church some Maundy Thursday and go.

In the stripping of the altars, all removable pieces of decoration in the church are removed. The vestments are removed from the priests who are left in black cassoks; the icons are removed from the walls; the candlesticks are shut away; the liturgical banners and altar-coverings are torn off; and the crucifixes, already covered in purple sheets for Lent, are taken down entirely.

The church, you see, goes from the picture of heaven, where the Divine Liturgy ushers us into the presence of God through Word and Sacrament each and every Sunday, into a tomb. The tomb of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The beauty and colors and precious metals are replaced by stark, gray, stone walls.

From here we processed out in silence and began a walk from the cathedral down into the Kidron Valley, a dark, silent olive grove near Gethsemane. Here we read the first half of St. Mark's passion narrative, from Jesus' time of anguish in the garden through Peter's triple denial. Then we dispersed; some stayed in the grove in silence, others left, and a few attempted to get into the nearby Basilica of the Agony (or 'Church of All Nations').

It was with this disturbing image of things to come that we were left to be haunted by that night, with the anticipation of a 6am procession through the Old City along the Via Dolorosa...

Wednesday: Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl

2010-04-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

It was my very last totally free day here in Israel aside from the Easter Triduum and Monday (which is the second feast day of Pesach, so nothing is opening), so it was high time I went to Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem. These are things which every visitor to Israel ought to do, no matter one's appreciation or not of the state of Israel. Since it was going to be a very Israeli day, I decided to make it an all-around Jewish day by going to some lesser-known archaeological sites as well.

I began with a sight I've passed by almost daily- the Hadrianic plaza under Damascus Gate. After the destructions of Jerusalem in AD 70 and 135, the Emperor Hadrian completely reconstructed the city as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, with its central entrance at the present Damascus Gate (at the center of the northern wall). Inside was a large open plaza with two roads branching off southward: the Cardo Maximus, which runs parallel to today's Souq Khan es-Zeit and has been excavated in the Jewish Quarter, and the secondary cardo, which runs basically along the Tyropoeon Valley, where today is the main north-south road through the city, Al-Wad ('Valley Road').

One enters the plaza, which has been turned into a museum, via the easternmost of the three arches through which pedestrians entered the city (picture above). The central arch is buried directly below Damascus Gate, and the western arch was covered up when the Byzantine renovation placed a chapel to Abraham beside it.

There wasn't too much to see inside the museum; however, walking around the guard room that flanked the city's principal was rather cool. Most interesting, I thought, was the pavement; it is almost identical to the pavement of Hadrian's reconstructed Antonia Fortress that one can see below the Ecce Homo convent.

From there I made my way a bit east toward Herod's Gate, where there is a deep artificial cave running well below the city. Known alternatively as Zedekiah's Cave or Solomon's Quarries- both for purely legendary reasons- this was the site of a quarry used by Herod the Great for his lavish reconstruction of the city. There isn't really anything to see, but there are traces of unfinished quarry work and it's a fun place to wander around in.

I then headed toward the Jewish Quarter to see the famed Wohl Archaeological Museum. When Jerusalem was retaken by the Israelis in 1967 they found the Jewish Quarter in ruins. In additional to plowing down a neighborhood in order to open up the Western Wall Plaza, they also took the opportunity to do something rarely possible: thorough excavations within the Old City. Among other things discovered were the foundations, first floors, and basements of six first century mansions in close proximity to each other. The Wohl Museum was built atop them in order to aid in preservation and allow visitors to access the site (unfortunately, this also meant no pictures).

These were houses destroyed following the capture of the Upper City about a month after the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70 (and yes, the defenders still held out for another month even after seeing their temple destroyed). Each house is a mansion unto itself, likely two or three stories and mosaic floors and large mikvehot (ritual baths) in the basement. The working theory is that these are houses of the 'Herodians' that come up in the New Testament: members of the Herodian dynasty or persons related to them through financial and political association. These were, in effect, the houses of the people who didn't want to fight the Romans at all.

After a quick lunch I headed off to Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem. The former is named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement. Herzl was originally a mild-manned journalist, but when he covered the Dreyfus Affair in France (where a Jewish officer was made a scapegoat in a treason case in an obvious case of systematic governmental anti-Semitism) he came to the conclusion that the Jewish people would only be safe if they had a national homeland and a nation-state they could call their own. From this conclusion came the drive for mass settlement in Ottoman and British Palestine and the push for a Jewish state. His grave is pictured right.

Mount Herzl is centered on his grave, but it also contains the graves of numerous Zionist leaders, national leaders, and the national military cemetery. Most moving of all were the graves of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin. For those who were too young or too apathetic to remember, Yitzhak Rabin was a leading military figure in Israel's Arab wars and a hawkish Labor Party prime minister in the 1970s. When he was reelected as prime minister in the early 90s, he made the hard call to turn around on his former tough position and pursue a negotiated peace with the Palestinians and Yassir Arafat's PLO (who had made a similar, if less sincere and eventually abandoned, turn away from violence). After several successful rounds of negotiations, Rabin was assassinated by a radical Jewish Zionist while concluding a peace rally. The black grave on the right is his; on the left, the white grave is his wife Leah's; the painted stones are the Jewish equivalent of flowers, brought by mourners from all over the world.

From here there is a little trail through the forest, and past the monument to the victims of terrorism, that leads down to Yad Vashem. 'Yad v'shem' means 'a memorial and a name,' and it is taken from the text of Isaiah 56:5: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off."

This, of course, is Israel's official Holocaust memorial.

Yad Vashem is what the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. should have been. Its central museum moves along chronologically, tracing the history of anti-Semitism and its roots in both European Christian culture and nineteenth century 'scientific' racism; it has both a room entirely devoted to Gentiles and Christians who helped Jews escape from the Nazis and a separate monument to these 'Righteous Among the Nations'; it treats the Holocaust as centrally about the Jewish people but has several exhibits on all the other groups who so tragically perished; it has exhibits and a monument dedicated to Jews who fought as Allied soldiers, forest partisans, and ghetto resistance fighters; and most importantly, it leaves people with a sense of hope, not guilt. When exits the museum, after a silent walk through the Hall of Names (which cannot possibly inscribe the three million names thus far collected, but is rather a library), one goes out onto a porch that opens up with a view over the Judean hills:
I might add, of course, that this hope of reaching the Judean hills, with these trees you see planted by the original Jewish settlers, was a dream not reached by the full half of world Jewry murdered in the Holocaust. That is why museum is built in the shape of a triangle: it is one half, but only one half, of the Star of David.

This, of course, is why Herzl's dream of a Jewish homeland and Israeli state are so very important- however much one sympathizes with the Palestinians' own national aspirations and suffering. Perhaps it is true that without the Holocaust, the world would not have offered to partition the British Mandate and create an Israeli state; yes, if there had been no Holocaust, there may not have been an Israel.

But far more importantly: if there had been an Israel, there may not have been so terrible a Holocaust.

For one of the principal so many Jewish people were murdered was because they had no place to go, and no state to defend them.

In the first case, the European countries had largely closed their doors to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. In one case, a refugee ship arrived in Havana, sat in the docks for weeks, and was turned back to Germany; eventually several countries offered them safe haven, but alas, these countries included ones that Nazi Germany would eventually conquer: Belgium and the Netherlands. Many fled for British Palestine, but in order to maintain good relations with the Arab population (both because of a pro-Arab bias in the Foreign Ministry and because of a desire to keep the oil flowing), the British refused more than minimal immigration numbers.

In the second case, states exist not merely to serve their own citizens, but their national expatriate communities as well. This is far from the American way of thinking about a nation-state (not surprising, as Americans really aren't a nation-state in this sense), but it's simply how it works. Armenians here in Israel may not be citizens of Armenia, but it's the Armenian state that protects and defends them. The Turks are afraid of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq not because they care about Iraq, but because the existence of a Kurdish state would mean that their own Kurdish population would have a defender and advocate, even if Turkish Kurds weren't citizens of Kurdistan. Even China- communist, atheist China- has come to the defense of the ethnic Chinese Christian community in Jakarta whenever that community has come under threat of violent attacks from Indonesian Muslim radicals.

This, of course, is exactly what happened when the Arab societies attempted to wipe out the Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the five years following the establishment of Israel. The Yemenite, Egyptian, Iraqi, and North African Jews would have all been murdered- wiped out as whole communities- were it not for the fact that Israel was there to defend them and offer them a place to go. The airlift of the Jewish populations of these countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s makes the contemporaneous Berlin Airlift look small by comparison. Can we imagine six million murdered Jews if Israel had been in existence fifteen years earlier? Perhaps many- certainly still far too many- but that is why, despite its numerous problems, difficulties, and often injustices, a Jewish national homeland called Israel is the ultimate yad v'shem.

"And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off."

Jericho

2010-04-02T03:46:00.001-07:00

So I had long planned to make it to Jericho on my own to see the many sites there. It's probably the calmest, most easy-going town in the West Bank, and has quite a bit of history packed into a small space.

Running about kilometers due west of Jericho is Wadi Qelt, one of the loveliest places for desert hiking. Midway between the western extent of the wadi at the Israeli settlement of Mitzpe Yericho and the eastern extent at Jericho itself is the monastery of St. George of Koziba. More on that later. But my original plan was to wake up nice and early, take a bus to Mitzpe Yericho, and walk through the wadi into Jericho with a stop in the monastery.

Unfortunately, several problems came together to eliminate this possibility. First and foremost, the day was Tuesday, which was the beginning of Passover week; therefore no Egged buses were running. Second, I woke up a little later than I'd hoped, so I couldn't meet up with a group that were planning on taking one of the Arab buses that passes by the settlement, nor did I have time to figure that one out on my own. Third, even if I had gone with them, the Monastery of St. George of Koziba is open all day, whereas the monastery in Jericho itself, the Monastery of the Qurantal ('the Forty'), is only open until noon, and I wanted to make sure I got there. So I went to Jericho first by overpriced taxi.

Happily, the taxi dropped me off right by the cable car station. The cable car goes from within the Jericho city limits until it gets halfway up the Mount of Temptation (venerated as the site of the temptation of Jesus our Lord in the wilderness), where there is a good restaurant and a cliff-side walkway leading to the monastery.

The Monastery of the Qurantal itself is an absolute wonder. It basically a two-story lengthy hallway, with one side carved out of cliff and the other suspended over the edge (like all good daring Eastern Orthodox monks, laughing in the face of worldly concerns, the brothers have their cells on the hanging side). Upon entry, I made my way into the ancient cave church. The monastery is relatively new, but there was an older monasty on the site centered on this natural cave in the rock. Don't ask me the significance, though, because nobody around spoke English.

From there the hallway continues into the main church with a beautiful set of icons. Of the four active monasteries in the Judean desert-Mar Saba, St. George of Koziba, St. Gerasimus, and the Qurantal- all of which I've now visited, I think the last one has the nicest church (though probably just because it's new).

There's also a wonderful set of pieces in the larger outer chamber of the cave church:Above this main sanctuary is a smaller chapel- the extent of the publicly accessible part of the monastery- which holds the stone that Satan tempted our Lord to transform in to bread... apparently. Oh well, I still venerated it as a commemorative relic, and that's good enough for me.

After lunch on the mountain I returned to Jericho via the cable car. My next stop was St. George of Koziba in Wadi Qelt (pictured right), but since I wasn't exactly sure how to get there from the eastern approach, I decided to hire a taxi.

Unfortunately, whereas I had requested that a taxi take me to the entrance of Wadi Qelt so that I could hike in and out, as well as see the ruins of Herod's fortress (called Cypros) on the southern exit of the wadi and his palaces on either side (they were once connected by a bridge), the driver thought I meant that I wanted to be taken all the way in. Granted, there is a semi-paved road running along the pinnacle southern side of the wadi, but I just wanted to say that I'd hiked Wadi Qelt while getting all the time I wanted in the monastery.

Instead, I was driven directly to the site, where I was told that I had about ten minutes, so I should walk up to the panorama place overlooking the monastery and take a picture. Dismayed, I explained that I didn't come for the picture (you can find about a thousand on the internet), but that I actually wanted to go down and into the monastery. Yet because he had another client on the schedule, he couldn't give me any more than thirty minutes to get down into the wadi, see the monastery, and worst of all, get back up.

Oh well. I got to the monastery (where I was told I had to put on a jacket because my short-sleeved t-shirt was unacceptable) and found it much as I'd imagined: glorious. Among other things was a prominently displayed corpse, presumably of St. George of Koziba:
They also had a very nice iconostasis, of far greater antiquity than that at Qurantal, and while the church as a whole isn't quite as good, I think the icons themselves are much nicer:
Anyway, I got literally mugged by a Bedouin guide who sold me a donkey ride back up the slope who agreed to one price at the bottom but changed his price at the top in the presence of a gang of fellow tribesmen. So that was deeply unfortunate, and was just one more financial disaster in a day of financial disasters. Again, oh well.

In any case, I was driven back to the cable car station by the taxi driver, since right across the street is Tel as-Sultan. Tel as-Sultan contains the remains of one of the earliest human settlements, rivaling Çatal Höyük in Turkey (which, unfortunately, I won't be getting to next week). There really isn't much to see if you're not an archaeologist with a specialty in the development of pre-literate building, but I figured it was worth going to.

At this point I decided that I couldn't afford to keep trotting around Jericho completely out of order with a taxi driver who wanted to milk me for all I was worth. So I missed Cypros Fortress, Herod's Winter Palace, and Tel es-Samrat, the site of Herod's Jericho hippodrome- namely, all the Herodian structures in a city that is well known for them. Come to think of it, I didn't get to Nebi Musa (a nearby Muslim tomb for Moses) or Jericho's greatest wonder, Hisham's palace, either.

Worse still, the taxi driver decided to drop me off at Almog Junction with the promise of an arriving bus. As I mentioned, it Tuesday was Passover, which meant there would be no Egged buses running. I mentioned this to him and asked him whether he meant an Israeli or an Arab bus, but he simply assured me a bus would come. I then asked what the number of the Arab bus was- at which point he drove off. I should have just walked to the bus station in Jericho and gone through with a transfer in Ramallah, because no bus ever came. After about forty minutes I flagged down a taxi, which meant yet another bit of financial ruin.

The lesson to be learn here is this: do Jericho in two days. On one day, take an early Egged bus to Mitzpe Yericho and hike through Wadi Qelt. See the Monastery of St. George of Koziba, and continue east to see Cypros Fortress, Herod's Winter Palaces, and and Tel as-Samrat. Then take the bus to Ramallah, and transfer from there onto the number 18 Arab bus to Jerusalem. On the other day, take the number 18 Arab bus to Ramallah and transfer to Jericho. See the Monastery of the Qurantal first thing, then Tel as-Sultan, and then hire a cab to Hisham's Palace and to Nebi Musa. In the end, those two days will cost you far less than my one day cost me, and you'll get to see a whole lot more.

Facebook Update

2010-04-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

A meet and right Good Friday to you all.

I'll try to catch up on this week's events this afternoon and evening, but I wanted to let you know that at the very least all the pictures from St. Catherine's to this morning's Via Dolorosa are now uploaded, labeled, and tagged. That took long enough.

I found one photo from this morning particularly touching; our Via Dolorosa was jointly held with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land and the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem and the Middle East. Although both have heavy British and German presences, the bishops are both native Arabs: Anglican Bishop Suheil Dawani is a native of Nablus, and Lutheran Bishop Munib Younan was born in Jerusalem.

So when these two great men met each other in the middle of the street, embraced, and shared the kiss of peace, I just had to take a photo of them together:

Simply wonderful.

Palm Sunday and Bethany

2010-04-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm wretchedly behind because this week has been absolutely frantic in the best possible way. I've had full days every day, except perhaps today but that's another story.

In the meantime, I'll try to at least get Sunday and Monday in.

Holy Week commenced with the Palm Sunday mass at St. George's Cathedral. Everyone met out in the parking lot and we had a full procession with incense and palms and everything. The cathedral was decked out with palm branches, and quite tastefully. Bishop Suheil offered the homily in both English and Arabic, as the service was held jointly with the English and Arabic congregations. That, of course, has come to be the rule for the whole week, and it's quite wonderful.

After lunch we hopped bus and were driven to the Bethphage, on the east side of the Mount of Olives. It was in the vicinity of this town and the neighboring town of Bethany (neighboring, but inaccessibly on the other side of the security wall) that Jesus began the very first Palm Sunday procession.

I can't even begin to describe the hordes of pilgrims. Go on Facebook and watch the five videos I took. It was absolutely amazing. Each group comes with their own songs and joins in an incomprehensible but utterly joyous cacophony of music. Monks and nuns of all religious orders, with (in Ben's words) "wimples of every description," and most wonderfully, people of every tribe, tongue, and nation. The vast majority were Catholic, and it showed: Africans, Asians, Arabs, French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and unending groups of Latin Americans. It was a true spectacular.

From Bethphage we walked up to the top of the Mount of Olives and then down past Dominus Flevit and the Church of All Nations (the Basilica of the Agony, at Gethsemane. Then we began up the middle of the road (traffic had of course been rerouted and there were police and helicopters aplenty) for the final ascent. In the first century, the procession would have gone up through the Shushan Gate and up to the temple mount. Indeed, it's a curious moment in the gospels, because a person proclaimed as Messiah would be expected to turn right upon entering the gate and whip up the mob against the symbol of present Roman power: the Antonia Fortress. However, Jesus isn't riding a horse, the symbol of a warrior king prepared for battle. He's riding a donkey; forget old sermons that suggest this is about humility. No, a king on a donkey is a king with peaceful intent, and he's telling the Romans that he comes in peace.

Even more curiously, instead of turning to the right after entering the gate and going after the Antonia, Luke's account paints the picture (even if the other gospels present a different sequence) of Jesus immediately turning left and going after the moneychangers in the Royal Portico! Rather than going after the Antonia in order to vindicate the national hopes of the Jewish people, he attacks the temple itself, completely, as always, turning expectations upside down.

Well, we can't go through the Shushan Gate because the Arab Muslims blocked it up centuries ago for whatever reason. However, St. Stephen's Gate is near the spot, and just inside it is the Church of St. Anne. So thousands upon thousands of dancing, singing pilgrims squeezed their way through the gate:

At St. Anne's the church had set up a live band to play rock versions of traditional folk music from around the world. A dance party inevitably ensued. For a while I stood on the sidelines to watch, but I was pulled into the conga line by a group of elderly Filipino nuns. This, of course, was all going on on the front lawn of St. Anne's Convent. I think had I danced for about half an hour when I left just as the Arab Catholic Scouts marched in to snare drums and bagpipes.

After a restful evening I got up the next day to complete this Palm Sunday experience by going to the other side of the security barrier to Bethany. Bethany would be quite walkable from St. George's if it weren't for the wall, but since there isn't a checkpoint one must go on a bus on the Jerusalem-Masada-Eilat highway, which then turns off on the other side. It's a shame, but fortunately the Arab staff here at the college live in Bethany and were able to tell me exactly which Arab bus to hop on.

The reason to go to Bethany is to see the Church of St. Lazarus and the adjacent tomb. Whether or not it's the real tomb, it is a first century tomb; you can tell because the entrance, the mourner's vestibule, and the burial chamber are constructed in a straight line, as they are at the Holy Sepulchre and elsewhere (though not at the 8th century BC 'Garden Tomb'). In any case, there's not much to see, but it's one of those fun shrines that's shared between Muslims and Christians. The current street-side entrance was cut out by the Franciscans in the early modern period; the original entrance is now inside a mosque which was built up around it.

The church was a particular goal for me, since it is the last of the Antonio Barluzzi churches I wanted to get to. Hopefully later in the week I'll do a post on the man and his churches, which really shape the experience of so many pilgrims and whose architectural vision of sacred space profoundly determines the character of Christian life in this land. Not to mention, like all of his works, the church is beautiful.

After seeing the church and going into the tomb, I went to walk up the steps out again to the street when I heard a British accent lecturing about the site. It was Stephen, the dean of St. George's, giving a presentation to the members of the current course, Risen With Christ: Eastern Holy Week! When he saw who it was walking up out of the chamber, he joked, "And here is Lazarus, risen from the dead!"

Running into them turned out great, since not only did they give me a ride back, but I celebrated Mass with them in a small medieval chapel near the church and got to go into the nearby Greek monastery (to which I had been denied access as a lone person earlier). The entire group only got five minutes, anyway, but it was lovely to be able to see the interior of their chapel, venerate the icons, and, of course, take a photo.

Well, it's after midnight and I'm getting up and out by 6am in order to do the Via Dolorosa with the joint Anglican-Lutheran group. Yes, I'll be kicking off Good Friday bright and early. Just wait to you hear my schedule for the rest of the weekend...

Lotan and the Arava

2010-03-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

After making my way back into Israel through a completely painless border cross, I landed at Kibbutz Lotan. As I'm sure you know, a kibbutz is an agricultural commune where the property is owned jointly by all (read: by none). Now there are various sorts of kibbutzim: some are more Orthodox, most are secular, almost all left-wing, and they have a variety of ideologies behind their communal settlements. But within this strange group of micro-communists, there's the good folks at Kibbutz Lotan.

And by good folks, I mean creepy tree-hugging self-righteous hippies.

Naturally, I went just in order to see what they'd done with the place (note: the place = the desert).

For a good overview from their own mouths, watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yz6ggl03_0

Those domes you see aren't actually where the kibbutz members live, contrary to what the advertising video leads you to believe. Members live in semi-normal houses. The domes are where they stick people in the Green Apprenticeship Program for the duration of their stay while they learn to make mud bricks. Speaking of mud bricks, did anybody notice the use of children for construction labor in the video? They scoot right past it there, but they're a bit more vocal about their left-wing ideology of labor on one sign in the Creative Ecology Park:

"Under the Egyptians, Pharaoh made the Hebrew slaves gather their own straw and mud, but we'll gladly provide you with straw and mud here at the Creative Ecology Park!" It might as well continue: "But like under all forms of socialism, you're still slaves!" Fascinating.

At dinner the first evening I got a particularly enlightening peek into the culture of Lotan. One of the other people at the table began complaining about corn. "It's in everything!" she exclaims, and proceeds to detail the evils of corn by listing all the products in which corn is an ingredient. Finally someone asked "What's wrong with corn?" The response? "It's in everything!" Again, fascinating.

We were also told by the same girl that we needed to take eggs off the menu in order to restrict people's diet choices, since eggs are neither healthy nor vegan-friendly. Truly, the tendency of socialism to inevitably lead toward multiple avenues of total control is, yes, again, fascinating.

After escaping this hippie paradise I made a day trip through Timna Valley Park. Here are the world's oldest copper mines, dug by the Egyptians of the late New Kingdom in cooperation with the local Midianite population. The park was far larger than I'd thought, but fortunately I was driven around by a nice Russian-American family visiting relatives here in Israel for their son's Bar Mitzvah.

The park also contains a working replica of the wilderness tabernacle carried around by the Israelites that was eventually supplanted by Solomon's temple. It's a far, far better representation than the one done by Mennonites in Lancaster, PA. You just know there's quality work when various tools used in the incense offering and on the altar of burnt offerings are actually metal rather than plastic. Truly great.

Later I caught a bus to Masada. I spent the night in the wonderful hostel, followed by an early morning hike up the Snake Path in order to catch the dawn. Because of the Dead Sea, the sunrise here may just beat the dawn at Sinai. Maybe.

In any case, I also met a couple on vacation named Mark and Michelle. We went back on the same bus to Jerusalem and I ended up showing them how to find their hostel and got them oriented in the Old City. I swear, I might as well become a tour guide (too bad I'm not an Israeli citizen). And, of course, it was nice to come back to St. George's and find Ben still in the country and all the other faculty and staff happily preparing for the current course.

My apologies for the lack of pictures. The internet isn't cooperating tonight, but with a whole bunch of Easter activities beginning this week and updates to come on Palm Sunday, Bethany, and Wadi Qelt (hopefully), I figured I might as well get something up so that people know I'm well and alive. Inshallah, my pictures will be up on Facebook soon as well as the amazing videos from Sunday's mass procession.

Speaking of which: Happy Palm Sunday!

Return to St. Catherine's

2010-03-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

Going back to St. Catherine's and Mount Sinai was great. It was very, very different from the last time I'd gone there with AIT. You've all heard me say quite a bit about the differences between going with a large commercial group and going alone as a pilgrim, so I'll spare you the obvious observations.

In any case, that wasn't even the biggest change. I purposefully set out to do things differently. First of all, I stayed in the monastery guesthouse, which competes with Fauzi Azar Inn in Nazareth as the best money spent on this trip. Something like $30 for a single room, with breakfast and dinner included, clean sheets and towels, (mostly) hot water- really great. I'd recommend staying there anytime. In addition to a few other brave travelers- a couple from Seattle, two French fellows- there was also a Romanian pilgrimage group there taking up a good number of beds. To hear them singing at dinner was a marvelous treat.

I thought about doing a dawn hike, but when my alarm rang at 4am, I decided that it just wasn't worth it. Instead, I did the smart thing, and set out for an afternoon hike to catch the dusk. The person running the cafe at the guesthouse even put me in touch with a reliable Bedouin guide. For this time, I wasn't taking the well-trod and easily-navigable camel path. No, I was going up the three thousand, seven hundred fifty Steps of Repentance.

What, you ask, are the 3750 Steps of Repentance? Well, it's a giant uneven staircase up the side of the mountain. The first 3000 are the Steps of Repentance proper; the next 750 are the ones everyone ascending to the summit has to climb once the camel path terminates. But it's not so-named simply because they're a form of penance, or because (more often) you repent of your decision to go them once you're about halfway. No, they're called the Steps of Repentance because those three thousand steps were laid and carved out by a single monk as a form of penance for some unknown sin. Talk about hardcore.

Pictured left: Boy and donkey descending the steps on our way up.

I have to say, though, they weren't nearly as bad as I'd expected. First of all, I made them my own personal devotional by doing the same as in the Negev between Succah in the Desert and Mitzpe Ramon: namely, praying the (Lutheran) rosary fourteen times before stopping to rest while reading through the Stations of the Cross. Let me tell you, fourteen breaks for prayer on the way up and down is a great way to catch your breath. Forget my own piety- I was looking forward to each and every one of those stops.

Second, the path is actually shorter since it's a fairly straight ascent. I was thoroughly surprised when the 3000 were over and I recognized the top of the camel path. What a great feeling.

And speaking of great feelings: third, I'm in far, far better shape than I was on my previous visit three months ago. Last time I took a camel up the wide and winding path and then only climbed the 750 stairs to the top, and let me tell you, I thought I was gonna die. This time, I went straight to the top and felt totally rested within minutes of reaching the summit. There has been no better confirmation that these months have whipped me into the shape that humans are supposed to be in.

Of course, I'd sent my heavy jacket back with my parents at the beginning of January, and I lost my raincoat somewhere in Galilee. Who knows. As a result, I had to buy some cheap replacements for the hike, but hey, I don't mind looking like a bum (or Kyle Reese from Terminator).

I might as well mention here that I saw no one else climbing up the steps, and that there were only about two dozen people at the top for dusk, as opposed to four hundred for sunrise.

Anyways, if you remember, there's a chapel and another building at the summit. First off, the other building is actually a mosque. My guide, Hussein, had it opened so that once we got up and had some time to kill before the sunset he could perform his afternoon prayers. As a result, I was invited to go inside and take a look- and a photo (left). Honestly, I found it to be one of the nicer mosques I've visited here.

More importantly, though, there's the chapel that they keep perpetually locked. I asked one of the Bedouins who sells tea and blankets whether the monks ever come up and open it. He replied that when there's a Greek Orthodox group staying at the monastery, they'll give them the key so they can hold a service.

As a result, everybody wonders what it looks like inside.

Well wonder no more!

No, I didn't get to go in. What I did do is climb around to the front of the church, where the windows of the sanctuary (behind the iconstasis) look over a fifty foot drop. However, there's just barely enough room to crawl out on a ledge, hang over the abyss, put one hand through the broken glass holding the camera, and snap a shot:
Of course, I can hear my mother's fury now. "You did what?!"

Naturally, I then found an easier way to get a photo. The keyholes are particularly large, so you can just look through some of them. For instance on Facebook, there's another picture of the iconostasis of a chapel near the intersection of the Camel Path and the Steps of Repentance. Well I looked in the main door at the rear of the church- this time facing the sanctuary and the iconostasis of which you can only see the rear in the above photo- and found that I could just barely get the picture:
From left to right, that's Theotokos and Child, Christos Pantocrator, and the Holy Trinity. What a perfect collection.

Oh, and, of course, here's a picture of the approaching dusk:
In due course, I also revisited the monastery itself and found something far more interesting: the monastery has Sacred Sacristy, which in layman's terms is a museum for displaying its treasures. And what treasures! Unfortunately, there's no photos allowed inside (though perhaps fortunately, given that people would inevitably- accidentally or not- use flash and destroy precious manuscripts and icons), but the items displayed are unparalleled in the world.

Because of its isolation in the Sinai desert, St. Catherine's monastery was spared the pillaging of the iconoclasts, who went around the Byzantine Empire destroying icons in the latter half of the first millennium. As a result, St. Catherine's has the very oldest Christian icons in existence, some dating to the fourth century.

Perhaps more importantly, the monastery contains a library of early manuscripts second only to the massive Vatican library. The monastery's Codex Siniaticus is one of the earliest and more reliable biblical texts in existence, and alongside the Codex Vaticanus (you may as well guess where that one is from) is foundational for the biblical text we all use today. So yes, I've now seen the Condex Siniaticus and the Aleppo Codex. Booya.

Well, after two nights I headed back to Taba, crossed the border into Eilat, and took the bus up to Kibbutz Lotan, from whence I write this post. What a strange and ridiculous place this is- but that's for the next post.

Days in the Negev

2010-03-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

So, wow. If there's anywhere to go for Lent, it's the Negev.

As I mentioned, Succah in the Desert (Succah baMidbar) was simply amazing. I highly recommend it: under certain conditions. Alone, or with one's spouse, or with one's family including kids is the way to do it. The first night there I was the only guest, as a large German group had canceled. And yet, the hosts made me feel completely at home (to the left is a picture of the common succah where meals were served). The second night another six or eight people showed up, and it still felt very cozy.

Contrast this to Chan HaShayarot, the commercialized Bedouin camp where I stayed for the following two nights. There's no denying that the place was great; indeed, it was simply amazing. The food was incredible, including grilled chicken, ground beef kebab, delicious hummus, eggplant (yes, I'm making myself like it), and assorted other Middle Eastern dishes. Fantastic. Then there were the camels. Wonderful camels, who didn't spit and only fought with each other enough for our amusement. Very good with kids. Their lips seem to be prehensile, capable of grasping round things (namely, my fingers). The one to the right I call Joe. No, really, he was trying to get at the cigarettes in the trash bin, so I couldn't help the obvious joke!

However, Chan HaShayarot is not really the place to go alone. Go with a group of a half dozen or more. There were groups there up to a hundred people, and they got the full package. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy myself- I thoroughly did- but I had to hook up with bachelor party groups, families on holiday, and a caravan of law school students from Chicago to do so.

Back to Succah baMidbar. I might as well mention the animals. At the site, the owners keep six very, very large dogs: two Rhodesian ridgebacks, three large white Russian dogs, and a Turkish sheepdog. The greatest animal, Dov, is a big, furry, white, and very playful young pup. Yes, pup- he's just two years old. I made sure to take a picture of him next to a person for scale. Look at him! He's huge! I loved it.

They also have two donkeys, two horses, and a ton of chickens for their eggs. They cook all vegetarian meals, and let me tell you, if all vegetarians cooked this way, I could totally do it. Then again, who'd want to?

I stayed there two nights, so on my full day I made the eight kilometer hike to Mitzpe Ramon. This is the town overlooking the Ramon Crater, a massive geological formation that pictures don't capture and words can't describe (here's a picture anyway). More importantly, though, the hike through the desert really gave me the chance to reconnect with the roots of Christian spirituality: ascetic meditation while on a desert march. Lent is all about preparing oneself to suffer alongside Christ as he walks the Via Dolorosa, and in order to prepare myself, I prayed through the rosary (Lutheran version) multiple times while using a book given to me during the St. George's Palestine of Jesus course that offers up Scripture readings for the stations of the cross. There's few better ways to get through a desert hike than ritual prayer and, especially, the Prayer of the Heart, a.k.a. the Jesus Prayer. I'll have to write a post on the Prayer of the Heart at some point, because it has been a source of strength and serenity- and sometimes necessary disturbance- for me.

Well, I got to Avdat, between Mitzpe Ramon and Sde Boker (the town near Chan Hashayarot) . Avdat was a city of the Nabateans, the ancient nomads-turned-settled townsmen who controlled the trade routes between Yemen and Gaza. This route was the path along which incense and other precious goods from southern Arabia traveled into the Roman Empire. The city is the best-preserved of the stations along the Incense Route, and includes ruins from the Nabatean period (third century BC to first century AD), the Roman period, and the Byzantine period.

The highlight for me was seeing a double baptismal font at the entrance to the earlier (fourth century) church. Here there is a cruciform adult immersion pool, but below and to the left there is a smaller immersion-sized infant pool. It is magnificently preserved to the point where it could almost be used today. More importantly, it serves as an object lesson in not only how the early church baptized infants, but in how equally incapable we are before the wisdom and power and law of almighty God. We are all of us infants, going into the waters of salvation.

It wasn't long before a bus picked me up from Avdat and got me to Chan Hashayarot. After a good night in the warm tent (yes, it's true, the desert gets freezing cold at night), I took my full day there to get up to Sde Boker.

Sde Boker is one of the most famous kibbutzim in Israel. This is where the founder of modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion, settled at the end of his political career. The 'old man' (as he was known) had a long-standing interest in taming and settling the Negev.

The house he lived in today stands exactly as he left it. It is a museum testifying to his humble lifestyle through to his final days. He has numerous statues and portraits of famous figures who offered him inspiration throughout his struggle to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine; included are Buddha, Plato, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi. Of course, what could be more impressive for me than the centerpiece of the house, his five thousand-volume library?

From there I hitched to the nearby Ben-Gurion University. Here are the graves of David Ben-Gurion and his wife Paula. I don't know why- I've mentioned before that I wasn't sure exactly what to do at the graves of the ancient Jewish sages in Tiberias- but I was strangely moved by being here. Something about the struggle of the Jewish people for a homeland, and forging it in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, and the trials of the nation of Israel since then, have left me embedded with a sense that this little country is a mirror for the marginalized peoples of the world, whatever its many faults.

Happily, just by the grave site is the entrance to Ein Avdat National Park. This park contains the Wilderness of Zin nature trail, which leads from the university to a mere kilometer from Chan Hashayarot. The hike was breathtaking, leading through a wadi teeming with life in the middle of the harsh Negev desert. There's not much to say, but check Facebook for pictures.

For those of you wondering if I'm alright, I'm now in Taba, Egypt. I hitchhiked from Chan HaShayarot to Eilat thanks to the benevolence of some black dude who didn't speak of word of English but happily gave me a ride in his pickup truck. Before crossing the border I spent two hours in Eilat's Underwater Observatory Marine Park. Baltimore has nothing on this; the observatory is 4.25 meters beneath the surface of the water and allows visitors a great view of the Gulf of Aqaba's coral reef in addition to a great aquarium on the surface. It was a great way to kill a few hours before heading into Egypt.

The Taba Hilton is definitely the magnificent facility it's made out to be. But after an aquarium and a beach resort, tomorrow it's back to the desert: returning to St. Catherine's Monastery and Mount Sinai. Hard to believe it's been three months since I was there. Quite certainly, I'm in better shape now.

Pray for these final days of Lent, that they may prepare me to confront Good Friday and accept Easter Sunday.

I'll leave you with this final picture of the desert sunrise from my succah:

Quick Update

2010-03-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

Hey all. I'm at a pizza place by a gas station waiting for a bus to the ancient trading city of Avdat, but they have wireless so I thought I'd mention that all is well. Succah in the Desert was an amazing experience. I could have spent a week there rather than two days. Highly recommended, even if the owners are total hippies. They make great vegetarian chili, though. I'll fill you in on some of the details, with pictures, later.

By the way, for those who are aware of my predicament, I'd been scheduled and booked to spent Easter in a run down little place on the Mount of Olives. That is now no longer the case! I will be back at St. George's College, which has an open room available for me. So it's back to my old stomping grounds, and I'm quite glad for it. Thank God, truly.

Well, I'm off to Avdat and two nights in the Bedouin tent of Chan Hashayarot.

Into the Desert

2010-03-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

Well I don't have much time before I head out, but I wanted to let everyone know I was safe and alive.

I've been staying in Beersheva for the past two nights with friends of the Hewerdines, Matt and Robin Umbarger and their kids Hadassah, Matan, and Gabriel. I attended a Hebrew-language Catholic Mass with them upon arrival on Sunday, which was simply spectacular. After a year of hosting Friday night Shabbat dinners in my apartment at Messiah, you can really, really hear the continuity between the Jewish liturgy and the Mass.

Yesterday I went to Tel Beersheva, which is truly impressive. I also went to site of Abraham's Well and the Museum of Bedouin Culture. Cool stuff.

Today I'm off for my first week of the desert. I'll be two nights at Succah in the Desert in small tent-like cabins to experience desert life near the Ramon Crater; then two nights at Chan Hashayarot, a Bedouin complex where I'll sleep out in their large tents. After that, on Saturday night, I'll (hopefully) be in Taba, the border in Egypt on my way back to St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai, where I'll (hopefully) have internet access.

So here begins my desert Lenten experience.