Winding Down

Friends,

We are in the last week of our pilgrimage. The official portion of this trip is coming to an end. We are taking final exams in our Acts of the Apostles course and in our Architecture course. I finished buying souvenirs and I am planning my last visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. All of these things are going on in preparation to leave the Holy Land. I am think about my own extended trip to Europe after this. So you can continue to follow my progress a little bit more.

I hope that I am a better man from being on this trip. I have learned much more about the world by coming to its center. Jerusalem is truly the center of the world for Jews first and also for Christians. I recommend to you all to visit the Holy Land someday in the not too distant future. I assure that I have never feared for my safety on this trip neither in Israel nor in the West Bank. Politically, this land is in turmoil, and it is such a said story especially for the Christians here. 40% of the Christian population since the second Intifada have left mostly because of the lack of jobs. This is something that we ought not hide from. We should be concerned about the problems on the ground here and elsewhere in the world where people suffer, at least because these problems motivate many people to immigrate to our country.

About my faith, I have learned that religion is a “we-thing” (but not a wee thing). Many of my everyday struggles are not merely my struggles. Rather, we all struggle basically no matter what we do. This doesn’t make the struggle less personal. In the Holy Land, history is lived communally. The past is very much alive here. This is very different from our sense of history, which holds in us the sense that each generation, each individual must strive in a way that is not only new, but totally unique in relation to what came before. We are not to be so individualistic, lest we find ourselves isolated.

And if we know our history as these people do, we see that those things which make us different are actually inter-dependant. So we are really so alike to one another as coheirs of the past.

We went to the place where the arch of the covenant stayed for some time after it was abandoned by the Philistines. It's one of my favorite passages in scripture when David start dancing like wild in front of the arc of the covenant. Hey I'm tired so I might of confused a couple passages there. But both of these things came up on our Sunday tour, our cold, rainy Sunday.

Today, some excavations around or under (I'm not sure) the Temple Mount were just begun. This seems controversial amongst the Palestinians. There seems a fear that archaelogical findings could be used as a pretext for seizing the Muslim controlled Temple Mount, where the beautiful Dome of the Rock is as well as the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

God Bless You!