Pilgrimage Reflection
Anneli Meyer Korn
Foreword
It is hard to stand here and read out the pilgrimage reflection that I started writing about three months ago, given the war that is now being waged by Israel.
Like many, I have been reading the news reports and commentaries.
The college of St. George, the host and source for our pilgrimage, states on their web page: “The pilgrim group we had with us when the war broke out were able to have an adapted pilgrimage and left the land early and safely.” They have cancelled all remaining pilgrimages for this year and are, essentially, shut down.
On October 14, Adam L Silverman wrote: “we need to make sure we do not conflate all Israelis with the Netanyahu governments that have run the country for 13 of the last 15 years, just as we must do the same thing in separating the Gazans from Hamas.”
Pilgrimage
When father Edmund announced the year of pilgrimage, my original reaction was one of near dismay.
I grew up in New England, so the word Pilgrim invokes images of those early New England settlers - and my sympathies lie more with the character of Wednesday Addams in the Addams family values movie.
My second image of Pilgrims brings up even more dark historic images of my European ancestors, whose great Crusades were supposedly to make Holy Land pilgrimages safe for Europeans, but became 200 years of bloody warfare whose actual objective was to capture territory, often involving outright slaughter of innocents along the way.
And yet, I love the hymn “He who would valiant be”, where every last line is “To be a pilgrim”. I loved the proposed pilgrimages- to the International District, to the Wing Luke museum, to Bainbridge Island, and Minidoka.
Oh, and Israel- my husband has family in Israel and we were very overdue for a visit. My husband had been to Israel several times but I had not.
I’m going to take just a brief moment here to give some context: my husband Peter is Jewish. His husband’s parents, who were both extraordinary people, passed away over twenty years ago. His mother Eva was born in Bratislava, which was then part of Czechoslovakia; she and her younger brother Dov both avoided being taken when the German soldiers came, but both were eventually betrayed and sent to concentration camps. Their parents were killed in the camps. Both went to Israel after the war; Dov stayed, but Eva did not.
I will also mention here that my first serious boyfriend’s father was a Dutch Jew and also a survivor of the holocaust, a child hidden by Christians, and the only one of his family to live.
I say this to demonstrate my connections with survivors; I have, firsthand, heard them tell their stories, seen, with my own eyes, the tattoos on their arms, and witnessed the long-term effects of the holocaust on the people, their families, their lives.
A few years ago we visited Prague and I stood in the Pinkas synagogue, which is the Memorial for the Victims of the Shoah, where the names of the holocaust victims from Prague and surrounding towns are inscribed on the walls, and I wept. The lettering is small- less than two inches high- and the 80,000 names cover the entirety of the walls, yet this represents only the victims from that small area.
Add to this, my Godmother gave me, for a birthday gift, Golda Meir’s autobiography; I think I had turned 14. I am much more a fan of fiction and not nonfiction, so the book was quite a slog for me, so I read it more out of a sense of duty than curiosity. One of my very close childhood friends was Jewish, and when I once stayed with her for a weekend, I went to Hebrew school on Saturday and read the storybooks that they had for children- unlike the Bible stories awe had in Sunday school, these were contemporary stories about being honest, being a good neighbor, and doing mitzvahs as the examples of the principled life that a modern-day American Jew was expected to lead.
These experiences have had a deep and fundamental effect on how I reacted to some of what we saw in Israel.
Israel
I have travelled a lot- to Europe, many times, including living in Stockholm for a year as an exchange student when I was 18; to China and to India, and one precious day in Japan. I’m used to that feeling of disorientation when the streets and signs and basic architecture is different and somewhat disconcerting, letting you know that you are most definitely not home.
When I arrived, my first impression of Israel was that it felt so much like California. The trees and the flowers were not exotic; they were familiar, even welcoming. The climate was not so welcoming; it was impossibly hot, dry, and the daily events of the pilgrimage were very challenging, as our guide set a fast pace.
I learned so very much during those two weeks- about the Palestine of Jesus, about my fellow pilgrims, about the issues of modern Israel, and about myself.
Having a demanding daily schedule helped me find a sense of self, purpose, and self-discipline that I so often lack. Our days were packed full, and I could spend weeks talking about all that I saw and learned and felt while on this pilgrimage.
I learned, for instance, that when looking at old Roman sites, we use the word Amphitheater incorrectly: unless the seating is in a full circle, its simply a theater.
I think that we all came away with a wealth of experiences, new favorites, and special moments. I came away with a new-found love of mosaics. I had never been in an Eastern Orthodox Church before, and the delicious scent of the honey-infused candles - I’ve brought some here to share- brings a smile to my face and a sense of the peace and beauty.
I have a small bottle of water gathered at Caesarea Phillipi, where water wells up from underground springs to form a major tributary to the Jordan river- which is not chilly and cold, and certainly not wide. I also have a little packet of sand from the beach at Tel Aviv, sand so soft and silky and amazing that it did not seem natural.
Our pilgrimage was, vaguely, a circle: on our first day we walked down into old Jerusalem and visited the Holy Sepulcher, and near the end of our pilgrimage we were on the roof of the Holy Sepulcher for the last Stations of the Cross. The next day we visited the Church of the Visitation- a fitting start to learn about Jesus’ life- and on the way there we drove so close to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the holocaust, that we could see the building from the bus. This was distinctly unsettling to me: here we were, newly in our adventure, still learning each others names and on the way to visit the place where the wondrous Magnificat was first spoken: My soul doth magnify the Lord…
Oh, and when you are there and know how far apart things are, and realize the amount of journeying that Mary did while pregnant- from Nazareth, to visit Elizabeth in Ein Karem where she stayed for three months, and then back to Nazareth, before the trip to Bethlehem.
We went by bus to visit the wilderness- the wilderness where Jesus spent forty days of temptation before he began his ministry- and on the way our guide asked us to think about how we each envisioned “wilderness”- which, to me, thinking in non-biblical terms, was deep forest lands, swamps, and tangles of vines, not the the arid, near-barren, rocky wilderness where we pilgrims sat and meditated.
There were so many places we visited, I cannot list them all, but time after time we witnessed the layers upon layers that are pervasive in that ancient land: we enter a modern structure, and below that is an older structure; below that, a Roman layer, and below that, an even older house, or holy place. Kyle spoke about the convent in Nazareth; there under the current building, down below the basement and through a door marked “Excavations” and down another stairway, there is a transverse lintel stone that was above a water source, where for years buckets were lowered on ropes and drawn up again- so many times that the rope wore grooves in the lintel, deeper than my fingers- and that was above the old church, which is above the layer where the ancient house lies, the house that may have been the dwelling place of the holy family. Many, many places had these layers.
Our guide, Rodney, told us that while we have called Joseph and Jesus “carpenters”, the term is better translated as “artisan”. When Jesus was a child, Herod’s son Phillip chose Banias to be his capital- and to build this capital, it is likely that artisans from Nazareth were called to assist, so Joseph may well have worked there.
Others have told you about visiting the Aida refugee camp. This started as a group of tents in 1950. It is a piece of land, 7/10 of a kilometer, housing over 7000 residents in multistory buildings that have inadequate infrastructure. Kyle told you the story that our guide related- that the refugees still have the keys to their houses, and hope to return; there is even a key pictured on the gate.
I heard my fellow pilgrims respond to this story, and the image of the key, with sympathy and honest righteous indignation at the displacement of these Palestinians, and their continued mistreatment by the government of Israel, but my mind was elsewhere: I was remembering the story that my mother-in-law Eva told.
When the Russian soldiers liberated the camp she was in - Terezin, also called Theresienstadt- she sewed herself a blouse made from bedsheets so she would have something decent to wear. She travelled back to her home city and to the apartment where she had lived with her family, only to find other people living there. All their furniture and possessions had been taken by others, and certainly no one offered to give anything back to her, though she was only gone for a few years, where these people had been exiled for many, many more years.
This filled me with great sadness, almost despair, as we walked through the narrow streets of Aida. We ate lunch there, and the warmth and kindness of our hosts helped assuage my sorrow. There, similar to the Princess Basma Center, there are many children with disabilities; at Aida, they were struggling to get funding to start a school for children with disabilities, a cause that I deeply support. My husband was able to bring Amazon Fire tablets with him, which we donated to the Princess Basma Center.
Turning to more joyous subjects:
My favorite church, by far, was the Crusader Emmaus Church in Abu Ghosh. We went to that church on our last afternoon, after walking the Way of the Cross in the morning, carrying a wooden cross down into the old city of Jerusalem and visiting the stations of the cross. This church was surrounded by peaceful, beautiful gardens. We stepped inside from the oppressive heat and over-bright sun, into the coolness of a great stone church, which is decorated with frescoes of saints and holy figures, made ghostly because their faces had been obliterated by vandals. The acoustics of this church were spectacular- no need for microphones or amplifiers during our communion service there -and to my great joy, we sang a hymn set to the tune of Hyfrodol, whose descant is irresistible for me.
At the first service I attended at St. Peter’s after my return, the gospel reading was the story of the transfiguration. In Israel, we went to Mount Tabor and heard the story, but it was hearing the gospel reading again, when standing here, that gave me a feeling of deeper understanding, almost like double vision. I knew just how high and steep and dry and rough that mountain was, and what it took for Jesus, with Peter, James, and John, to climb it. No longer sweating in the heat and sun, and breathing that mountaintop air, I could truly grasp what it must have been like to the three disciples to have their beloved rabbi suddenly begin to radiate holy light, and for both Moses and Elijah- those revered figures representing Gods laws and prophecy- appear.
Final Thoughts
We have been back from our pilgrimage for months now, but it truly was a life-changing time. I have my honey candles, my many pictures, my sand, and my water, to help me remember our time there.
I still read fiction more readily and easily than I read nonfiction. I have a few favorite authors whose stories and resonate with me. Lois MacMaster Bujold wrote a set of fantasy books where she delved very deeply into theology, envisioning a world with a five-fold view of god; perhaps I’ll share some of the beauty I have found in her parables with you. But today I want to close with words written by the British novelist Rosamunde Pilcher, in her book Winter Solstice, where a minister is speaking to a man whose young daughter had died:
“I hope so much that no one has sought to try and comfort you by saying that God must have needed Francesca more than you. I would find it impossible to worship a God who deliberately stole my child from me. ….
Thirty years in the ministry has taught me that the one thing we should never say when a young person dies is ‘It is the will of God.’ We simply don’t know enough to say that. I am in fact convinced that when Francesca died in that terrible accident, God’s was the first heart to break.”
In this way, I know that when the every time there is violence between Israel and the Palestinians, God’s heart is the first to break- each time and every time.
Let us pray:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.