Colourful Dreamer

After lunch back at the college for lunch, we were bused up Mount Zion – The Western Hill. Here we come near the end of holy week, with the last supper, trail and denial. First we went to the Cenaculum or the Upper Room – or at least a building situated on the traditional site of the upper room. Tradition situates this site with where Mary may have stayed/lived. Next door is the Dormition Abbey - Hagia Maria – an alternative site for the Virgin Mary's death. We tried to find this later but my map reading skills deserted me. Honestly, we started out from where we wanted to go, found our way into the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, wandered around for awhile trying to work out where I wanted to go, and then saw it back where we started, too late to even try to go there. Bonnie had had enough by then anyway. Fair enough. So back to the Upper Room. Over the centuries this has been a church and a mosque, and currently the site is within a Jewish School. It is a much more contested s...

Day nine – the penultimate day – was a long and hot day. The morning began with a quick bus trip up the Mount of Olives to the Chapel of the Ascension. The first place Christians gathered to remember the Ascension was a bit further down the hill, in a cave associated with the memory of Jesus. This would have provided a safer place to gather and worship in the time of Roman persecution. We would meet another cave down at Gethsemane later that morning which served a similar purpose for Jesus. This cave was integrated into the Constantinian Church of Eleona, which is now part of the Pater Noster. More about that soon. After the Edict of Milan by the Roman Emperors Constantine and Licinius in 313 made it possible for Christians to freely worship the site of the Ascension moved up the hill a little to where the Chapel now sits. One tradition has the first church being built between AD 384–390 around Christ's last footprints. Another later tradition has this church, and the Pater Nos...

Day eight began with a lecture from Rodney as he helped us begin our journey into and through Holy Week. These last three days were all about the places and stories of Holy Week, and he invited us to reflect on our own experience of that as we journeyed through this time. Then we boarded the bus, assumed our normal seats, and headed off through the Separation Wall to Bethany, a bustling Palestinian city struggling under occupation. Here John’s version of Holy Week begins with the raising of Lazarus. Here we begin the walk to the crucifixion. We walked up the steep street to a small entrance and steep steps down into a small antechamber. In the floor are cut steps down into a tomb that tradition teaches us was Lazarus’s first resting place. It is not as it was in Lazarus’ time as the Crusader Church built over the top resulted in masonry blocking much of the original tomb. The entrance we entered by is a “new” entrance – the original came from the Byzantine and then Crusader church. ...