Colourful Dreamer

As I look back on our time in Palestine-Israel and Jordan with St Georges Colleges I am grateful. I am grateful it even happened. I had tried twice before and the Intifada and Covid-19 had prevented both courses from happening. This time Hamas nearly did. We left on Tuesday October 3, and the Hamas attack happened on Saturday October 7. It is hard to fathom the brutality of either side. I am grateful we were able to do the courses, spend time in this troubled land and to experience something of the anxiety, despair, frustration that even Palestinians in Israel feel. I am so grateful for Rodney, his care, his knowledge, his lectures at the College and his briefings as we bussed to our various pilgrimage sites, his wisdom, and his careful time keeping and leadership. He herded us cats really well, no mean task. And I am grateful for his book on pilgrimage. I listened to it as I waited for and sat on trains, and as I drove around Cornwall. it was my companion which invited me to reframe...

Day 4 was a return to pilgrimage mode which took us back to the Jordan to where we began on Day One of our Footsteps of Jesus Pilgrimage two weeks earlier. After a rough night I felt much better the next morning. Still a little fragile but well enough to eat some breakfast with no ill effects. And then we were off for our last day, heading back down to sea level, which is relatively quite high, and then on and on way down to the Jordan river.  We soon arrived at Bethany Beyond the Jordan which according to the early church, is the traditional site of John the Baptiser’s activity and of Jesus’ baptism. A hill nearby is the traditional site of where Elijah was taken into heaven on a fiery chariot, and before that where Aaron led the people of God across the Jordan into their promised land – which was not great news for the people already living there. All of which is why John chose to be here with his message of salvation through the forgiveness of sins. This holy place was an impo...

Sun City Campsite in the morning Day three began with me feeling a little off but those omelettes were still there. And then as I got ready the “a little off” became more serious, and my day of needing to know where the toilet was began. Sadly. We set off for the long drive back up to Amman. We stopped at the Hejaz Railway Train of Wadi Rum . This took us back to the Arab Revolt of WWI and Prince Faisal and Lawrence of Arabia. A significant part of their guerrilla campaign was the constant attacks of the railway line that seriously disrupted communication and Ottoman troop movements.   The refurbished locomotive and carriages are there to help tourists experience something of that story. It was very cool to see it. After a few hours we stopped for lunch at a place Michel described as offering the best food we would have in Jordan. I had pita bread and a tiny wee bit of meat. Not a lot of anything. At one stop we learnt about the Mosaic of Jordan. We first encountered this in ...