From the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane

 I'm writing today from the hotel. The rest of the group is in the old city visiting the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Yes, I managed to catch the flu! I'm insistent upon losing only one day, and since we're so close to the old city I'll find my way to these places on my own, later in the trip. For now I'm drinking massive amounts of fluids and have slept most of the day. One of the pediatricians on the trip hooked me up with some tamiflu. If you haven't done so, get a flu shot!

Yesterday's trek, if you can call it that (everything is so compact), began at the Damascus Gate of the old city. Iyad explained, artfully, just enough to engage us, but not so much as to overwhelm us, the difference among the principal time periods which shaped both the architecture and the religious expressions of Jerusalem: 1st century (Roman) 4th-5th (Byzantine), and 11th-12th (Crusades). We walked, briefly, into the old city and exited on the Nablus Road ending up at St. George's Cathedral. Stunning! From there we met our bus, and following lunch, we gathered on top of Mount Scopus to get our bearings, and to appreciate once again how small the whole place actually is. I imagined a big city, but in fact, it's quite small, and during Jesus's time, of course, it was even more condensed.

Just east of Mount Scopus we stopped again to look east, and to see the dramatic beauty of the Judean desert, and also, to see Jewish settlements. In that part of the West Bank there really is only one section of hilltops without settlements. Who knows how long that will remain.

From there the bus took us a short ride to the Mount of Olives, and standing there, looking west, we could see the old city and get our bearings from a different perspective.

The mosaic in front of the altar at the "Teardrop Church" which is
about half-way from the Mount of Olives to the Garden of Gethsemane.

Then began the palm Sunday walk. We descended steeply to the Garden of Gethsemane, except for one important stop along the way, the Church of the Dominus Flevit (meaning "the Lord wept"). The current church was built in the 1950s, but the original one was supposedly built upon the rock where Jesus had wept over Jerusalem. It was extremely powerful to read from the gospels Jesus lament over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41 and Matthew 23:37-39), and to sit inside of a church where the central image is a mosaic on the altar of a hen gathering her chicks under wings. Of course I told the story of "chicks on a stick" for children in the Palm Sunday procession back home (taken from Thomas Mousin and from Gertrude Muller's book, To Dance with God.)

Just inside the garden of Gethsemane

The Garden of Gethsemane itself is does indeed have some of the world's oldest olive trees, three of them have been scientifically dated to be over 2000 years old, making them witnesses to whatever biblical events occurred there. The Church of All Nations, also known as the Basilica of Agony, is a 1920s era shrine to mosaics! Unbelievable. The church was designed by Antonio Barluzzi, and the seals of the 12 nations which financed the project are represented on the ceiling, in mosaics, naturally.

We returned to the hotel late in the afternoon. At 5:00 a friend of Iyad's, a Palestinian Muslim, spoke to us about Islam, a sort of Islam for Dummies lecture. He was entertaining and passionate. At one point somebody asked him about what it's like to live in East Jerusalem, in 2013.
His response, even more animated than his discussion of Islam,
helped us to hear, maybe for the first time (I'm not sure how much
my travel companions have heard from Palestinians...we certainly
don't get the story from our media in the U.S.) the pain
of occupation, and the clear desire for a two state solution.

One of the olive trees that is over 2000 years old.