August 22, 2002

A long, strange trip which could have been far more eventful given our start on Wednesday in Boston - apparently, we had cancelled our tickets without knowing it. A little bit of bellyaching convinced them otherwise, and after a twelve-hour layover in Amsterdam (enough time to enjoy the Van Gogh Museum - and sneak some shut-eye in their cafeteria), we arrived in Amman at 3:00 in the morning.

We made our way (eventually) to the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge to cross into the West Bank. We had been reading about the numbers of International Solidarity Movement folks whose non-violent activities coordinated between Israelis and Palestinians had brought unfavorable attention on the Israeli military's tactics - enough so that many of them (as well as development, relief, and human rights workers) have been turned away by Israeli security at the borders. And so, as always, we approached the bridge with some trepidation - needlessly, it turned out.

Our biggest problem was the giggling security girls who pulled us aside and asked us a few questions - they spent most of those few minutes being embarrassed about their halting English. "What do you do here?"

"I am a priest." (the nuanced differences between priest and pastor are lost on non-native speakers)

"You don't have a church in America?" (too much detail to go into, reminder to pick battles)

"No." (some giggles)

And so it went. We shared a taxi to Jerusalem with an American family whose roots are in Ramallah, back for a visit - though probably not to Ramallah, which has been under constant curfew for a while now.

We checked into our favorite youth hostel, bustling with ISM folks, and begging for a short story to be written about it - the French woman decorating her hands and arms with henna for hours on end, the Japanese peace activist monk who has spent the last ten years in this place walking everywhere - a few weeks ago, from Jenin (in the northern West Bank) to Eilat (in the south, by the Red Sea).

Author William Dalrymple sharing from his book From the Holy Mountain.

We made it just in time to the lecture we hoped to attend at Sabeel Theological Center. British author William Dalrymple spoke about the writing of his book From the Holy Mountain, an account of his 1994 travels in the footsteps of a sixth century pilgrim named St. John Moschos who traveled through what's now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt. A thoroughly Christian region, the Middle East in Moschos's time supported thriving monasteries, churches, and holy sites. Fifteen centuries later, the landscape is very different, shaped notably by the rise of Islam and, centuries later, the rise in nationalism. From the Holy Mountain illustrates forlorn Christian sites in Turkey, that land of Saint Paul's ministry, whose nationalistic Young Turk movement cleansed the country of its significant Christian population during the Armenian genocide in 1915. It brings us to Mar Saba in the desert hills outside Bethlehem, inhabited by a few salty, opinionated monks clinging to their ancient tradition (and, in one case, odd opinions about freemasons). We end in Egypt, where monasticism is experiencing a renaissance; Pope Shenudah I of the Coptic Orthodox Church even has encouraged a revival of solitary hermeticism, reminiscent of the Desert Fathers during the first several centuries after Christ. The account is alternately uplifting and (more often) distressing, but always fascinating and entertaining, and we were wowed by the chance to meet and hear its author.