Friday night from Jericho

Today was a day of contrasts for me. We left Tiberias this morning and went to the Church of the Beatitudes. This was the first morning when we were with a whole crowd of other people. At the sites we've been visiting, we haven't been overwhelmed by people but this morning there were more people than normal. Yet that made it somewhat holy for me. We read the scripture passage on the Beatitudes in English and were surrounded by other groups reading in different languages. It was a beautiful experience. And when I went in this church, tears welled up in my eyes. I'm not certain why but I think part of it was that in this church, I really felt the power of people's prayers. I know that thousands of people have prayed at the other sites we have visited but in this place the urge to just sit and be was overwhelming so I just sat for awhile and prayed. It was an incredibly moving experience for me.

As we left Tiberias, we drove south toward Jericho. And that is where the contrasts came in. The land is very different. This is a much more brown and dry area although there are springs in Jericho. We had to go through checkpoints because we were entering the West Bank - first an Israeli checkpoint and then later an checkpoint controlled by the Palestinian authority. I have learned a lot about this area and I learn more every day I am on this trip. We passed Israeli settlements, surrounded by barbed wire, that are in the midst of Palestinian land, settlements that are lush and green because of the amount of water they get, yet just outside the borders of the settlement, other people don't have access to the same amount of water. We heard someone say on our trip that much of the fight in the land is over water and not over religion. I thought that was an interesting concept and I saw it in action here.

We passed checkpoints; we rode by the no-man's land between Israel and Jordan with mines still in between the fences even though Israel and Jordan have made peace. It reminds you of what a fragile peace exists in this land. On the day earlier in our trip when we visited the Lebanese border, I remembered visiting Lebanon years and years ago and looking over at Israel just as we looked over at Lebanon through a locked border crossing. There were times in the years since I visited Lebanon that the borders were open between Israel and Lebanon but that time is no more. Maybe in some far, far distant past, there was peace in this region and and all the borders were open but that time is no more. This trip has given me a greater awareness of borders and the freedom - or lack of freedom - to cross borders than ever before.

During some of the discussions on this trip we have talked about other borders - the border between the mundane and the holy. The trip has reminded me that the mundane is often holy even if we don't always realize it. And the holy encompasses our whole lives, our whole existence, even though we don't always recognize the holy in our lives either. And in acknowledging the holy in our lives, I am ever reminded that the Holy One is ever present with us as we push against those borders of our lives - borders that make us acknowledge our inadequacies, borders that make us acknowlege our prejudices, borders that make us admit our lack of knowledge. The Holy One is present with us on this trip as we deal with all those borders in our lives and is helping us cross those borders into new and transformed lives.

Diana Moore