Can anything good come from Nazareth?
Last night I walked out onto the roof of our building, and the scene was comical: Nine guys were all arrayed along one edge of the roof, their faces lit by the glow of their computer screens. It's the basic story of my life - every single guy here can access the wireless internet except me. Nobody can figure out why, but neither my laptop nor my iTouch is able to pick up any wireless signal at all, but all of the other guys' computers are just fine (so long as they precariously situated themselves along the edge of the roof). I've accepted the fact that I won't be able to get online during my brief stay in Nazareth. If I can't survive three days without the internet, then I'm simply not fit for the priesthood.
So it's Friday afternoon right now, and I'm sitting on that same rooftop, in the shade of the structure next to me. Today was the first day that felt legitimately hot. The weather couldn't possibly be any better, and even the locals are surprised. This time of year is normally what they call the "early spring". Recent rains, combined with several cloudless days, has made everything around us burst into a beautiful array of green. Galilee definitely has a different look and feel than most of the rest of Israel. To make it even better, I'm sipping on a real Pepsi while I'm typing this! Add that to the list of reasons why I like Israel better than Palestine. After having gone a month living in a place that doesn't sell Pepsi anywhere, these last few days I've enjoyed the availability of my favorite drink. It doesn't even taste any different than the kind I drink back home (but since the ingredients are listed entirely in Hebrew, I have no way of knowing exactly what might be different about this).
This morning was our long-awaited Mass in the grotto of the Basilica of the Annunciation. Well, it was long-awaited by me because of the epic significance of its location, and because that's where I would be giving my reflection. Historians tells us that the grotto and its surroundings were turned into a worship space sometime in the first century, and early sources referred to it as "the house of the Virgin Mary". The first Byzantine church was built on the site in the fifth century, and then in the 12th century the Crusaders built a church over the ruins of the Byzantine church. The grotto is a curious-looking structure situated in the middle of an enormous modern basilica - a first century stone cave surrounded by twentieth century architecture (the current basilica was constructed in 1969). Like the lights (circa 1988) that were affixed onto Wrigley Field (circa 1916), it's always a challenge to make the modern and the ancient blend together... but the incorporation of the new basilica to the 2000-year-old house of Mary was tastefully done in my opinion. I offered up the Mass for Maggie Belville, who today became the second member of the Big Six to reach the Age of Reason - that's right, today is her seventh birthday!
Having gotten my reflection out of the way, I boarded the bus with a light heart - no more responsibilities! Our first stop was the nearby town of Cana, which is famous for having been the location of Jesus' first miracle. He and his mother and his disciples were at a wedding - and Jewish weddings at that time typically lasted for a week. Three days into the festivities, the biggest social gaffe imaginable happened... they ran out of wine. When Mary caught wind of this, she found her way over to the men's side of the celebration. One can easily imagine a mother motioning her son over to talk to her. "Um... Jesus? They're out of wine." Jesus initially balked at the idea of doing anything about it, because he said that his time had not yet come. He knew that as soon as he worked his first miracle, his public ministry will have officially started, and then the clock would be ticking down to his crucifixion. But upon Mary's insistence, Jesus went ahead and saved the day for everyone at the wedding - he converted six stone jars' worth of water into fine tasting wine. (You can see why this is a miracle that we Catholics like... that's 180 gallons of wine! You know what they say - wherever there are four Catholics, you'll always find a fifth.)
Cana is very near Nazareth. As our bus drove there, we never left any urban area. We pulled off in the middle of an ordinary neighborhood, and the church marking the supposed site of the wedding was situated in an alleyway. A Byzantine church had been built there in the fourth century, but like everything else around here, it was destroyed in the seventh century - not by Muslims this time, but by the invading Persians. The Crusaders built a church of their own commemorating the miracle, but it was in a very different spot. Finally the Franciscans built the church that currently stands there in 1880. Like I said, variations on a theme.
Also near that spot was a church that's built over the supposed location of St. Bartholomew's house. Bartholomew, also known as Nathaniel, first showed up in John's gospel immediately before he told the story of the wedding at Cana. Nathaniel was sitting under a tree when Philip came up to him excitedly saying that they'd found the Messiah - Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth. "Nazareth?" Nathaniel snorted. "Can anything good come from there?" The main reason he said this was probably because of the miniscule size of the nearby town - about three hundred people at that time. Telling someone from Cana that the Messiah was from Nazareth would be like telling someone from Aurora that we'd found savior of mankind, and he lives in Big Rock.
One of the things I was excited about doing when I got there was to buy myself some small bottles of Cana wine, which had been one of the few things that I'd been planning on buying before I came here. What better gift can there be for a newlywed couple than wine from Cana? So I found in a gift shop on the site a nice box of four small bottles, and it is now my intention to give those to the first four couples whose weddings I celebrate as a deacon or priest. And it looks like one of those couples will actually be somebody whom I know - last week, I was contacted on Facebook by my old friend Jackie Chmielarz, and she was asking if I could preside at her wedding this coming fall. She's in luck; I'll be a deacon by August! I don't have too many friends left who still aren't married, so that will be a treat. I expect to be doing many more baptisms for my friends than weddings.
After Cana, we went to a site about two miles from Nazareth called Sephoris. This was the first site we'd visited about which I'd never heard. It turned out that this site was purely of archaeological significance. Sephoris was a fairly major town that served as the capital of Galilee for a few years. The inhabitants of that town wisely chose not to take part in the Jewish revolt of 66-70 AD, so the Romans spared the town. As a result, Sephoris retained its Jewish culture and identity long after most of the rest of Israel had lost it. The ruins of this site were extensive, and we spent some time strolling between what was once a bustling city but was now a collection of dilapidated stone walls. I've seen so many ruins over these last few days that I can't help but wonder what any place in which I've lived will look like 2000 years from now. Will tourists one day walk through the remains of Mundelein Seminary, learning about how men were formed for the Catholic priesthood in the 20th and 21st centuries?
Any biblical connection for Sephoris would be purely speculative. One tradition says that Mary's parents, Joachim and Anne, were from that town - so therefore Mary was born there. Because most of the major building up of Sephoris occurred in the first decades of the first century, it is also theorized that Joseph helped work on that, seeing as how he was a skilled carpenter who lived only an hour's walk away. In later years, perhaps Jesus and Joseph worked on construction projects in that town together. All of this falls under the "it would be fun to imagine that..." category, of course.
But it is still fun, because none of it is infeasible. I'd like to think that the young carpenter Joseph may have first met Mary and her family in Sephoris while she was still a little girl. It's kind of like how it would be fun to imagine that Mary was the author of the epistle of the Hebrews, since nobody knows who actually wrote that. Luke certainly depicts Mary as having a pretty good knowledge of Old Testament prophecies, which are then strung together just as expertly in Hebrews as they are in Mary's Magnificat. If you read Hebrews through the lenses of "what if Mary wrote this?" it makes the whole letter come alive in a different way.
A similar "wouldn't it be cool if..." scenario arises when one studies the guest list of a certain hotel in Paris in 1887. A pilgrimage group from Lisieux was on its way to Rome, and one of the families in this group was the Martin family - Louis and his daughters Thérèse and Celine. This was the famous trip that St. Thérèse took to Rome when she was just 14, where she boldly asked Pope Leo for permission to enter the Carmelite convent at such a young age. In a letter to one of her older sisters, Thérèse describes how enthralled she was with the elevator in that hotel - something she had never seen before. She writes about how she rode the elevator up and down like the gleeful girl that she was (this was certainly the source of a theology that appeared in her later writings in which she describes how the Holy Spirit can lift us up to God "like an elevator"). Anyway, historians later discovered that one of the guests registered in that hotel on the same night was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. So I'd like to imagine the greatest saint of modern times standing in the elevator, when the father of modern atheism gets into the elevator with her. She smiles at him and says, "Bonjour, monsieur."
We got back in the early afternoon, and I've been taking it easy since then. Weather like this just makes one want to lean back and relax. Tomorrow morning, we're checking out of this lovely convent and moving on eastward. Hopefully when we get to the Pilgerhaus tomorrow night, I'll be able to access the internet there, and I can post all of these entries. Until then, please know that even if I can't communicate with any of you, you're all in my prayers!
So it's Friday afternoon right now, and I'm sitting on that same rooftop, in the shade of the structure next to me. Today was the first day that felt legitimately hot. The weather couldn't possibly be any better, and even the locals are surprised. This time of year is normally what they call the "early spring". Recent rains, combined with several cloudless days, has made everything around us burst into a beautiful array of green. Galilee definitely has a different look and feel than most of the rest of Israel. To make it even better, I'm sipping on a real Pepsi while I'm typing this! Add that to the list of reasons why I like Israel better than Palestine. After having gone a month living in a place that doesn't sell Pepsi anywhere, these last few days I've enjoyed the availability of my favorite drink. It doesn't even taste any different than the kind I drink back home (but since the ingredients are listed entirely in Hebrew, I have no way of knowing exactly what might be different about this).
This morning was our long-awaited Mass in the grotto of the Basilica of the Annunciation. Well, it was long-awaited by me because of the epic significance of its location, and because that's where I would be giving my reflection. Historians tells us that the grotto and its surroundings were turned into a worship space sometime in the first century, and early sources referred to it as "the house of the Virgin Mary". The first Byzantine church was built on the site in the fifth century, and then in the 12th century the Crusaders built a church over the ruins of the Byzantine church. The grotto is a curious-looking structure situated in the middle of an enormous modern basilica - a first century stone cave surrounded by twentieth century architecture (the current basilica was constructed in 1969). Like the lights (circa 1988) that were affixed onto Wrigley Field (circa 1916), it's always a challenge to make the modern and the ancient blend together... but the incorporation of the new basilica to the 2000-year-old house of Mary was tastefully done in my opinion. I offered up the Mass for Maggie Belville, who today became the second member of the Big Six to reach the Age of Reason - that's right, today is her seventh birthday!
Having gotten my reflection out of the way, I boarded the bus with a light heart - no more responsibilities! Our first stop was the nearby town of Cana, which is famous for having been the location of Jesus' first miracle. He and his mother and his disciples were at a wedding - and Jewish weddings at that time typically lasted for a week. Three days into the festivities, the biggest social gaffe imaginable happened... they ran out of wine. When Mary caught wind of this, she found her way over to the men's side of the celebration. One can easily imagine a mother motioning her son over to talk to her. "Um... Jesus? They're out of wine." Jesus initially balked at the idea of doing anything about it, because he said that his time had not yet come. He knew that as soon as he worked his first miracle, his public ministry will have officially started, and then the clock would be ticking down to his crucifixion. But upon Mary's insistence, Jesus went ahead and saved the day for everyone at the wedding - he converted six stone jars' worth of water into fine tasting wine. (You can see why this is a miracle that we Catholics like... that's 180 gallons of wine! You know what they say - wherever there are four Catholics, you'll always find a fifth.)
Cana is very near Nazareth. As our bus drove there, we never left any urban area. We pulled off in the middle of an ordinary neighborhood, and the church marking the supposed site of the wedding was situated in an alleyway. A Byzantine church had been built there in the fourth century, but like everything else around here, it was destroyed in the seventh century - not by Muslims this time, but by the invading Persians. The Crusaders built a church of their own commemorating the miracle, but it was in a very different spot. Finally the Franciscans built the church that currently stands there in 1880. Like I said, variations on a theme.
Also near that spot was a church that's built over the supposed location of St. Bartholomew's house. Bartholomew, also known as Nathaniel, first showed up in John's gospel immediately before he told the story of the wedding at Cana. Nathaniel was sitting under a tree when Philip came up to him excitedly saying that they'd found the Messiah - Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth. "Nazareth?" Nathaniel snorted. "Can anything good come from there?" The main reason he said this was probably because of the miniscule size of the nearby town - about three hundred people at that time. Telling someone from Cana that the Messiah was from Nazareth would be like telling someone from Aurora that we'd found savior of mankind, and he lives in Big Rock.
One of the things I was excited about doing when I got there was to buy myself some small bottles of Cana wine, which had been one of the few things that I'd been planning on buying before I came here. What better gift can there be for a newlywed couple than wine from Cana? So I found in a gift shop on the site a nice box of four small bottles, and it is now my intention to give those to the first four couples whose weddings I celebrate as a deacon or priest. And it looks like one of those couples will actually be somebody whom I know - last week, I was contacted on Facebook by my old friend Jackie Chmielarz, and she was asking if I could preside at her wedding this coming fall. She's in luck; I'll be a deacon by August! I don't have too many friends left who still aren't married, so that will be a treat. I expect to be doing many more baptisms for my friends than weddings.
After Cana, we went to a site about two miles from Nazareth called Sephoris. This was the first site we'd visited about which I'd never heard. It turned out that this site was purely of archaeological significance. Sephoris was a fairly major town that served as the capital of Galilee for a few years. The inhabitants of that town wisely chose not to take part in the Jewish revolt of 66-70 AD, so the Romans spared the town. As a result, Sephoris retained its Jewish culture and identity long after most of the rest of Israel had lost it. The ruins of this site were extensive, and we spent some time strolling between what was once a bustling city but was now a collection of dilapidated stone walls. I've seen so many ruins over these last few days that I can't help but wonder what any place in which I've lived will look like 2000 years from now. Will tourists one day walk through the remains of Mundelein Seminary, learning about how men were formed for the Catholic priesthood in the 20th and 21st centuries?
Any biblical connection for Sephoris would be purely speculative. One tradition says that Mary's parents, Joachim and Anne, were from that town - so therefore Mary was born there. Because most of the major building up of Sephoris occurred in the first decades of the first century, it is also theorized that Joseph helped work on that, seeing as how he was a skilled carpenter who lived only an hour's walk away. In later years, perhaps Jesus and Joseph worked on construction projects in that town together. All of this falls under the "it would be fun to imagine that..." category, of course.
But it is still fun, because none of it is infeasible. I'd like to think that the young carpenter Joseph may have first met Mary and her family in Sephoris while she was still a little girl. It's kind of like how it would be fun to imagine that Mary was the author of the epistle of the Hebrews, since nobody knows who actually wrote that. Luke certainly depicts Mary as having a pretty good knowledge of Old Testament prophecies, which are then strung together just as expertly in Hebrews as they are in Mary's Magnificat. If you read Hebrews through the lenses of "what if Mary wrote this?" it makes the whole letter come alive in a different way.
A similar "wouldn't it be cool if..." scenario arises when one studies the guest list of a certain hotel in Paris in 1887. A pilgrimage group from Lisieux was on its way to Rome, and one of the families in this group was the Martin family - Louis and his daughters Thérèse and Celine. This was the famous trip that St. Thérèse took to Rome when she was just 14, where she boldly asked Pope Leo for permission to enter the Carmelite convent at such a young age. In a letter to one of her older sisters, Thérèse describes how enthralled she was with the elevator in that hotel - something she had never seen before. She writes about how she rode the elevator up and down like the gleeful girl that she was (this was certainly the source of a theology that appeared in her later writings in which she describes how the Holy Spirit can lift us up to God "like an elevator"). Anyway, historians later discovered that one of the guests registered in that hotel on the same night was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. So I'd like to imagine the greatest saint of modern times standing in the elevator, when the father of modern atheism gets into the elevator with her. She smiles at him and says, "Bonjour, monsieur."
We got back in the early afternoon, and I've been taking it easy since then. Weather like this just makes one want to lean back and relax. Tomorrow morning, we're checking out of this lovely convent and moving on eastward. Hopefully when we get to the Pilgerhaus tomorrow night, I'll be able to access the internet there, and I can post all of these entries. Until then, please know that even if I can't communicate with any of you, you're all in my prayers!