As I Wrestle With History In A City Where There's Really Not Much Else

The air is so thick with history here -- you can almost choke on it if you're not careful.

I work around the corner from the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, which is said to be where it will all start/end when the end of the world gets rolling (That's why there's so many cemeteries around it -- gotta be first in line to be resurrected you know.)

The raised area in the back is the Mount of Olives (the middle and lowest of the three towers in this picture is the Church of the Ascension, which I pass by on my short walk to lunch.) 

 I don't think about it very often though -- the air of history there tends to be more subdued, only manifesting itself in sporadic groups of tourists interrupting my path to the cafe.


 Just the other week I was at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City, waiting for a friend to get off work, when I decided to walk the 100 feet over to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of Jesus' death and burial, and hang out for a little while. It's a lot more crowded and tense than the Mount of Olives.

--Not least because the various churches represented here (Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, etc.?) can get pretty ornery about seemingly insignificant things. (Fist fights between priests of opposing factions are not altogether unheard of or shocking occurrences.)

But I guess if you devote your life to this stuff and spend the majority of your many years of existence living near and working in this one specific building, you might get pretty uptight and specific about a few things (e.g. how often the rock of Golgotha should be cleaned, to what extent the Greek Orthodox can put their weird gaudy gold candles everywhere, whether or not the Syriacs are allowed to renovate their burnt out chapel, the list goes on).

I'm currently standing on the hatch used by the church fathers to enter Jesus' tomb every once in a long, arbitrarily decided, traditionally delineated calendar tenuously agreed upon by the various churches. 

Inside that little alcove is a hole through which you can touch the rock of Golgotha, upon which Jesus was crucified and around and on top of which this church was built. That figure to the left is a priest of some variety of Orthodox (Cause no self-respecting Catholic would condone those garish bejeweled decorations) promptly stepping in for the periodic Windex-ing of the glass for viewing the rock and the wetwipe-wiping of the blessed armhole through which pilgrims can touch the rock. I felt incredibly blessed to bear witness to such a solemn and important ritual.

 Here the history is a little more palpable. There's the heavy smell of incense, the dark, germy rocks that had contact with Jesus somewhere along the line, and the cold, rough crosses carved into the stone walls by crusaders who hacked-and-slashed their way to the Holy Land and into Jerusalem so many years ago.

You feel it in the obnoxious throngs of tourists of all shapes and sizes and origins, and you feel it in the tension between the priests as they go about their meticulously structured routines and mind the strictly demarcated boundaries between denominations and sects. 



But that's just the beginning. I haven't even started on the history of Judaism and Islam in this place, and there are a couple more whole worlds of history outside the realm of religion too.

This is just a small taste of the backbone of history underlying and looming over this beautiful, complicated place. Thousands of years of Roman and Islamic and Crusader and Turkish and so many other histories overlapping and undergirding each other.

Then there are histories that define everyday life here more than any others. There is the history of Jews, filled with persecution and defiance, blood, loss, and exile in the face of an always stronger and oppressive power -- and there is the history of the Palestinians, filled with dispossession and resistance, death, fear, and pain, always at the mercy of some grander empire or ruler.

The air is thick with all of it mixed together, a thousand different stories remembered and countless lives touched and scarred forever by the past and now the present. The sour taste of endless cyclical violence and a blinding fog of irrational fears and hatreds. It fills the air and all of our lungs, and then it sits on the city, pinning it down beneath the tremendous weight of memory. 

I appreciate the history; I enjoy learning about Jesus' life and what we know about it. But I can't seem to ever be touched by it. No matter how often I walk the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Pain, the way Jesus walked under the weight of the cross, I can't seem to find meaning in it for my spirituality today. I don't get anything out of it.

I see the people around me as I walk and I can't make the disconnect. I can't find the beauty of this history because I can't see it apart from the people here now, who live with the weight of all this accumulated history on their backs day in and day out, year in and year out.

This is the history that brought about the reality of today: occupation, fear, deprivation and indignity -- and this is the history that makes the future look like more of the same: distrust, unrest, crippling stalemate and painful cycles. The accumulated weight of history keeps us in the past, and forbids us from progressing into a future of justice and peace.

It's not all of history that's to blame! And there's hope there too. But we have to unearth it. We have to keep walking the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering, the way of weight -- until we find a way to redeem it. To reconcile it with the world I see around me. To bring this ancient history back to life and full communion with life as it is lived here, and free all those here burdened by its weight.


But that just got a lot more high-minded and rambly than it probably deserved to be. (And confusing because history means so many different things) This is as much a personal process as it is a hypothetically region-wide or possibly global one. I'm sorting through these histories, finding this weight, trying to reconcile all that I see and all that I know and all that I believe. I'm trying to find Jesus here.

But once I say that it seems pretty silly.

All I really need to do is look up. Those people aren't just watching me as I meander my way across Jesus' historic steps through the Old City and up to what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the rock of Golgotha. They're walking it too, and they've been walking it since before I was born.

I Bought a Coffee Mug Today. It Was Made in China.

What did most people occupy their lives with just a couple hundred years ago? Well that's easy, it seems to me like the majority of people would spend their days busily preparing and producing material goods, like food (totes obvi) or useful and important tools for living like chairs or clothes or any of a wide array of different instruments for making coffee.

Then we got all industrial and now most of those things are mass-produced -- lower costs, less time investment, and often better quality (with the primary loss as far as the actual good is concerned being only that EVERYONE'S EVERYTHING LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME.)

Also there's no "love" or "compassion" or "the least bit of human contact" cooked into my twinkie or sewn into my polo, but whatever. 

But wait! That's a lot of displaced employees. People can't just sit and lazily enjoy the fruits of industry their whole lives! Money in modern economies doesn't work that way, and people seem to rapidly lose dignity and the capacity to not hate every aspect of their lives when they don't have something like work to do or the ability to "provide" in some sense. Plus, we spread like kudzu and cane toads, so there's a lot more of us now. What do all those people do?

Well it turns out a lot of them sell souvenirs.

"Prominent"

Which is kind of ironic -- or something -- because they're either the last remaining outlets for the actual handmade goods, or they sell the worst of the worst of the kitschiest, cheesiest, most mass-produced and uniform of the industrial goods -- and then attempt to pass it off as handmade.

That can be a good job, and it can be an easy job -- but it probably depends a lot on where you are, what the economy and political environment is like around you, that sort of thing.

If you're one of umpteen billion identical shops in the Old City of Jerusalem, and you happen to reside in a country where tourism and thus your income are entirely contingent on the thoroughly volatile geopolitical situation, you might have a pretty rough go of it.

And it only gets worse if you're in, say, Bethlehem. (Because giant concrete walls and security checkpoints might not deter violent extremists or contribute to political solutions, but one thing they sure are good at is scaring away tourists.)

Less than a day after Jesus changed water into wine: Local resident: "You know what, I bet if we charcoal that onto a crude 1st century equivalent of a postcard, goshdarn-it, people will buy it!"

So when it comes down to it, if you're forced to choose between A) lying to tourists' faces and trying every tactic in the book to trick or simply guilt them into buying a small coffee mug with a print of a mosaic on it for five times the standard sell price or B) not feeding your family -- then the choice is not a difficult one. 

And as far as selling out your conscience, soul, and intrinsic human dignity go, there's a lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot lot worse you can do "just to get by" than trapping a tourist in your shop with free coffee and inventing stories about the "people" who "made" this factory-mug by hand (while you discreetly tear off the price tag from the bottom of the mug). 

And there's space for redemption and honor in there too! Because every friendly welcome into a shop and offer of coffee or tea doesn't have to be an empty commercial gesture. You can really touch people's lives that way! (Which I guess is part of the exchange, if we want to look at it economically.)

And there's some sort of cultural/national pride and empowerment thing that can go into that -- as long as you don't feel like the symbols of your heritage are cheapened to the point of meaninglessness by being mass-produced in foreign factories and aggressively hocked at foreigners.

But yeah. I can't imagine it feels good to lie to tourists every day, even if the hospitality is always genuine. But that's life -- it's out of your control! You do what you gotta do! No matter how it makes you feel about yourself afterward. 

Disclaimers: I do not intend to cast shame or color perceptions of either souvenir store pictured.

(They're just the ones I have pictures of.)

(Also if shame was cast on any individuals anywhere then I did something wrong.)

Also for the record: I did not overpay for a coffee mug. However, haggling was a long, arduous process.

And good language practice.   

Speaking of other ridiculous consequences of the post-industrial age... This was the most relevant picture I found before I realized I had pictures of actual souvenir stores. Jerusalem's Bus Stop Graveyard.

Bibliography:


blah blah something about service economies

gross generalizations

Anecdotes

probably Wikipedia

Out of the Mouths of Infants: Grunts and Incomprehensible Chattering

(Leaving out pictures and names for privacy reasons cause kids, sorry. But hey! Look forward to my next newsletter! And if you want that and aren't on a list for it/you want past newsletter, send me an email at miked3592@gmail.com)



I've worked with kids before. I'm by no means a stranger to playing with children, although the ones I'm playing with now are a little smaller than I'm used to. Being silly and playing games and dealing with tantrums and accidents isn't totally new to me, although it's true I am generally accustomed to children who can, given the proper space and time, successfully dress themselves with minimal assistance.

So that's new for me.

And as I sit here and reflect, holding crayons still as my 3-year-old companion meticulously peels the wrappers off like a conscientious matron polishing silver, I realize the daily joys and tribulations and oddities I'm facing here at my kindergarten/preschool/daycare hybrid in East Jerusalem are pretty irregular, actually. It's an environment both uncannily familiar and ridiculously different.

There's the age range, from nearly one all the way to five, which leads to some pretty silly interactions.

And then there's that whole language thing. Yikes.

There's a lot of overlap in comprehension with the kids, because if someone shouts "GET DOWN FROM THERE" at you enough in any language, you're going to understand it eventually. But to really effectively communicate fully with all these kids, you need to be competent in Arabic, English, German, and maybe Czech. That's not to say those are all the languages different kids there know, but it's enough to get by.

So in a single work-day I end up speaking a blurred, clumsy mix of English, Arabic, Norwegian, German (in steeply descending order of my actual competence), and sometimes even some Spanish by accident. One girl knows Italian, so Spanish is close enough, right? The crayon girl knows Norwegian, English, and Arabic, so I try to speak Norwegian to her -- just for the fun of it, and it grabs her attention a little better (you don't hear Norwegian very often here.)

There's a thick mix of local Palestinian children and children of internationals working with various NGOs and such -- not to mention a lot of mixed families that makes it even harder to spot the internationals versus the locals. 

I get a lot of chances to practice my Arabic though, because there's very little pressure when speaking to a 3-year-old. If I don't make any sense, maybe they just look at me funny -- which is whatever, because they were already gonna look at me funny. Or maybe they're crying about falling off the slide or I'm hurriedly carrying them to the bathroom -- regardless, they're not going to call me out on my bad grammar.

And the older kids even help teach me! Well, to an extent.

Some of them chatter endlessly and adorably to me in Arabic, not really caring whether I understand or not, while some speak Arabic but for some reason or another decide to communicate mostly in grunts. One particularly eloquent grunter likes to point to things and teach me vocabulary, but I know enough Arabic to know he's usually wrong. Maybe he's just messing with me?

Another girl is always super pumped to teach me more words, but whenever I point at an object and ask "shu hay?" she just tells me what color it is.

Most of the time though I just feel bad that I can't understand more of the incessant rambling and mumbling of the small Palestinian children as they play and wander about indulging their wild and vivid imaginations, beautifully unrestrained by all that "reality" and "knowledge" and "physics" that they'll pick up on as they continue growing. If only I knew a little more Arabic, that world of play and magical possibility wouldn't be so closed to me...

But then I hear the Canadian kid climb onto the slide and exclaim to no one in particular something like "You're a tomato -- mommy where fardinar!" And suddenly I feel a little less bad about my lack of comprehension.

Lutheran Pride in the Religiousest City on Earth

"This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified."

Martin Luther

(Photos by Danae Hudson)

EXPOSITION

So October 31st was Reformation Day. If you are of the Protestant persuasion, perhaps you had a special service of some sort, or maybe you'd just halfway noticed an increased incidence of Martin Luther quotes popping up on bulletin boards and newsletter-tables-of-contents. Or maybe you had no idea, that's also very possible.

When I was at UNC, we Lutheran students celebrated by donning our Halloween costumes and taping the 95 theses to the door of the Catholic student ministries building. So at least we celebrated it?

Here in Jerusalem though, Reformation Day is a pretty big stinkin deal. Perhaps because it's not majority Protestant Christian like America, and thus the ethno-cultural-religious significance of the holiday is a lot more apparent, and the effects of that initial act of "Reformation" (the whole nailing grievances to a church door thing) are consciously felt a lot more often?

     TANGENT

Hard to say for sure. Religious identity in America in general isn't really super salient or talked about much, so I guess it'd be doubly unusual to have some sort of "Protestant" or "Lutheran Pride" event.

Whereas here in the Holy Land, religious identity is proudly and assertively on display, perhaps only second in its significance to the behemoth that is "national identity," which just happens to be somewhat angrily and confusedly inextricably intertwined with the question of religious identity -- WHICH of course brings us to the fascinating question of the place we and Palestinian Christians occupy in this tremendous regional Palestinian/Israeli conflict that seems so strikingly to be divided across ethno-religious lines in regards to which we are not clearly situated, so we should just drop this question before it takes us further off topic.

    GETTING TO THE POINT

So in the shadow of a tense, conflict-ridden Friday in Jerusalem (just the latest Friday in a couple consecutive months of escalating pressure) and the first gloomy, dark, wet day I've seen in my whole two months here, we Lutherans descended on the Old City, assembling at what has become my home church this year: The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, founded in the 1800s by Kaiser Wilhelm and now home to a motley mix of congregations of different languages and nationalities.

Redeemer on your average Sunday is already an exciting and fascinating smorgasbord of different peoples and voices and nations sharing the space and schedule-dancing around each other, but this service was something else entirely. (Smorgasbord is only appropriate because of the strong Scandinavian influences at play throughout the church space. A mixed buffet including meatballs and cabbage rolls would not be entirely out of place.)

The liturgy cycled spontaneously back and forth from Arabic to English to German, and sometimes all three at once. (And the prayers of the people took that and kicked it up a notch with some Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Danish.)

A whole parade of presiding clergy marched in at the beginning of the service, with not only Lutherans but Anglicans, Mennonites, United Church of Christ priests and probably Methodists, hailing from not just America, Palestine and Germany, but Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands.

 And you see those guys in hoods and the other fancy looking patriarchal looking figures around them? Well, they're the patriarchs. Mixed in there you've got Ethiopian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, and Syriac Orthodox (You can tell by the hat-shape.) Cause no Jerusalem Reformation Service would be complete without representatives of every other Jerusalemite Christian denomination falling asleep in the front rows and getting tipsy on free reception wine.

As you can tell, it was a pretty huge deal!

Although... it wasn't really the most elegant service.

Actually, it was downright messy in parts, if only because of the conflicting bulletins, the communion riot, and the whole thing where it sounded like mildly syncopated, throaty garbage when we sang.

"A Mighty Fortress is Our God" was a clumsy linguistic tangle of incomprehensible overlapping mumbling, and the Germans always seemed to have more words than us. The Lord's Prayer was more of the same but quieter and with less organ.

But what matters is that we were there. The wild, eclectic mix of peoples of all different backgrounds and origins and walks of life -- and the wild potential, the possibility that this joyous and messy pluralism represents.

We were gathered there in the midst of turmoil to celebrate Reformation. Reformation in the past and Reformation in the now.

Religion can be an escape, a way out of the circumstances of the world. Like a cornered animal it turns fatalistic and apocalyptic, turning within itself like the hedgehog of cosmology showing its spines.

But even if we had wanted to escape from the worldly circumstances bearing down on Jerusalem in general and the Palestinian Christian community in particular and just mindlessly peacefully celebrate for one night, that's not an option here.

"Upon your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen; all the day and all the night they shall never be silent," began the first reading, and the chanting drone of the Muslim call to prayer filtered into and through the church, filling the silences between words and sentences with the melodic reminder of the city around us.

It took me back, just hours ago, to my trip across the city earlier that morning. The Israeli government, in response to growing tension and violence, had completely shut down access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Al-Aqsa compound for the first time in I think probably decades.

The center of East Jerusalem, around the Old City, was swamped with heavily armed Israeli security forces. Positively marshy with martial enforcement. Like a bog of bogus political logic. Did I mention it was a really unseasonably gross and wet and hazy day?

I waited at a bus station for nearly 45 minutes (45 minutes longer than I normally would've) because the buses just couldn't get there. But that wasn't because of the security.

Lined up in front of one of the Israeli barricades were dozens of Muslims, young and old, lined up in even rows. They couldn't get to Al-Aqsa (the third holiest site in Islam), so they prayed at the barricade, kneeling down on carpet squares from home, cardboard they'd found on the way, or just on the wet dark street. They prayed, they bowed, they worshiped, they milled about a bit, and they went home.


It was profound and powerful and vaguely intense. I anxiously watched from the impatient bus line, satisfied by the reasonable distance between me and the inevitably political act I was witness to, but nervously plotting an escape route just in case.

I still don't know what to make of it. There were feels but I can't untangle them enough to name any and the whole experience thoroughly resists effective processing, let alone blog-worthy metaphorizing.

What I'm trying to say, (or at least what I'm going to say), is that the situation here is tense and tragic and painful and obscenely implausibly complicated. The only thing that's clear is that something has to change.

There's a lot wrong here, and there's a lot wrong in the world, and there's a lot wrong in "the church," whatever that means, and there's a lot wrong with us, whoever that is.


So in lieu of an escape, and with me unable to process enough to give you an adequate emotional conclusion, I'll offer you what I then received in that church in the Old City on Reformation Day, with so many different people coming together to share.

It was delivered in Arabic, but I'll be nice and give you the English.

"Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

Hence, Reformation. 


I'm not much of a "quote" person. It feels more lazy than anything else most of the time. But there are some things I just can't say. 


"This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified."

Martin Luther


"We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own."

Oscar Romero



Follow this link for the sermon, delivered by the excellent Pastor Carrie of the English congregation.

AND HERE FOR MORE PICTURES

One Hot Day in Super Land: A Glimpse of Peace in a Cheesy Amusement Park

People keep asking me questions about politics, violence, and ISIS (or as it's called in Arabic: "da'esh." The apostrophe here meaning that all immediately surrounding vowels should be pronounced like a growling cat mid-strangulation).

Which I guess is understandable, because I'm in Jerusalem which is in the Middle East and both of those proper nouns carry a lot of baggage and crop up in the news on a regular basis. But instead of any of that I'm going to talk about fun and silly things like amusement parks because that's what I'm actually doing.


So I'm living with a wonderful intern/associate pastor/vicar type character named Fursan, and he runs the local church's youth groups -- which means I get to tag along to all sorts of things! And for some of our break from work/school this last week (Because of the Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha), Fursan and the middle school/high school/young adultish youth group decided to go to a magical magical place called Super Land.

So I got up reasonably early on Monday morning, had my standard breakfast of cultured milk fat, jelly, and coffee, and prepared to ship out for Super Land. I of course had very little idea of what on earth Super Land was, but I was soon to find out. After waiting an unnaturally long time for everyone to gather and the bus driver to show up, we got going.

 

Outside the park: Clean, manicured, and potentially a *few* native trees.

Also: Lines. Already lots of lines. Deep sense of foreboding kicks in right about now.

Not too long of a drive, probably less than an hour. Super Land is west of Jerusalem, near Tel Aviv, in a town called Rishon Lezion -- if that means anything to you. And what did I find there in Super Land, you might ask? Well, amusement park stuff, duh. Exactly like an American amusement park except it was all in Hebrew and the demographics were a wee bit different. Here's some more photos!

It doesn't look very crowded in this shot, but yes. It was crowded. This just looks relatively empty cause people aren't allowed to form lines in the middle of the walking areas. Anywhere they were allowed to form a line, it got pretty dense with humanity.

Hebrew! Various warnings and instructions variously bolded and highlighted and underlined and ovaled and "!!!"ed. 

The language situation was a little weird. Coming out of East Jerusalem, where most signage includes Hebrew, Arabic and English, and where most people speak Arabic, if not also English, it was a little weird coming into Hebrew-Heavy Super Land. Although Arabic is one of Israel's two official languages, it was a bit of a struggle. There were a few employees who spoke Arabic, but most of the time we all had to rely on the Israeli clerk's stumbling English, and sometimes I had to rely on the twice-removed mediation of my Arab companions with their haltering bits of Hebrew skills. (That felt weird.)

Not that I would've been able to understand if everything had been in Arabic? Whatever. I spent most of my day just trying to soak up language ability. I was the ajnabe (foreigner), the ward of the group, suddenly removed from the context I'd just begun to learn how to navigate and thrown into a different one (that looked oddly familiar in a kitschy, American sort of way).

And even though Fursan and the motley assortment of middle school, high school, and college kids were in a vaguely foreign environment themselves, they took care of me. Some of the younger ones used the only English they had to verify that I had fun after every ride, and all of them seemed to feel responsible for making sure I ate and didn't get lost on my way to the bathroom.

(We could note here also that these kids don't know me super well, and I'm not especially communicative, what with the semi-permeable language barrier membrane that I'm slowly but steadily creating pores in for me to peer through or whisper-mumble something half-articulate and only partially incorrect through. Pretty humbling.)

Some of my young Palestinian Christian companions getting off of that-one-ride-where-the-boat-spin-swings-you-around-in-a-circle. Like most things at Super Land, it brought me back to state fairs in North Carolina, and bringing with it, of course, all that attendant anxiety about the safety of those shoddy fair rides. Some things never change.

Here's the Super Land mascot-type-character. Kinda scary. And I don't get it.

They have bumper cars here too! In listening to Arabic conversations going on around me, I'm often limited to just understanding the occasional word here and there, like "peace," "shoes," or any of an extensive range of prepositions, but I now have reason to pride myself on being able to deduce what ride we're going to before we get to it. Cars (Sayyaraat) is bumper cars, chairs (karasi) is that one thing with the chairs, and trains of death (Qataar al-mot) is roller-coasters! I have not been able to corroborate that roller-coaster translation anywhere online since my trip to Super Land, but I stand by it.

Friends! Waiting in line!

Apparently the Middle East has bumper cars too. Who knew?

And these are the chairs I was talking about earlier. The ones that pick you up and swing you around like a sepia-tinted Kansas twister. I remember *loving* this ride as a kid. Not quite sure why. I think it just felt very high and intense, but I was firmly in a chair so it felt safe. High point (haha!) of many a yearly family trip to the state fair. That and fudge. Family pictures were eh.

Kablam! America but in a desert ecosystem! Which makes you really start to question the logic of all the water rides.

A Jewish orthodox family trying to read the map. It was a pretty small park, but I gained very little in terms of confident navigating ability during my day there. It was like a miniature Holy Land equivalent of a local state fair trying to be Six Flags.

Muslim woman wearing hijab, apparently texting and trying to find her friends. They're probably stuck in a line somewhere.

Muslim man carrying an overexcited child as they watch people do that crazy fly up in the air and back down thing.

Anyways, it was a good time. And just like fairs and amusement parks and cheap country buffet restaurants in America, Super Land gives you a glimpse of a society at its most united. No matter the race, the socio-economic background, the religion, ethnicity, or political disposition, everyone comes together. Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Arab-Israelis, Jewish Israelis, Palestinian-Arab-Israelis, Palestinian-Arab-Christians-who-live-in-Israel, etc. etc. and probably many other religious minorities like Druze and Baha'i that I can't confidently identify or spot in a crowd. (And many other fancy and complicated and unexpected ways of putting together the many descriptors I just listed above). 

They were all there. And they weren't there to voice their grievances, legitimate or quasi-illegitimate, they weren't there to cause tension or to politicize or to protest or to rationally express the myriad ways they've been wronged or to irrationally announce their radical response to whatever it is. 

They were there to have fun. To live their lives. To give their children an exciting day of rides and games. To stand in line with their family for the bumper cars. To wait in a queue with their friends for the fancy chair ride. To patiently pass the time in semi-organized linear segments of people to spend less than 5 minutes on a "train of death" with the people they love most in the world (plus that weird ajnabe they're being nice to).

And all that is not to say it's perfect unity, total peace. Of course not. And if it were it'd be a farce, a bold-faced lie of an anecdote-turned-metaphor. The tensions are still there. It transcends the conflict but it does not hide it. 

From the language discrepancies to the (drunk?) Arab man who tries to start a fight in line for the log-flume, to the Israeli staff woman screaming at every other person in line about how seating works on the log-flume (often in what is *at least* their second language), to the Palestinian youth who cut in every line until an older man who can command respect tells them to stop -- to the countless people who simply aren't there because a dividing wall, a fee, and endless webs of arbitrary, convoluted, explicitly racist bureaucratic processes are keeping them away.

 (And that's for West Bank Palestinians -- Families in Gaza just have a military blockade in the way.)

The shaded middle-left area is Israel, the blue line is Jerusalem, and the solid orangish line is the dividing wall. I'm in the ambiguous part of Jerusalem that's "Israel?" but not Israel. The wall is sometimes a huge concrete wall and sometimes just a fence, but to cross it you have to go through a checkpoint. For West Bank Palestinians to cross for short visits they have to apply and pay and wait for it to be processed, and then it's still subject to the whim of whoever processes it. And there ends the educational bit for today. This map came from http://t-j.org.il/JerusalemAtlas.aspx , go visit for other cool informative cartography.

And anyway we don't need something like amusement parks to hide the conflict and tension for us. Where is God in that? What it does is something far more significant: It allows those peoples to come share a space, flaws and all, and explore and exhibit their common humanity despite and through and in the midst of those tensions.That's where God is. In redeeming that space and those lives and giving us a chance to be a part of that.

 Because kitschy overpriced "fun" and waiting in lines is something the whole world can enjoy!

Given the territorial access and economic means, of course.

Which is a pretty huge caveat.

But yeah.

It's still something.

What is Michael doing in Jerusalem anyway? (In which I attempt to be informative and end up just talking about food)

It has come to my attention that I haven't really gone into much in the way of basic, basic detail on blog, so those who arrive at this blog without the benefit of advance information might be a little confused.

Also: I've been living in Jerusalem for three weeks now, so it might behoove me to give you a little bit of an overview of what life is like for me right now -- before I slip back into a more scattered, anecdotal blogging style.

 So yeah! I live in Jerusalem, which is a couple layers of city on top of each other, the older layers of which are some of the oldest layers of city in the world.

The whole city is dense with cultures and histories and traditions and faiths, overlapping, intermixing and weaving together in tremendous and beautiful and also occasionally morally revolting and traumatizing ways. One way or another there's a lot of feels.

Then there's the politics. You can't turn a corner or buy a bag of chips without choking on it like abnormally thick, rancid, polarizing, volatile air.

A brief sample: I'm living in Jerusalem. Israel claims it as its capital, but the international community (by which I mean pretty much everybody, but also specifically the big guns at the U.N., including Amurkah.) puts their consulates in Tel Aviv, and when they put "Jerusalem" on official documents, like under "birthplace" on passports, they just leave off the comma and specific country.

To be specific, I'm living in East Jerusalem. But where is East Jerusalem? Well Israel says it's Israel. And they treat it like it's Israel, but everybody else puts their hands over their ears and kind of ignores that.

But that's cause they've got their eyes set on very particular solutions to this whole massive trainwreck of a geopolitical struggle and taking their hands off their ears for too long might endanger those idealized plans and this is all tongue-in-cheek and neither-here-nor-there so we're-just-going-to-put-politics-Palestine-and-Israel-all-away-for-now. But yeah, I'm in a fairly awkward, confusing position, geographically speaking.

So I'm living in Jerusalem.

It's sort of a city in a desert, except there's a bunch of pine trees and grass and various other temperate plants because a lot of people wanted to make it look European. (Cigarettes and capris would've been much more effective and much less intrusive to the indigenous ecosystem)

I live in a neighborhood called Beit Hanina, and I attend church at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City. It's part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land, which is the primary representative of the spunky, self-confident global minority that is Palestinian Lutherans.

I'm working at an odd preschool-daycare sort of hybrid run by the ELCJHL, and I play with children, and there's a lot of interesting adventures and quirks to get into there, but we'll get into that later. Needless to say, silliness, tears, etc. etc., lots of weird and fascinating language difficulties and opportunities, many different smells (few pleasant), etc.etc.etc. whatever.

Food! Food is good. I'm currently living on a diet consisting mostly of cheap Hospital lunches, invites to occasional local bbqs, and leftover Bible Study pastries.

Only sort of. But I'm eating a monstrous amount of yogurt, hummus, and fresh produce. That's about it. Vegetables, oil, and milk fat. (With live cultures!) 

Also for the last week I've been having the most incredible inexplicable cravings for dark chocolate and coconut. I've been rapidly burning through some funny imported Polish coconut cookies but I'm never satisfied. I usually trust that my body knows what it's doing better than I do, so I sort of just follow its lead, but this might be one of those times where I have to step in and demand that it put down the Dr. Gerard Kubanki Kokosowe. (now with Podluzne kruche ciasteczko wypelnione kremem śmietankowym i wiórkami kokosowymi!)

Here be pictures.

rice and lentils and onions (mujuddara) and what is probably yogurt or tahini sauce.  (R-L cause that's how they do here)

Cucumbers and tomatoes and various other things diced up, and probably drowned in parsley (tabbouleh!)

shakshouka and coffee! Egg, tomato stuff with various other vegetables mixed in, anddddd parsley.

Did I mention I work on the Mount of Olives and can go chill out here in the mornings, only minutes from my workplace? No I don't think I did. Hey look, the sovereign nation of Jordan! (The hazy, faint mountains in the distance) And now we return to your regularly scheduled food programming.

Most meals outside of my flat consist of many little plates like this. It's a little overwhelming. Also this is just the appetizer round. It's called "salads" and it's an opportunity to stuff your face with hummus and arugula. 

And after salads... Meat! And potatoes! And more vegetables! And more meat! And usually someone will complain to the waiter at this point about the woefully insufficient supply of hummus thus far received. Then more hummus will be delivered, and there is generally much rejoicing. (If you don't eat all the hummus and/or complain about there not being enough, you're probably not adequately fulfilling your social obligations.)

Oh parsley. You're like that friend I thought I sort of knew cause you were always kind of hanging out on the fringes with our pals back in high school, all ground up and somewhere in that ubiquitous "generic spices" category, but now I get to know you and see you in your element, as an individual, on your own terms, and wow you taste funny.






Also the lemonade here is made with mint. I don't think I'm ever coming back. (Kidding! I'm kidding! Don't deport me!)

Flashes of Coffee, Cats, and Assertive Hospitality: First Impressions of the Holy Land

The hour spent taxi-ing from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after our flight is the longest hour I've ever experienced. I want to sleep and I have to sleep but I already slept for maybe half of the 11 hour flight and if I sleep much more I know I'll be awake all night.

I blink repeatedly to keep my eyes open, telling my body it's not time to sleep yet and trying to keep hushed the shouts of "LIES!" it keeps throwing back at me. I want so bad to be able to look out the window and calmly observe the middle eastern landscape, but I keep stumbling violently into dreams and I can't tell what's real -- all I know is I'm uncomfortable. I feel more cramped than I actually am because my body blindly, angrily somehow still thinks it's on a plane.

We get out of the shuttle at the front of our East Jerusalem neighborhood, send our bags ahead in a friend's van, and begin the trek to the flat. First lucid observation outside of the airport: There are a lot of cats. Cats of varying breeds and levels of healthiness swarm like squirrels through the alleys and dumpsters and into the streets. They're the only creature I've ever experienced that can "not care" in an intensely threatening manner. Lots of cats in Jerusalem. Huh.

This lone cat subsided from creepy staring long enough for us to take an artsy shadow shot. Thanks! You can go back to licking yourself.

Beginnings are weird. Of relationships, of experiences, of adventures -- no matter what exactly is being "begun," the beginning seems to do the same sort of thing. In the long-term it doesn't look like it amounts to much: first impressions fade, you settle in, you might barely remember how it all started -- but beginnings set the tone and lay the defining groundwork for the structure and dynamic that is to come.



It was my first day in my flat, in my new space, my first step out of structured orientation and into independence. I'd moved in and then left again to go explore -- and when I say explore, I mean stumble around aimlessly and nervously trying to cobble together Arabic phrases in my head and find my way to the store and back. After an hour of anxiously and awkwardly finding my way to a store and buying an Arabic version of "The Giving Tree" ("Shajara il-Kareem"), I was on my way back home, struggling with the overwhelmingness of everything.

I was excited to be out on my own (not including my host-brother-uncle type character who wasn't here yet at that point), but all of my confidence and overflowing energy was suddenly nowhere to be found. I was so eager to finally climb out of the nest and get away from the small family of birds I'd spent a month of orientation with that I didn't even notice that there was apparently no ground there, just a lot of open air and a terrifying sense of height.

But then I see a coffeeshop in the distance. My last hope at comfort and stability: coffee. I plan to regroup and recenter myself with a nice, hot cup of the local bean water, which is similar enough to my experiences with bean water in America that it's familiar and a little bit nostalgic.

I walk in and start throwing around coffee-buying-related-Arabic-phrases like nobody's business. I'm on home turf now, I tell myself.

But wait! I'm fascinated by the sights and smells of the coffeeshop and its long bank of piles of beans and various coffee-related machines and contraptions that I don't understand -- but the cashier's blank looks and blunt English responses tell me two things: 1) I have some things to learn about coffee here. 2) Also Arabic. I've got a ways to go there.

And 3). This is not a place you go to buy a cup of coffee. I seem to be buying a half-kilo of Arabic coffee. Whoops.

But then we start talking. He's caught on to my feverish commitment to speaking Arabic as much as possible, so he tries every phrase in Arabic now before switching to English (after I pathetically repeat, "shu?" "shu?" "shu?" (What?) for lack of a better phrase with which to say "I'm sorry, come again? I have no clue what you just said but I want to.")

He affirms me and my attempts to speak language, I tell him I'm living in the area for the year and volunteering with the local Lutheran church, HE KNOWS THE PEOPLE I'M STAYING WITH, we converse, he pontificates about the local culture and what my year ahead has in store for me, HE DECLARES HIMSELF MY FRIEND; Inside my head I'm freaking out, one little positive social encounter and I'm overjoyed, words have happened successfully between me and people AND SOME OF THEM WERE IN ARABIC.

I'm flipping out on the inside but on the outside I'm still going through the motions of a commercial transaction. I pay, I take the coffee, and I go ahead and leave, closing our conversation in the process and making abundant promises to stop by in the future and check in.

As I leave with an absurd grin on my face, the last 10 minutes a big happy blur, I realized I closed that conversation a little abruptly and totally could have lingered a bit. Was that awkward? Yes. But he didn't mind. He was just going about his day and making mine in the process. (Leaving out names and exact places so he won't be overly associated with my making a fool of myself.)

Also I got the wrong kind of coffee. If I put this in my coffee-maker I'll get a cup of mud and a disgusting coffee-maker. Whoops.



One week later? I'm moved in for good and settling in, finally finishing blog. Also I have the right kind of coffee now. Everything is as it should be.

New Beginnings and an End to Waiting

It's been less like stasis and more like a sort of limbo, a weird, indefinite holding pattern of weeks on end, shuffling our feet, twiddling our thumbs and pacing through Detroit and Chicago as we wait for the powers that be in the Israeli consulate to give us a thumbs up.

We go to YAGM orientation and then the rest of the YAGMs leave. We tearily say goodbye as they disperse across the globe, and then we lie around Chicago and go to a museum and our sentimental feels start to get a little puzzled.

The other YAGMs who got their visas late start to abandon us too, but it's okay! We drive to Michigan! Things are happening and we're going places! We watch some movies and it's interesting and there's a whole bunch of band geeks and Jesuit retirees and everything's hunky-dory.

Then the band kids leave us too. We tearily say goodbye as they tromp off to start the school year, disturbed and perturbed by the clingy, sobbing young adults from Chicago. The cafeteria starts to empty, the schedule begins to loosen, and all of us start showing up to every meal 5-20 minutes late. Pretty soon even the employees there start disappearing, and we're left pining for a weekend retreat group to come ask us to be quiet or simply a staff person to come refill our coffee and nag us about the mugs and spoons we keep squirreling away from the dining hall.

But then we see the light at the end of the tunnel, albeit shrouded in a murky haze of visa uncertainty and regional conflict. We drag our things back to Chicago and try to keep our heads up, but the doubt and abandonment issues of recent weeks cast a pall of uncertain futility over our efforts to remain something vaguely resembling "positive."

Then commence two days of chaos. We drive and walk and public transport our way back and forth to and from Trader Joe's, the Israeli Consulate, and the ELCA Churchwide office countless times. We face sudden interrogation at every turn from embassy security officers, grocery store staffers, and well-meaning receptionists.

"Are you having a pleasant browse?" "So how's the visa situation?" "Are you carrying with you a weapon or anything that may resemble a weapon?" As we slump over our cart in the frozen food aisle and wait for the latest stressful 7-way phone conversation interchange to end -- as an ELCA staffer passes us in the hallway on their way to another productive and fulfilling work venture through which they meet a purpose and feel validated -- as a deep, hushed, and strongly-accented voice shoots rapid-fire questions at us over a phone and ushers us up to the 31st floor of a building with messily transliterated name tags.

Through last minute sprints across town, through reschedule after reschedule and visa delay after visa delay after desperately awaited cross-country overnight package after desperately awaited cross-country overnight package, our long period of waiting in limbo began to come to an end.

An end arose in sight, but we were too doubtful, too beaten down by past betrayals and past hurts to hold too firmly to hope. Monday. 5:30 p.m.ish. With a slightly-better-than-decent chance of all visas and flights appearing in the right place and time.

We've spent nearly a month on orientating, and now we're finally being retrieved from the dirty cryogenic chamber in the ELCA's basement. But we feel loved! And validated! And ready (more or less)! My body's just afraid to get too excited for fear of disappointment.






(Pictures will be added after arrival overseas in order to make more clear any weird, unexplained portions of this.)

Stepping Stones to Community While We Float in Limbo (i.e. Michigan)

The upside of getting your visas delayed? You have two whole extra weeks to spend exclusively with your fellow travelers in tight community. And the downside? You have two whole extra weeks to spend exclusively with your fellow travelers in tight community.

But in the end it's net-positive! (And I'm not just saying that because some of my four fellow volunteers and two country coordinators will likely end up reading this.)

Living in community is not an unproductive venture. Something important and valuable happens when you live in a tight space with a small group of people -- with only the hustle and bustle of the retired Jesuits all around to distract you from each others' irritating little personality quirks.

Living in community (initially) is one of those vaguely painful and somewhat uncomfortable processes (like starting at a new school or dental surgery under anesthesia) where you commit yourself to going through some awkwardness, swelling and irritation, and then you come out the other side good as new (except perhaps with numb chipmunk cheeks or a little syringe for cleaning the food gunk out of your mouth for the next few weeks.)

(Speaking of the dentist, I've continued working steadily on my Arabic, and I think I can honestly say that I've never made weirder noises in my life. Doing a lot of gargling and spitting. A'yup.)

You fake it until you make it, essentially. You create community by acting as if it's already there (assuming nothing goes seriously wrong to disrupt and derail your dental surgery in progress). And just like any good medical procedure, there's a standard sort of process to it. (I work at camp, so this is something we work on and watch in action and theorize about on a weekly basis.)

We arrived at YAGM (Young Adults in Global Mission) orientation only vaguely familiar with each other, like those people you did that group project with that once in Spanish 250. So for that first week we were on our best behavior (the 5 of us but also the other 60ish YAGM volunteers). We had fun, got to know each other, and engaged in friendly shenanigans, but we didn't totally relax. We thought before we spoke, watched our manners, and generally kept our quirks at bay.

In the school of thought I come from, we call that pseudo-community: We feel like close friends that are really there for each other, but we don't really actually know each other yet. As soon as pressure appears and you sort of have to work as a team or even make a decision together, the facade starts to show some cracks. You've come together as a community like cold marshmallows, gently fitting together and rubbing up against each other with no real pressure or friction, but without any real cohesion or strength to resist outside forces.

The YAGM community at the end of the first week of orientation was not your ordinary pseudo-community, but you can only do so much in a week. The YAGM authorities not only broke the ice for us but proceeded to shove us into the lake, forcing us to get to know each other at a serious level instead of dwelling at the surface and standoffishly chatting about our preferences in pets and toothpastes. It was a bit cold under there but it had to be done.

The crazy-stressful experience of the impending life adventures and challenges and the sense of foreboding that comes with that helped to start bonding our marshallows together a little more thoroughly, and the shared vision and mission gave our marshmallows the will and momentum to stay firmly together -- but it will be up to the rest of the year to come to turn that gooey mass into a rock hard, sticky safety net of emotional support and compassionate conviction.

So we had an impressive amount of collective marshmallow cushion to rest on as a community by the end of that first week, but the true comfort of community hadn't begun to set in quite yet. (So maybe orientation heated us up to melt us together, but I didn't finish drying?)

The YAGM team headed to Jerusalem, meeting with our lovely Arabic tutor, Sally.

Whatever. It's a complicated process, different people progress at different rates, and the stages tend to melt into each other like soft, cylindrical spongy confections made from sugar, gelatin, and egg white. But by the time us Jerusalem peeps started getting our quality time as a small gorup after everyone else left, the "best behavior" was fading fast. I felt myself relaxing and letting the quirks fly. (Mostly a lot of mumbling, random falsetto, giggling, weird non sequiturs, and picking corn kernels off other people's plates.)

And that's a good sign. Comfort and genuine behavior is important in a community! But it also means your little cloud of personality can start getting in other people's way, and you sometimes find that other people's collected masses of condensated quirks tick you off a little bit. Interpersonal cloud conflict is going to happen in any attempted community, but for it to really work, you've got learn how to work around those barriers of personal eccentricities. And if you're really a high-functioning community, you'll find out how to harness them.

So us Jerusalem YAGMers have had a valuable two weeks to learn how to actually function as a team, but also to start learning how to tolerate, appreciate, and love each other fully. Yay!

God's peace and goodbye for now!


Michael

Waking up in Michigan

The long wait for visas continues. Hope is alive and well, and she's tentatively scheduled us a flight to Tel Aviv for September 6th, but she has her fingers crossed and she keeps checking her phone so I'm not really sure how to read that behavior. But we're optimistic! And we sternly, semi-confidently expect visas to arrive before September.

In the meantime, we've ventured to Michigan, where we're staying at a fancy Jesuit retreat center that frequently plays host to various church groups and band camps. (Sweaty band kids keep stealing our table.) ("Sweaty sousaphonist" is a term I wanted to use just then, but then I would be making assumptions about what instruments the various sweaty children play, and that's a problem. You can't sacrifice your integrity for a cheap joke Michael, especially when you're not even sure that's the proper term for a musician who specializes in the use of the sousaphone.)

But besides the adorable children visibly struggling their way through primary school (bless them), I really enjoy the random pictures of Pope Francis scattered about the facility (bless him), and I have much appreciation for the copious amounts of complementary coffee of questionable quality (BLESS IT, I guess).

It's definitely a little anti-climactic to be sitting here in Michigan after a week of orientation, rather than getting to actually get going, but I'm trying to see it as an exercise in patience.

And it's not like we don't have plenty of orientating and preparation to do for our time in the Holy Land anyway? With our team of volunteers and our humble coordinators we've already started diving more deeply into the history of the region -- so we should be all read up and ready to go in a couple more life-times of careful study and analysis. (Which at least means we won't be running out of things to do anytime soon.)

Then there's the whole language learning thing! I've been producing spit, phlegm, and gaspy wheezes all summer in anticipation of learning Arabic, but it's helping surprisingly little. Apparently there's a little more to it than that? It's actually a pretty beautiful and complex language and it's a lot of fun. But yes, there is a lot of spitting.

Our first vaguely on topic Middle East venture for orientation was a casual trip to the Oriental Institute in Chicago last Wednesday (after the other YAGM volunteers started catching flights). I say "vaguely," because how relevant is the history of the Hittites and the Assyrians to the Middle East today? Also because the whole "oriental" label is a little iffy for me, in a "what-does-that-really-mean?" sort of way. (For me it was more of a museum about western archaeologists and their conclusions about Sumerian trade routes than a museum about the Sumerians themselves -- if you know what I mean.)

But whatever. Life goes on and learning continues.

Michael goes overseas! Or really, actually, to Chicago. And soon to Michigan. Heh.

Hi!

For those of you wandering idly through this puzzling piece of blogmanship trying to verify that it is in fact the site from which I, Michael, will be blogging from and about Jerusalem for a year:

Yes.  It is.

I can’t promise I’ll stay entirely on topic – so don’t be too surprised if you catch some weird tangents about terrifying high fashion department stores in urban Germany, classy horror-filled clothing boutiques in French cities, or any of a wide variety of numerous other topics I might end up on that have little or nothing to do with scary clothing outlets in Europe. (I'll be writing newsletters occasionally that will be a lot more direct and to the point in terms of letting you know what I'm doing.)

Usually hopefully the tangents will have a point, potentially relating to the issues and events more immediately at hand. The point of this most recent tangent being that I’ve seen Abercrombie & Fitch outlets in Paris and Dusseldorf, and they were something out of an Orwellian nightmare tinged with high school nostalgia and dripping with a noxious cocktail of musk, matching tight shirts, and peer pressure.

It was dark, there were more random staircases than I knew what to do with, and identically dressed store employees kept popping out of random dark corners with perfectly-styled hair and eerie German-accented unison choruses of “Can I help you?” It was like a dimly lit alien museum full of a very limited range of confiscated Earth artifacts – namely, tight, over-priced teenager clothes.

I wanted to feel bad for the imitation-human creatures apparently forced into servitude as robotic tour guides by their cruel Martian overseers, but I got the feeling they were far beyond the reach of sympathy by this point. (I guess the real question is why are the alien masters so fond of Abercrombie & Fitch? Perhaps unresolved middle school traumas and anxieties? Or more likely the outrageously over-perfumed ventilation shafts are easily adapted for larva incubation purposes.

Anyway.

I don’t really have much to talk about yet, so I reverted to talking about other things to give you a little bit of content. I’m just gonna forget for now about all the other things I said I was gonna talk about on this blog in the past, but watch out for random unexpected jaunts into the past throughout the next year! (Maybe they’ll be more relevant? It will be a journey of discovery for all of us.)

I’ve officially left my sticky, humid home in the South, and am now in Chicago. Will be here for a week for various types of orientating, and then I’ll be moving on to Michigan for two weeks of more Jerusalem-specific orientating as we wait for visas to arrive. Hah.

Oh gosh, do I sign off? I don't know even normal blogging protocol all that well, let alone when you have piles of people you're specifically writing for and to.

Um,

Michael.