From first crossing the wall

Still looking east

I’ve spent most of this year with images of a religious geography telling truths our usual physical geography does not tell (Jerusalem is at the centre of the world), and with the idea that facing east towards Jerusalem (as Christian churches, worshippers and graves do, akin to Moslem facing Mecca) being our fundamental desired  ‘orient-ation’ (which is simply literally ‘east-facing’ anyway).  From where I usually stand, facing Jerusalem (as well, as it happens, as facing Mecca) is to face the rising sun, and I am now reminded that the mediaeval name for the land at the far end of the Mediterranean is the Levant, and discover this is the French for dawn.

Now I am here, which way do I look?  Is it a bit like the puzzle of knowing which way is south for the one standing at the North Pole?  No, it seems that I have allowed the sense of ‘facing Jerusalem’ to be too dominant.  The Institute’s Director (an Orthodox priest) has twice reminded us that we should still be looking east from here, looking longingly in the direction from which we expect to find the Second Coming.  He added that ‘without this hope, this place would crush you’: here at the centre of the world its conflicts and impossibilities are focussed and not resolved; the dawn is not in the Levant.

Meanwhile, on this out first Sunday, we attended Mass in French in St Anne’s Church very close to the Temple site, thus praying on the feast of the Birth of the Virgin Mary at the traditional site of that birth (and hard by the certain site of the Pool of Bethsaida). 

Praying for Syria

At Gethsemane this evening.

Back streets of the Old City

Opening challenge

"For such a small place as this country, it is very complex (and everyone is totally lacking in objectivity); if you don't go away more confused than when you arrived, we will not have done our job."  This was the Course Director's opening gambit during supper on our arrival, and the picture is from the terrace of the room in which we eat, looking across the separation wall to Bethlehem.

Hebrew context

The pace of this Blog now changes.  I haven’t posted for two weeks, and in two weeks time we go away for thirteen weeks Extended Study Leave (nee Sabbatical) at the Tantur Institute on the edge of Jerusalem. 

Some of my time at the moment is spent arranging things with those who will be living in the house and those who will be looking after the parish, rather than posting here .

I suspect that I’ll then want to use the Blog as a way of saving pictures and ideas for myself, but the Institute warns participants in its courses about missing the sabbatical experience by spending a disproportionate amount of time updating others on social media, so what I post will be unsystematic, and possibly episodic.

With the background reading we’ve been asked to do, I’ve already begun to reinhabit the Hebrew culture of much of the Gospels. 

Last Sunday, I explored new ideas for me as I found part of the Gospel (Luke 12.37-38) identified  by Kenneth E Bailey as Hebrew poetry, with the first and last lines in parallel, then the second and penultimate ones, then the third and antepenultimate ones, pointing to the ‘conclusion’ at the centre.  

Blessed are the slaves

  when the Lord coming he finds them watching:

    amen I tell you he will gird himself 
     and he will make them recline                                                  

    and coming he will serve them;

  whichever watch coming he finds it so  

blessed are they.

We feel we can almost touch the Galilean preacher who habitually identifies the blessed, says ‘amen’, speaks of the God’s Kingdom as a wedding banquet, and turns the idea of servanthood upside down, all features which colour lots of other parts of the Gospel.

Today, I explore old ideas with one of the two set Old Testament readings (the beginning of Isaiah 5) where these fourteen lines

Let me sing for my beloved

    my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watch-tower in the midst of it,
    and hewed out a wine vat in it;

he expected it to yield grapes,
    but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
    and people of Judah,
judge between me
    and my vineyard.

are clearly  in the minds of the first speaker and hearers of these Gospel lines (placed by Matthew soon  tells us Jesus’ cursed and unproductive fig tree)

There was a landowner

who planted a vineyard,

put a fence around it,

dug a wine press in it,

and built a watch-tower.

Then he leased it to tenants

 and went to another country.

When the harvest time had come,

he sent his slaves to the tenants

to collect his produce.

But the tenants seized his slaves…

Now when the owner of the vineyard comes,

what will he do to those tenants?’.

Meanwhile, bees and butterflies swarm round plants in our garden in a way at which this picture only hints.

Another break-in?

A temporary repair to the south window in the chancel at St George's, Bradley where it appears a burglar removed both the mesh and a whole window panel to gain entry; this would be third occasion in my time here that a window has been damaged in this church in this way, and, when the facts and details are established, it is possible that once again the cost of the repair will be far higher than any costs involved in losses from the apparent break in itself.  Meanwhile, some of the the villagers have contributed during July for the first time to a church-based collection of tinned food for the Daily Bread Community Larder in Grimsby, so, as it happens, the church had been doing its part in seeking to support those in greatest need locally at the same time.

We spotted this thatcher at work in Ashby St Ledgers in Northants when visiting my mother, and observed the way the visible thatch is all made up put of the ends of stalks.  Meanwhile, today's Independent highlights nationally what I had been about to post from the local experience of the new 'bedroom tax'.  The number of householders who have had benefits reduced because of having a 'spare' bedroom in the two Wards of this parish alone far exceeds the number of one and two bedroomed properties in the whole of North East Lincolnshire available for such people to move into and thus make their larger homes available for others and reduce their own rent.  What is troubling is that the property-owning (perhaps even thatched property-owning in some cases) politicians responsible for this situation knew this before they embarked on all this.  Nobody will be surprised if things like the use of food banks and the frequency of church break-ins increases as more and more families are pushed into debt.