Started today with one final Mass at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, inside the ante-room of Christ's grave with one final opportunity to venerate the grave itself. We then, as a group, boarded a bus and drove about 14 kilometers outside of Jerusalem to one of several possible sites for the Road to Emmaus (photo above), a lovely post-resurrection story in Luke. The story features two of the disciples who are walking heavy heartedly away from Jerusalem on Easter Sunday when a stranger joins them. They talk and then ask the stranger to "stay with us, for it is evening and the day is nearly over" -- and the stranger abides with them and when he breaks bread, they recognize him as Jesus. We walked a rural path together in silence to commemorate this event.
We then visited an 11 century Crusaders' church(photos above), where the Knights Templars set up shop, now run by French Benedictines and then had a final eucharistic service together at a French convent, before heading back to Jerusalem. I returned to St. James Armenian Orthodox Cathedral for a thoroughly Medieval Vespers service, chanted by young Armenian seminarians presided over by Armenian Monks in spooky robes with pointed hoods -- one last encounter with a Christian Church of the East, with their very different liturgies and tradtions.
I finished my pilgrimage where it began last week and this same morning, at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Ben, one of our hosts at St. George's College, brought us into some heretofore undiscovered nooks and crannies iincluding a first century crypt.
Our group boarded a bus for Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport. All of us cleared the very stringent Israeli security and are now in a very shlocky Israeli food court, where a McDonald's Happy Meal exhausted all my shekels (and ran about $11).
It's been a terrific trip.
Dan
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