Today, on a boat, in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, we
met Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s girlfriend. Actually we met her several days ago
but we found out about the Ferlinghetti connection today. Hearkening back to
JMHP, Part 2: “God will always surprise us.” -- The Rt. Rev. Sulheil Dawani.
Who goes to the Sea of Galilee to meet the girlfriend of, the author of “Coney
Island of the Mind, the beat poet who made the other beat poets famous?!?” Werner
Heisenberg and Bishop Duwani agree: Reality is, at its heart, unpredictable and
delightful.
But that didn’t happen until late afternoon. The day was
engaging long before that. Our bus headed East from Jerusalem toward the Dead
Sea. At last we came to the desert wilderness I had expected in this Land of
the Holy One. It is a “ferocious landscape” (Belden Lane) somewhat similar to
Nevada, but distinctive. There are occasional groves of date palms. The dates
are used to make honey such as the honey in which John the Baptist dipped his
crispy locusts. In the Spring, there are also wildflowers, but basically, ”it’s
a desert out there.”
We drove North through that desert, then on through the
mountains of Samaria into the rolling green hills of Galilee. At the Sea of
Galilee we stopped to visit the Mount of the Beatitudes, a seaside mountain
where the Church has long commemorated the Sermon on the Mount. Actually the
Sermon on the Mount is a collection of Jesus sayings artistically and
theologically arranged by Matthew, but it is a work of spiritual genius and
deserves to be commemorated. The beautiful gardens and the octagonal church
built to honor the Sermon are fitting.
Venerating holy places is like reading Holy Scripture.
Different parts of Scripture must be read in different ways. Some texts are
history, others are poetry, some are rules, others are prophecies, and some are
cries of passion. Just so, some places are holy for historical reasons.
Something important really happened here. Others are holy because of the
prayers that have been said there for millennia though no special events are
associated with the place. But there is a special dynamic in religion called “sacred
geography.” I learned about sacred geography while studying Hinduism from
Dianna Eck. A spiritual truth is conveyed through a narrative, which may be
historical, fictional, or a mixture “partly truth and partly fiction” – but the
point is it contains a spiritual message that cannot be stated as a flat two-dimensional
abstraction. It must be expresses as story. There is an art in weaving and
telling sacred story. When it is done well, we then go on to construct a sacred
geography for the story. We say, “Ram was born in this place.” “The Buddha
meditated and was enlightened under the branches of this tree.” “Jesus was born
in this place.” If we have designated a place as part of the sacred geography
and honored it by association with the story that bears a spiritual truth, the
place comes to bear that truth as well. So it is with the Mount of the
Beatitudes.
From there we went north, north, north to the borders of
Lebanon and then Syria to visit the region of Caesarea Philippi. There are two
reasons visiting this place. First, in this area three rivers, fed by the snow
melting off the Golan Heights, converge to form the River Jordan. Far be it
from me to suggest that this three becoming one is a natural metaphor of the
divine nature. Second, this is where Jesus asked his disciples “Who do you say
that I am?” and Peter answered, “ You are the messiah, the Son of the Living
God.” I am somewhat mystified by why Jesus took his disciples so far north to
ask this question. It would have been one long walk from his home base in
Capernaum!!! On another occasion, they walked all the way to the region of Tyre
and Sidon in Lebanon – even further. He did cover some distance on foot.
We then headed back south into Galilee and visited
Capernaum. There is a ruin of a 4th Century synagogue believed to
have been built on top of the ruins of the synagogue where Jesus worked his
first exorcism. By the way, my friends of a skeptical bent, recasting Jesus as
a wisdom teacher who did not actually do miraculous healings, exorcisms, and other
such unscientific things is a case of western modernist cultural imperialism – rewriting
the story to fit our worldview, to keep it in our comfort zone. Those who
believed in Jesus were unanimous that he worked miracles. No surprise in that.
But the people who did not believe in Jesus were also unanimous that he worked
miracles. They just denied it was by God’s power he was doing it. When it comes
to miracles, I don’t know what’s possible and what’s not. Take it out of my
cultural context and I am even less prepared to say what’s impossible. Bottom
line: Gabriel said it to my satisfaction, “With God, all things are possible.”
Around the old synagogue are older ruins of houses going
back to Jesus’s day. An Orthodox Church is built over one such ruin of a house.
The church has a glass floor so one can look down into the ruin. Christians
have long regarded this house as the home of Peter’s mother-in-law whom Jesus healed
of a fever right after the exorcism in the synagogue. History or more fictional
sacred geography? This is somewhere in the middle. Could be true. It’s a house
next door to the synagogue. No one can say for sure.
From there we walked down to the rocky beach near the
synagogue, which means near the site of the 1st century village of
Capernaum. On this beach, the first disciples were mending their nets when
Jesus said, “Follow me” and they did. You can’t say the exact spot where their
boat was situated, but it’s a short distance along the beach, easy to walk the
length of it – easy to know that right along here, the Kingdom Mission began
when Jesus said, “Follow me.” That’s history.
Then we took our boat ride on the Sea of Galilee. It’s a
pretty big lake, as I had imagined it would be. The hills come right up to the
lake as I had been told. But those hills are taller and greener than I had
imagined, a truly beautiful place. The day was enriched by a good exegetical
reflection on the Beatitudes by Brother Mark and a moving reflection on storms
in our lives given by Dean Graham Smith while we were on the Lake. And that
brings us back to where we met Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s girlfriend.
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