Easter Feast

Happy Belated Easter!  Yes, it has been a week since Easter, but if you think about it, the Easter spirit should fill our hearts all the days of the year, so therefore, Happy Easter!

On Easter morning, I actually managed to yank myself out of bed to head out to the lake for the sunrise.  Good thing too, for it was beautiful.  I’d show you pictures if I didn’t have to pay extra for the cord that connects my phone to my computer.

What I can show you, however, is pictures of the food we made for our feast.  Now, you may be thinking, “feast” may be a little excessive to describe dinner, even Easter dinner.  But you would be wrong.  It was a proper feast: we were eating from about one in the afternoon to ten at night.  We roasted lamb, made dinner rolls, muffins, deviled eggs, enough fruit salad to feed a large army, green salad, apricot rosemary infused chocolate, and a lamb cake.  It was extraordinary, even for us, and we tend to go overboard with meals.

The recipe for the chocolate cake in the lamb is by far the best chocolate cake recipe I have ever tried.  Check it out here!

Also the real lamb, the roast leg of lamb with mint tarragon butter, check that out here.

If you could ask God one question, what would it be?

For however few there may be of you readers, I wanted to explain my relative infrequency of writing for the past few weeks. I have a job!  After all my whining and searching and fretting, I have joined forces with a minsitry called Q Place working on their communications at a national level.

I wanted to tell you about Q Place because I increasingly see more reason to delight in its existence.  I first got excited about it last September at their annual conference.  I went to appease a friend who invited me, but I left uplifted and changed.  That may sound like I am exaggerating, but bear with me as I explain what Q Place is.

Q Place is the new name for Neighborhood Bible Studies, a ministry that is now 50 years old.  It was founded as a method to give to the masses what Intervarsity gives to college students:  A small group environment free from harmful judgments where people openly ask questions, discover and grow closer to God through inductive Bible Study.  For half a century, NBS has given thousands of people a template for small group studies that make people think without telling them what to think.  Q Place carries on this mission but also takes it a step further:  Q Place seeks to reach out to people wherever they may be in their spiritual life, whether they are an atheist, a spiritual seeker, a new believer, or a life-long Christian.  Q Place believes that everyone not only benefits from but also deserves having a place where everyone can openly ask questions(Question-Place, yeah) without suffering through dogmatic religiosity stuffed down their throats.

One of Q Place’s core values is the belief in an individual’s inherent human dignity.  In a way, this seems so obvious that we might not need list it as a core value.  But if you ask me, this concept is not addressed enough.  When we talk about service, and I mean real service and not just appeasing our own guilt by doing a good deed or two, I think we need frequent reminders of the value of every person and the treatment to which that person is entitled.  Again, this may seem trite and obvious, but when we really stop to think about what the world thinks of Christians when we evangelize, we realize that we have not always been treating people as we would like to be treated.  We are not loving our neighbor as ourselves, and as a result, we lose opportunities of sharing Christ’s love and healing with those neighbors.  Consider this:  What do we know about how people frequently get treated by Christians?  Christians tend to be:

-know-it-alls

-preachy

-obnoxious

-close-minded

-poor listeners

Though I have always been a huge fan of apologetics, I realize now that these arguments have their place:  They are designed to defend the faith; they alone do not bring people to faith.  If we, as Christians, want to share the transforming love that Christ has offered us, we must share it in ways that people are willing to receive it.  Why are we preachy when we don’t like preachy people?  Why do we argue when we don’t like confrontation?  We frequently contradict ourselves in our approach.

Q Place, praise the Lord, offers an alternative.   In a Q Place, the Christians in the group are simply initiators.  They are instructed to wear, as we like to call it, the proverbial duct tape over their mouths.  If a Christian is talking too much in a seeker Q Place, then it is not truly a Q Place.  Christians, if you are reading this, suck it up.  Seekers, if you are reading this, get excited, because if you have been struggling with questions about spiritual matters but didn’t know where or with whom to ask them, here is a grand opportunity to meet with people like yourselves who are seeking truth.

Many Q Places begin with Gary Poole’s book, 1001 Complete Book of Questions, which is essentially a book of ice breakers starting with questions like “How do you eat an oreo?” and ending with “If you could ask God any question, what would it be?”  From here, groups can decide to go in any number of directions depending on what the members of the group collectively need.  There is the Tough Questions series, which is written with no agenda, but just asks questions like “Why does God allow suffering and evil in the world?” or “Don’t all religions lead to the same place?”  There are forty two questions in that series.  Then there is the whole collection of Neigborhood Bible Study guides which have thematic guides as well as guides on whole books of the Bible.

I am really excited about Q Place because, though small group communities asking questions are as old as Jesus, using this method is really a paradigm shift in evangelism.  It is learner-centered learning, and it is desperately needed in the mission field.  It may take more work, but if you know your neighbor is struggling with spiritual questions, what better service can you render them than to help them find peace?  Q Place offers Christians a way to help, and seekers a place to find it.

If you would like to partner with Q Place prayerfully and/or financially, please either contact me or visit our website at QPlace.com.  If you would like to support me specifically in this work as a domestic missionary as I will be raising my own funds, please contact me at emilycapo@gmail.com and I would be thrilled to have you join forces with me in this work.

What do you mean, overboard?

I hope I take after my Mom.  This is the cake she made me when I turned six:

Now, if you think this is impressive, get this: she did this less than two weeks after making my brother’s cake, The Jolly Roger Pirate Ship from Peter Pan.  That year, she went all out on the birthdays, and praise the Lord we have it all on video to prove her genius.  My mom was the kind of mom that made other moms jealous.  For my brother’s Peter Pan-themed birthday party, she made the cake, she made costumes for most of the kids there, and she turned an indoor playground into a pirate ship—plank and all—with the help of PVC piping, cardboard and paint.  It was epic.  Then, a couple weeks later, she turned that same indoor playground into the beast’s castle, and threw a Beauty and Beast Party for my birthday with this stunning cake.  She impressed all who ever met her.

So now I am grown.  I am 24, which still weirds me out to say.  And I don’t think I have it in me to make a normal cake or throw a normal party.  The standard has simply been set too high.  And so this past week, for my birthday, a good friend noticed that I was six four times over.  I thought it appropriate to honor this anniversary with a tribute to that first cake, so I made another one with the help of mi pareja.  Check it out:

As I was finishing it up, my roommate asked if I were going to put roses all around it.  I said, “No, I’m not going to go overboard.”  That’s when I realized: “Overboard” is a relative term.

Chicago Surprise

Chicago is a funny place.  One minute it’s the greatest city in the world, and the next minute you’d give up a kidney to be on the first plane out.  A lot of it has to do with weather.  Ok, most of it has to do with the weather.  But even on the worst days of the year, we must, must, remember why we love this fair city.

I was talking with a friend the other day about Chicagoans.  We think that there is a certain amount of masochism about them.  Or at least we think that they like to complain.  Years and years have Chicagoans endured tough winters, corrupt politics, defective transportation systems, among other things.  But they never move.  They frequently re-elect incumbents.  They choose between messing up the alignment in their cars on account of the potholes and waiting for eons for a CTA bus in the cold.  Why, oh why, do we put up with all this?  Because we like to talk about it.  We reserve the right to gripe.  Whatchagonnado?

Oh, for heavens sake, why oh why do I live here when day after day I wake up to a gray gray sky and a steady temperature in the low 30s.  I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun.  Yesterday morning hit me particularly bad.  It’s not just the monotony of it.  We need the sun.  Vitamin D deficiencies take their toll, and I am a victim. Yes, I will take some cheese with my whine.

Despite these feelings, however, Chicago has yet a few tricks up its sleeves. Yesterday after church I went to Chinatown to get some bubble tea.  A few weeks ago I was also here for the Chinese New Year.  It struck me on that day how fortunate we are in Chicago.  At any moment we could be minutes away from so many exotic experiences it is hard to conceive the possibilities. If someone comes to visit me, say, just for a weekend, I could give them a culinary tour of the world.  Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopian, Swedish–you name it, we will find it, and it will be delicious.  After we eat, we could go see a concert of practically any music you could imagine.  I attended an event last year at the International Music Festival that was so fabulous I wondered why the place wasn’t more packed than it was.  Apparently I really like Swedish Polkas.  Who knew?

Chicago is full of gems, but you really just have to look past the gray exterior and brave the frequency and duration of Jack Frost nipping at your nose.  It doesn’t take too much digging to find great beauty.  Yesterday I was reminded of one of the most beautiful sights Chicago has, namely the Chicago Cultural Center.  Beautiful both externally and internally, this wonderful ex-Chicago Public Library now houses art galleries and musical groups and shows them off almost always completely free of charge.  Yesterday I went there to find a quiet spot, a place to journal without spending any money.  When I climbed the mosaic lined steps to the beautiful (and newly refurbished) domed room at the top of the stairs I discovered I was just in time for a concert given by a classical ensemble.  I happily seated myself in a chair towards the back and delighted myself with my journal and the melodious harmonies of Mendelssohn, Gershwin, and others.  Afterward, I wandered the beautiful hallways into various rooms full of art work.  My favorite display was an exhibit of nature photography by Jon W. Balke.  I highly recommend you look up some of his work.  He studied with Ansel Adams and you can tell.  I left inspired.

I had some more time to kill after I left the Cultural Center, so where better to go than across the street to the Bean?  You know, some modern art I don’t think I will ever appreciate.  Other works are sheer genius though I can explain why.  The Bean in Millennium Park is the latter.  If you don’t know what it is, The Bean is an enormous, stainless steal sculpture in the shape of a bean.  A strange concept, but I love it, and so does everyone.  Just like you shouldn’t have to explain why squirt guns are fun on a hot day, I see no reason to explain the bean.  It’s just awesome.  It’s reflective surface delights visitors because, not only is the Chicago architecture showed off in its mirror, young and old adore the marvelous optical illusions displayed in the contours of the bean.  I walked underneath, as I usually do.  What was unusual about this visit, though, was just as I walked underneath, I had, though for only a few moments, the whole bean all to myself.  This has never happened before as normally everyone crams underneath to catch a glimpse of themselves reflected a bajillion times over.  But yesterday I experienced an anomoly, and I loved it.  I stood directly under the center and spun around in circles.

Bean Innards

When I lived in New York, I remember hearing a joke:

How can you tell if someone is a real New Yorker?  They have never been to the top of the Empire State Building.

If this is true, I always thought, this is a shame.  What’s sad is that it likely is true for many people, and not just those living in New York.  We frequently forget that exploration need not require a trip further than out our own door.  (I know, that sounds like something Mr. Rogers would say…) Now that I’m living in Chicago again, and living on the north side where I have better access to more of what Chicago has to offer, I hope to make many more discoveries.  Stay tuned.

Bikram Yoga

It’s 105 degrees in here.  Sweat drizzles off my body like I’m a lawn sprinkler.  Both knees are locked with one leg lunged back behind me and my hands stretched out in front with my whole body balancing precariously on my other teetering leg and I say to my self, “I paid for this.  Yeah.”

Jill said I would hate Bikram Yoga the first time.   What a funny thing about us, about our culture, that when we here of some exercise that our friends say we will surely hate, it makes us want to do it even more.  It’s like when someone says not to look at something the temptation to stare increases all the more.  But it really shouldn’t be that way with something that our friends say we will hate.  “But it’s good for us.”  And that’s the clincher.  Come hell or high water, we will determinately pay huge amounts of money to do things we know we will hate in the name of health.

I wanted to write about Bikram Yoga after my first time there.  But Jill did say I would hate it the first time, implying that the second or third time might give a different impression.  So it would not have been fair to write about it after one try.  I was also busy/lazy/etc., but that’s another story.

I didn’t actually hate it the first time.  When someone says I am going to hate something, I expect it to be pretty bad.  It turned out that the hard part was only the first forty-five minutes, where you go from difficult pose to difficult pose.  The next forty-five minutes switches between a resting pose and stretching pose.  According to Bikram, this is where you get all the benefits, in the resting pose.  Fine by me.  Just as long as I get to lie down, (is what I was thinking at the time).  As a result, it really wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought.

Then again, I was sore for a week.  I guess that means that there must be gain as there was significant pain, but I always wonder if it was worth it.   In addition to the soreness, there is also a detail I really should mention about this activity, and that is the smell.  The whole idea might be really great, focusing on breathing deeply and cleansing the body.  Problem is that when they tell you to breath deep, you say to yourself, No Thanks.  It positively wreaks of sweat in that facility, and I find it so hard to even think of cleansing effects when in such a stinking environment.   I guess you get used to it.  No.  Not really.

I do like yoga, and doing it in a hot room certainly puts a new spin on it.  It’s quite a change of pace in winter, too, since there is really nothing wrong with being warm when it’s so cold outside.  If you are going to try it, there is no better time than the dead of winter.  You end up going out into the 15 degree day with your jacket hanging open, a purple face still sweating and a popsicle hanging out of your mouth.   The irony amuses, even if the yoga doesn’t.

I’ve done Bikram Yoga four times now.  I gave it a good honest try.  I think that’s fair.

Second Christmas

Was your Christmas not what you expected?  Need another try? Or perhaps do you love Christmas so much that you wish you could celebrate it more than once?  Well, luckily, you can.  This, friends, is the phenomenon of Second Christmas.  It may not be in the church calendar, but I am sure Jesus doesn’t mind having a second birthday party.  Who would?

It’s quite simple really.  It’s Christmas.  Just all over again.  We had a tree, lit and ornamented.  We had excellent company, to be sure.  And food.  So much food.  An excellent meal.

This past Saturday my friends and I celebrated the second annual Second Christmas.  It all began last year when one friend approached another friend and said, “My Christmas was sucky.  Can we have a do over?”  Since the other friend is more than keen on Christmas, rather like obsessed (though lovably so), he obliged with gusto.  They developed an elaborate menu, an assembly of guests, some Christmas decorations, and set Nat King Cole going on Pandora.  Thus was the birth of Second Christmas.  Apparently, it was such a success, that my friends made it an annual event.

This year, given my strange Israeli Christmas experience, it seemed like a great idea to have another go at the holiday.  I soon realized that Second Christmas is a great excuse to pull out all the stops on the menu, sparing no expense nor substituting anything from any recipe.  Here was our fare with links to the recipes:

Second Christmas Menu

To Begin

Apple Chestnut Soup

Greens and Apple Salad with Dried Cherries and Walnuts

Stuffed Mushrooms*

Entrée

Roast Chicken with Double Cranberry and Thyme Sauce

Sides

Scalloped Yukon Gold and Sweet Potato Gratin with Fresh Herbs

New England Sausage, Apple and Dried Cranberry Stuffing

Pan Browned Brussel Sprouts in Garlic Butter

Dessert

Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread

Lavender Chocolate Bars

Apple Pie with Brandy-Soaked Cranberries and Currants

I starred* the recipe for stuffed mushrooms because, I am pleased to say, they were my invention.  I based them on the stuffed mushrooms they serve at Maggiano’s, or at least as best I could from memory of how they tasted.  Here is what I did:

Emily’s Stuffed Mushrooms

Preheat oven to 400 Degrees.

Wash mushrooms and hollow them out, reserving and dicing the stems.  Arrange mushrooms on a baking sheet lined with foil.

Dice 1 medium shallot

Wash 1 bag baby spinach

Mince 2 cloves Garlic

Mince 3 strips of bacon.

Heat a skillet on medium and sauté bacon bits until crispy.  Add shallot and garlic and sauté until translucent.

Add Spinach and cover until spinach is wilted.

Wisk one egg.  Add cottage cheese (enough for however many mushrooms you have). Add salt, pepper, and Italian seasonings and stir until well mixed.

Once vegetables are done, add them to the egg and cheese mixture and stir.  Spoon mixture into mushrooms and form a nice heap.

Mix together bread crumbs, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper in a small bowl.  Sprinkle this mixture on top of the mushrooms.

Bake until cheese starts to brown, about 20-30 min.

Enjoy!

Alas, I have no pictures of these because they were gone faster than I could remember I ought to have photographed them.

Avatar: A Lamentable Waste

In every interview with a Pixar director they stress over and over the need for a good story.  If the story isn’t good enough, they say, the audience loses interest.  You could have all the special features in the world but if the story doesn’t carry it through, it’s not worth it.  James Cameron should have had lunch with some of the Pixar directors.  Hear this, Mr. Cameron:  Avatar wasn’t worth it.

I look at the Avatar enterprise as a tremendous tragedy.  What a huge waste of money, talent, and time!  Since seeing the film last week I’ve been telling people that if they go see Avatar, they should bring some earplugs—it would be much better if they didn’t know what was going on and could just drink in the beauty of the 3D film.  In the case of the Avatar story, ignorance is bliss.

To be fair, I am happy I saw the movie because it is, as many other reviewers have mentioned, spectacularly stunning and unique in genre.  It pummels over precedents with its impressive special effects and animation, drawing you fully into this alien world.  I loved how they played with the idea of bioluminescence, creating plants and animals that glowed hazy blues and pinks and greens, an effect which, especially in 3D, bedazzled all aesthetic sensibilities.  Let me not forget the floating mountains—oh the floating mountains—how gloriously you gave new meaning to majesty.  And this praise means a lot, especially considering I still don’t understand what’s up with the blue cat people.  Regardless, I congratulate Avatar’s artists for their vision.

Avatar’s writers, on the other hand, ought to be drawn and quartered for their implicit racism, lack of creativity, and extremely twisted and disturbing understanding of human nature. Many of you might have heard or noticed for yourself that the plot line for Avatar is practically identical to Disney’s Pocahontas.  The basic gist is a soldier arrives in a new world and wants to explore.  He comes across a female of the native people and learns from her aspects of her culture.  As is the way with predictable stories, they fall in love.  Despite their relationship, the two peoples are fated to war, and a battle ensues.  Fine.  Whatever.  Very nice.  But Pocahontas manages to have one up on Avatar.  The story of Pocahontas is a woman rescuing a stranger and managing to bring peace between nations.  Avatar assumes a paternalistic tone in that the male protagonist must go in and save the natives who supposedly couldn’t possibly fathom the coming threat.  In this sense, the movie came off as shockingly racist, especially given that all of the native people spoke and dressed as African tribal peoples.  Somewhere in the design of this film these writers and designers said to each other, “OK, they are supposed to look savage.  Let’s make them African.”  Oh please tell me, where are the finger-pointers?  Or are we suddenly supposed to be OK with this association between Africans and savages? “But they aren’t really portrayed as savages,” says Avatar’s hypothetical defense, “they are actually a superior species in their values.”  Sorry, guys, but I’m afraid that doesn’t actually make it better.  In fact it makes it worse.  Not only is the film racist, it also achieves a hefty amount of reverse racism, in that it portrays Americans (all of them white, by the way) as being simple-minded imperialists drowning in avarice and destroying environments in the process.  What kind of statement did Cameron wish to make here?  Does he do any service to anyone by portraying almost all of his human characters this way?    It seems as far as Cameron is concerned, to be a white American is to destroy the world.  Great.

Ah, but you might say, not all of the humans were portrayed this way.  There were some who stood their ground in defense of the natives.  But here Cameron fails again.  None of the characters in the whole movie were developed sufficiently as to evoke any sympathy from me.  Maybe I am a tough audience, but once again I can’t help but look at this as another wasted opportunity.  The protagonist, for instance, was a cripple.  They could have done so much in developing that—his motives, his longings, his history.  As far as we know, he had no history besides being a marine and having a dead brother.   Where did he come from?  Why should we care?  Where is the exposition?  Now let’s look at Sigourney Weaver’s character.  She was a scientist; they could have done so much more with her as a heroine or a defender of knowledge or a source of enlightenment to both cultures or something.  But no.  She dies.  Big whoop. Her character struck me as completely tangential to the plot, what little there was of that to begin with.

Overall, the movie was neither moving nor uplifting nor enlightening.  Just pretty.  And that’s about all I’ll say on that.

Blind Photography

I want to interrupt these stories about Israel to show you guys this awesome slideshow I saw this morning on the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8466714.stm

Please view this link and watch the whole slideshow. It will blow your mind, even if you only have an inkling of interest in photography.  The photos in that slideshow were all taken by visually impaired photographers who were given the assignment of capturing their sensory experience on film.  Thus, the resulting photographs become visual representations of what the blind experience.  While initially the idea of blind photography may raise an eyebrow or two, the photographs in this slideshow produce stunning compositions delighting the eyes as well as the other senses the images evoke.  Personally, the slideshow opened my eyes, so to speak, to the idea that photography can evoke far more than simply a visual response.  Just as good writing could make the reader identify with sounds, smells and feelings, good photography likewise can draw a viewer into a holistic sensory experience.  Who would have thought that capturing an image might require shutting one’s eyes?

Bethlehem Fail

Safe to say, it was the strangest Christmas of our lives.  I’m still in disbelief that Christmas happened at all, actually.  The irony, of course, was that we were in the very spot of Jesus’ birth, so you’d think that the authenticity would add to the celebratory atmosphere.  Think again.

I don’t mean to complain.  It’s just that we worked so hard to get there.  I thought Bethlehem would be the highlight of the trip.  Granted, it still might have been, if only we had received trustworthy help earlier on.  The way to do Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, as we lamentably found out after the fact, is to sign up with a group a head of time—a group with its own bus, with its own service, its own system.  Doing it solo, as we did, failed miserably.

Some background:  The West Bank is broken up into different territories governed and protected by either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Bethlehem currently belongs to the Palestinians, meaning the land sits behind an enormous barbed wired wall and is guarded by countless numbers of armed soldiers.  Given this political situation, going to Bethlehem as a tourist seems more than slightly daunting.  The Frommers Guide didn’t even include any West Bank Cities in the book.  In reality, there likely would be little danger to tourists, and all it means is taking out your passport another time and pretending like the guns don’t bother you.  But on Christmas Eve there were even more guns than usual.  And the picture I had in my head of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, well, had no guns, to say the least.

Our troubles began when the American Express Concierge Service told us about Protestant services in the Shepherd’s Fields on Christmas Eve outside Bethlehem.  That sounded too cool to pass up.  What authenticity to experience!  I now wish we had given up when American Express sent us info on churches in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  But, alas, we looked past this and pushed forward.  We called tourism offices.  We called churches.  We called the YMCA.  No one seemed to know what we were talking about (even though all of these places did, in fact, lead their own groups).  Few people even seemed to take an interest in our question.  It was not until Christmas Eve when we finally reached the Christian Tourist Office in Jerusalem that we found out these services did in fact exist but we were too late to sign up for them.  Here was another place we should have given up, and didn’t.  We asked the lady there if there were protestant services in English in Bethlehem for which we could just show up and get a seat.  She said there was: St. George’s Church, right next to the Church of the Nativity, had a service at 11:00pm.  Awesome, I thought.  Finally, a breakthrough: we would be able to go to Bethlehem after all.  More than this, the Ministry of Tourism had free buses that shuttled people across the border.

Oh Fate, how fickle you are.

We waited 45 minutes for this free bus.  Fortunately there were other people waiting in that dark parking lot so we knew we weren’t in the wrong place.  I wish we had been.   Finally it came, we boarded, and five minutes later we were at the Bethlehem wall—huge, concrete, and imposing.  Surly men with grimaces and guns were there to greet us.  The bus let us off on the side of a busy roundabout and it was at this point I was happy I had bought a map earlier that day.  The Church of the Nativity turned out to be a 20 minute walk away up a series of hills and past hundreds of loitering young men who stared at us as we past by.  Some of them yelled out, “Maydee Chreestmas!” which seemed festive on the one hand, though I couldn’t help but feel that they probably had no idea what that meant.  As we walked, I remembered that scene from It’s a Wonderful Life when George is running through Bedford Falls when it had transformed into a Godless place with flashing neon lights above the gambling houses and Girls Girls Girls Dance halls and drinking in the streets.  I felt Bethlehem had taken a similar turn as Bedford Falls.  All was dark except for the giant plastic Santa Claus statues lighted up outside the tourist shops where older Palestinian men stood waiting for sucker customers.  The buildings were worn and shoddy. There was barbed wire everywhere.  There were so few women.  Up and up we went to get to the Church of the Nativity in the center of town where we had heard there would be a projection of the service shown on screens outside the building for the people who couldn’t fit inside.  When we finally made it past the throngs of people and armed police, we discovered not a peaceful church service but a raucous rock concert with a loud band singing in Arabic.  The place was packed and surrounded by machine guns.  We circled the square looking for St. George’s church.  We vaguely saw a sign for St George through the hoards of people and we headed toward it. After great difficulty, we made it to that corner, where we made the unfortunate discovery that St. Georges was a restaurant, not a church.  A protestant service in English…a hope that faded very quickly.

We continued circling around the crowd, dodging between smoky exhales and trying hard to stay together.  We moved over towards the church of the Nativity to see if there was any hope of getting in, if not to stay for the service, then just to look at the place.  But by the time we got over there, we found ourselves face to face with machine guns as policemen pushed the crowd back into itself trying to make room for cars that needed to pass through.  I stood there with no where to go, and my younger siblings there beside me, all three of us unable to tear our eyes away from the weapons.  Merry Christmas indeed.

It was time to give up.  Actually, that time came long before, but this was the moment we chose to finally turn around.  We went back to where the bus had dropped us off.  Along the walk I tried to make light of the situation, and reworded the tune to Oh Little Town of Bethlehem to make it go something like this:

Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, beneath your bright neon lights,

In darkened streets, cops pack big heat,

And tourists run in fright.

Folks were only slightly amused.  I prayed, wondering if we had missed God’s signs not to come.  I knew immediately upon having this thought that it is futile to think of those what ifs.  I felt God telling me, no need to dwell upon what could have been if only.

We made it back to the drop off point by the busy traffic circle.  There we waited watching the stampede of cars and buses honk their way through the mass.  We all wondered whether the bus would return at all.

As we sat there, a thought occurred to me, a thought that changed everything.  I wondered at that moment if any one in history had ever seen Bethlehem lie still.  Was it really a deep and dreamless sleep with silent stars going by, the night that Christ was born?  I doubt it.  There was no room at the inn.  That means the place was crowded with all the folks returning home for the Roman census, just as Joseph was doing with his bride.  Joseph and Mary faced rejection and great discomfort in Bethlehem, though indubitably much worse than the upset we experienced.  They had no where to go, no friendly face to care for them.  Talk about a moment for going into labor.  Though I have no personal experience with this as of yet, in my understanding, nothing about childbirth is terribly peaceful.  The true Christmas was probably truly chaotic.  Perhaps we have developed so great of a misrepresentation of that glorious night that we completely forget the desolate and humble circumstances by which Christ made his introduction to the world.  For goodness sake, Mary had no choice but to lay her newborn in a feeding trough for lack of a better, and cleaner, place to put him.  I feel this realness, the grittiness, of the first Christmas is crucial to remember, for it is precisely his humble origins that magnify the miracle of Christ’s immaculate human existence.  For after all, which is the more glorious: a king constantly dwelling in comfort, or a king emerging from poverty? Strangely enough our wretched trip to Bethlehem helped me see this.  We came to share in some of Christ’s experiences, and that may be precisely what we got through Bethlehem’s mayhem.  It is possible that, in a small way, our excursion on Christmas Eve might be a more authentic Christmas experience than we might have realized.  God’s funny like that sometimes.

The Fortress of Nimrod

When you were a kid, did you ever imagine yourself discovering an ancient castle?  Did you make believe you reached the peak of a mountain to find yourself amidst the overgrown remains of an ancient fortress?  And in this dream, did you come across darkened stairways, secret chambers, and any number of lookout points?  Did you look out and see miles and miles of beautiful land stretching out in all directions?

Well, bust out that inner child, because these things really exist.

Nimrod Fortress

The day we went north to see Caesarea Philippi, we thought it might be cool to follow the Frommer’s Guide advice and make another stop at the Nimrod Fortress.  In ancient times, the road to Damascus went right below it, making it a very strategic place to have a fortress, or at least, both the crusaders and Muslim caliphs thought so.  As we drove up the hill toward the magnificent stone remains of the fortress, I imagined trying to storm the castle, running up that huge hill under fire of flaming arrows raining down on top of me from beyond the walls of the fortress. Intimidating much?  Up and up we climbed, switching back and forth on hairpin turns until finally we reached the entrance to the national park.   “The view is worth it,” the book said. This turned out to be a great understatement. Nimrod Fortress stood at the top of an enormous hill with a 360 degree view of the Promised Land.  The air was cool and dry and the whole place smelled sweet. Across the valley you could hear bells ringing from around the necks of distant sheep—you could barely make out their little white figures as they traversed the rugged terrain.  The whirring of a gentle breeze flowed past our ears.  We could barely stop staring at the vastness of the view.

A Fortress with a View

On a side note, we worried in planning this trip that there might be bad weather if we went to Israel in the winter.  It only rained twice on our whole trip, and one of those was at night so that doesn’t really count.  Temperatures never got too cold or too hot—I’ve rarely had such pleasant tourism as far as the weather was concerned.  We soon realized December is a fantastic time to visit this country because so few other people do!  We rarely if ever waited in lines to see the sights; I could barely believe our good fortune.  I knew that coming at any other time of year we likely would have been constantly fighting crowds, not to mention blistering heat.  We experienced neither problem on our trip. In the entirety of Nimrod Fortress we probably saw a total of four other people, so for most of it, we really felt as though we could have very well been discovering it for the first time.  We felt like Indiana Jones.  I’m going to need a hat and a whip if I ever get to do something like that again.

Do you remember that scene in Prince Caspian when the Pevensie Children discover the ruins of Cair Paravel?  In case you don’t, time in Narnia is faster than time on Earth, which means that when you leave Narnia, Narnian years speed by without you noticing.  So when the children returned to their home castle they found it had been 1300 Narnian years since they had left, though for them it had only been a year.  The whole castle was overgrown with moss and shrubs and some gnarly trees sprouting out from the piles of white stones.  Nimrod’s Fortress looked so similar to that scene my Narnia fanaticism flared up so I was like a Trekkie meeting Patrick Stewart.

Unlike so many of the other archeological finds in Israel, Nimrod Fortress stands out because so much of it is still in tact.  There were whole rooms that were still going strong with impressive engineering of enormously weighty stones.  More than this, we found darkened staircases and tunnels, which, of course, we never hesitated to explore.  And not just staircases, but twirly staircases…can you believe it?  The rule was, if it’s a dark tunnel of stone, go down it.  I had to keep pressing on my camera flash to see where I was going.  The tunnels led out to many look-out rooms with slots in the stone where, I surmise, guards used to man watch posts.  We made sure to explore every possible opportunity for secret chambers.

The fortress stretches along an ascending ridgeline, so we gradually made our way up to the taller end, taking our time exploring the various rooms along the way.  In one of the chambers we saw a huge column in the center that curved outward at the top to form five points which turned downward to five pointed windows.  It completely boggled my mind thinking of what it must have been like to carve all that stone so perfectly as to create that effect, and to have it standing millennia later.

At one point in our visit I turned around and discovered my brother was no longer behind me.  I went back to see where he could have gone.  There was a secondary path leading down around the opposite side of the castle.  I figured he must have gone down there, but I couldn’t see him.  I called out his name.  I will never forget seeing my brother’s head emerge from a crevice in the side of that castle with a huge smile.