FROM THE PASTOR
Holy Week
This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday and we enter into Holy Week and the Passion of Jesus Christ. I want to share with you a devotion I wrote on Palm Sunday for Lenten devotional published jointly by Lutheran and Methodist Campus Ministry in 1991. The background for the devotion is that with a Roman Catholic priest and Jewish Rabbi I led an interfaith pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In the Holy Land we met Marian, a journalist who covered and wrote about the pilgrimage. The devotion begins with a reflection by Marian.
“Throughout the trip there was a growing understanding. Throughout the trip there was dialogue and open mindedness. Throughout the trip there was prayer, which the group’s leaders called a ‘cocoon of love and harmony.’ There were several changes in attitudes toward Jews. As a Jewish reporter for a Jewish newspaper, I found covering the mission a challenge. Partly this involved exploring my own biases and defensiveness about sharing my Jewish homeland with Christians. But I knew that the other group members were doing the same.”
Her name is Marian, a journalist and teacher, who had lived in Jerusalem for several years and published an article on our journey. One day we explored every corner of Jerusalem, not the shrines and tourist attractions, but the people, the streets and back alleys of a city torn, yet vital. Marian, a wounded soul, conflicted at putting her spiritual and emotional legacy at risk in this journey to her roots, accompanied us in our entry into Jerusalem. We walked the streets of East Jerusalem to a Palestinian poeeter shop. In the back women sat and painted beautiful and intricate designs on cups, pitchers, vases and candlesticks. Marian sat down among them and conversed in Arabic. They spoke of writing and painting, of art and craft, of Arabs and Jews and the troubled future. When we left they shared a tearful embrace. I did not see Arab and Jew in the tableau in the pottery shop, as much as I saw women together, opening their hearts to one another, listening and connecting in a primal understanding which roots beneath lpolitics and ethnic hatred. It was a sign of hope in the city of Jerusalem, a reminder of another entry of a Jew into the chaotic city so long ago.
Stephen Paul Bouman
Jerusalem, 1991