Back in the ol' U.P.!

Greetings, Pilgrims! After almost two days of continuous travel, Mike and I are back in the glorious Upper Peninsula! We celebrated our return as we crossed over the bridge from Marinette to Menominee this morning!

I've got more pictures to post, and we've each got a few more blogs, so don't go away. I hope to have the pictures up tomorrow. If you have any lingering questions about the Holy Land, Jordan, our travels, etc, don't hesitate to post a comment, but do it soon!

Thank you each and every one of you for sharing this pilgrimage with us, and especially for your prayers. It has been a gift and blessing to try to share this journey via the blog and the pictures. This process has enriched the experience for me, and challenged me to think about the meaning and value of different events and places!

Of course, the pilgrimage continues, as our life here is itself a pilgrimage, a holy journey, a journey to the Lord and with the Lord. Please continue to keep Mike and I in your prayers as we continue to prepare for, God-willing, ordination to the diaconate on October 17th, and to the priesthood the following June. I will continue to pray for each of you!

God Bless,
Ben Hasse

P.S. That's my dad and I getting ready to go for a ski! And then with some of the students at DACS!

Welcome to Jordan!

Greetings, Pilgrims! We've been out of touch for some days now, enjoying Jordan. We've had several days of snow and rains since we got here, but the warmth of Jordanian hospitality have more than made up for it! Mike and I have both commented that, after the way we've been received here, it feels like we've never been hospitable to anyone before!

We've been staying with my friend Amal, her husband Jeries, and their little boy Laith. They're letting us stay in a vacant apartment below them where their grandparents used to live! We've also spent time with my friend Maher and his wife Nisreen. They and their families have treated us like royalty! And it's not just friends - many times we've been told by a taxi driver or someone in a shop as we leave, "Welcome to Jordan!" The overall feeling here is much more relaxed and easy-going than in Israel and the West Bank - obviously, there's nothing here in Jordan like the conflict that dominates life there.

I'd always imagined Jordan as desert, and most of the country is in fact desert. But from Amman north and west, it is actually quite fertile hills, with olive orchard, pine and oak-covered hills, and plenty of other agriculture. Maher was working on his Ph.D. in forestry at Purdue while I was working on my bachelors degree, and now he's the head of his department at the Jordanian University of Science & Technology. He took us on a tour of some forests last weekend ith his wife - it was awesome to be able to ask all the forestry questions I've been wanting to ask all these weeks!

This picture shows Mike and I eating with our hands, the traditional dish of rice, lamb, and a kind of goat's milk/yoghurt sauce! We were actually told to do it this way by Maher's father, and he obliged by modeling the proper method of rolling the rice and lamb into a ball, using the yoghurt sauce to stick it together! I LOVE Jordan!

There's lots of new pictures up at Picasa, so check them out!

God Bless,

Ben

The Last Batch of Jerusalem Photos

OK, after 3 hours of reviewing and selecting the photos, Mike and I have put up 5 new albums on Picasa (Link in the Left Margin) from the last 10 days or so of the pilgrimage. Fortunately, it's been cold and rainy here in Amman, Jordan, so there's been little excuse to go out and get wet!

We've also been catching up a little on a few blogs we meant to write earlier, so stay tuned!

Hopefully, we'll have some Jordan photos to post soon, but it's been hard to take photos in the rain! Fortunately, Amal and Jeries have welcomed us with extraordinary hospitality, including an entire furnished apartment!

God Bless,
Ben & Mike

P.S. Here's a PICTURE LINK so you can go right there!

P.P.S. And, nearly all the pictures have captions - Mike put most of them up, I've been filling in on some of the older albums. So, if you've looked at the pictures, and wanted to know what was in them, try now! - Ben

Where are the Holy Places?

Some weeks back, we received a very good question in a comment: How do you know where the Holy Places are?

The easiest sites are the big ones. Examples of this would the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount within Jerusalem. When these are spoken of in Scripture, we know what they are talking about. These sites may look different now, the water level may be higher or lower, but there is no doubt about where they are. It was a very powerful experience to swim in the Sea of Galilee back in early January, knowing that hear the Apostles fished, here they were called.

Next, I would say, we have the key specific spots, like Calvary or the Empty Tomb, or the Church of the Nativity. How do we know they're on the very right spot? It's actually the result of an interesting fillip of history. In 70 AD, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, razed to the ground. They expelled the Jews from the area, and destroyed any Jewish or Christian shrines. However, in order to ensure these sites could not be used for worship, on the most important ones they constructed pagan temples to the Roman gods! For some generations, the city of Jerusalem was known only by the new name, Aelia Capitolina, and many forgot the sacred history. However, in the 4th century, the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal. He and his mother, Queen Helena, commenced a building spree and built many important churches. In the Holy Land, they were able to dig up the pagan temples, and find the ruins of early churches beneath them! In the end, the Romans' desire to destroy the faith actually monumented these sites for posterity!

Finally, there are other sites where it is much less certain, and where we have little early record. For instance, there are three possible sites for Emmaus. Many agree that Mount Tabor is the sight of the Transfiguration, while some think it is Mount Hermon. Scripture does not always give us clear or unequivocal directions about where things ocurred. It is important to know that the sites are not perfectly certain. At the same time, this does not diminish the opportunity to venerate the tradition and the event at that site.

Before coming, and in the early days of the trip, this was an issue I thought about quite a bit. After a few weeks, though, seeing the River Jordan, the Mount of Olives, and realizing that I was unequivocally and without doubt in the Land of Jesus, I realized that even in the cases where we're not perfectly sure, I was still SO close! He walked through these hills and valleys, along the shores of this lake. The Gospels are certainly not just pretty stories, they actually happened!

The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us!

God Bless,
Ben

I thought of heaven

A few days ago we attended mass with a French Religious community somewhere on the Road to Emmaus. The monks and nuns there wore crisp white habits and veils, and when they bowed down double I realized how thin many of them were, and their faces gaunt [with fasting?] They sang beautiful resounding harmonies. A nun played this instrument I'd never seen before- it had a set of strings for each hand which were set perpendicular to the neck and drum like a sail (or some suspension bridges). She played this enchanting, driving, sort of sad accompaniment while the priest chanted the Gospel in french. I thought, 'if i make it to heaven, I hope they sing this as I walk up to the gate.' It was a sound which drove me to silence: I realized, "this is what our voices were made for." I stood afterwards facing the walls and studying the frescoes- the images were preserved only piecemeal and the faces of the saints had been sanded off somewhere in the centuries.

We had our morning of reflection yesterday. I can’t believe it’s the end of the pilgrimage! We went to Dominus Flevit for our final, official pilgrimage mass. It is a quiet spot halfway up the Mount of Olives which commemorates the place where Jesus wept over Jerusalem as He sat upon a colt, and people sang Hosanna. I sat picking a guitar in some clovers under a red pine- over the silver green tops of olive trees and the roof of the Church on the terrace below me I could see all of Jerusalem. My mind was mostly blank after ten weeks of travel and experience and intake. I felt like I’d just come out onto a bridge through a railway tunnel and found that the ground had dropped beneath me, and the train was hundreds of feet above the land. I thought of Revelation 21- the vision of a New Jerusalem coming down: the symbol of heaven. This pilgrimage has just been a compact version, or a microcosm of that larger pilgrimage that we are all on.

People e-mailed me and said that they feel as though they’ve been able to see the sites through our eyes- and I thought of how much all of you have been very much a part of the pilgrimage for me, and I really have carried you with me.

We still have a few more things to say so keep checking back! Thanks for journeying with us-
Mike

Snow in the Holy City!

So, it's not so common for there to be snow here in Jerusalem, but a week ago we got two days in a row. It was wet slushy snow, as the ground was nowhere near frozen, but it was beautiful in it's way, and much needed water in a dry land. We had a couple tours canceled as a result, so we also had those days almost off! Snow day in the Holy Land... who would have guessed. After an early morning walk around the city in the slush, I resigned myself to wet feet, and tromped around with abandon! It was nice to see the holy sites with a white crust. Check out the new album on Picasa (link to the left) to see some pictures. There are also a lot more pictures from Petra in Jordan in another album.

While Chris (a brother seminarian from New Hampshire) and I were making a snowman outside the Old City near Damascus Gate, a Polish woman named Danuta walked by. I'd met her the day before at adoration at the Fourth Station in the Armenian Catholic Church. I imagine there's quite a bit of a story behind the three Polish women there who run Adoration here in the Holy Land... how did they come here, what is their precise mission? She was very welcoming at the Adoration, and encouraging to me as a seminarian. Then I ran into her again while making the snow man... you realize this is a small community, particularly the Catholic community. If you were to live here for any significant time, I suspect you'd be networked in pretty quickly!

I hear there's lots of snow in the UP! I hope I get to cross-country ski a little bit when I get home! That's the end of this little ramble!

God Bless,

Ben