Donna's Holy Fire! Experience
Some of you know that I took half my days off from team
to take a course called 'Holy Fire!' at St. George's College in Jerusalem.
Sometimes it was like being in Hebron, as when the Israeli blue police,
border police, and gray police were staffing barricades to restrict people's
movement in Jerusalem's Old City, to keep them from reaching the Holy Fire
ceremony in the Church of the Resurrection. Our group never got in. We
went round our elbow to get to our knee and ended up down the street and
around the corner from the church. Our candles did get lit with the fire
generated in Jesus's tomb. It was like Hebron too on the Friday night after
the Arab Orthodox congregation had processed three times around the parvis
to commemorate Jesus's burial, when the young men in the crowd passed out
broadsides of the Greek patriarch calling him a Judas for selling Greek
Orthodox church-owned property to Israelis, scuffled with the police and
unfurled a Palestinian flag while shouting anti-Israel slogans. Our group
was caught in the middle, but it was mild compared with what probably would
have happened in Hebron under similar circumstances -
tear gas and percussion grenades and maybe rubber-coated plastic bullets.
Sunday 15 May was Pentecost. There is the room on the
lower level of St. Mark's Syrian Orthodox Church and the Upper Room on Mount
Zion, both in the Old City, purporting to be the site of the coming down of
the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. I was at St. George's Anglican Cathedral in
East Jerusalem. They had combined the services for the Arabic-speaking
congregation and the expats. All the clergy of Israel and Palestine and
members of their congregations who could get there were there, along with
the bishop. The liturgy of the word was first in Arabic, then in English.
The Palestinian lector read, "All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other languages.. how is it that we hear each of us,
in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of
Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome,
both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs - in our own languages we hear
them speaking about God's deeds of power."
And the Holy Spirit had come down. And I couldn't stop
weeping for joy.
As the two men in dazzling clothes in Luke's gospel
asked the women at the tomb, "Why do you look for the living among the
dead? He is not here, but has risen."
The Holy Fire was there at St. George's on Pentecost.
Alleluia Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
Alleluia.
Indeed.
17 May 2005
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