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The Via Dolorosa attracts all christian pilgrims. On Friday afternoons there is a Franciscans procession down the street from The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Chris and I came across them on our first foray into old Jerusalem.
This is the women's section of the Wailing Wall.
Nesting in the wall there are white doves. A sign of hope.
At the Garden of Gethsemane there is this bas relief. I found these words in Ray Barraclough's poetry book "Poetry for Pilgrims" (Ray was chaplain at St George's when he published this in 1992.)
"If trees could talk
these trunks could tell a tale
as would shake the branches
of the world.
Through their roots
twice cousined trees
reach back
into the soil that soiled his knees.…"
Sometimes you focus on the place. You think of events occuring so long ago. And feel quiet and alone.
But you are there with pilgrims. There are many. And we are all there together, and alone with our god.
The Church of the Ascension. A German Evangelical church.
When looking for the proper title for this church I found an interesting web site:
http://tinyurl.com/yglx5gh
"When the Wohlrabs arrived there two and a half years ago thoroughly committed to dialogue, their first experience was to witness the setting up of fences around the complex due to the construction on one side of the compound of a mosque and the presence of a radical Jewish settlement on the other. For Michael Wohlrab this geographical situation is emblematic of the plight of Christians in the country. "The question is: Are we going to be crushed in the middle or will we succeed in building bridges?"
Many of these potential builders of bridges are no longer in the city. Mark Brown, the LWF regional representative, knows the figures by heart: "In 1946, 31,000 Christians, 35,000 Moslems and 98,000 Jews lived in Jerusalem. In 2000, there were 440,000 Jews, 220,000 Moslems and 14,000 Christians." According to pessimistic estimates, the number of Christians in Jerusalem at present could be as low as 6,000."
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The site was first published in 1999
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