Goats heads and not so holy gates - Max

Stream of thought here, pitching in while others are out. The tourist industry is just that, an industry. They have it wired to shuffle you through the various religious sites and onto the restaurant that give kickbacks. The "Jesus Boat" took the cake for cheesy, playing the riders national anthem, as if that somehow had something to do with Jesus and the sea of Galilee. They even gave out certificates saying, "you rode this replica of a replica of a boat Jesus might have sailed on," or something like that. Still, I loved the water and the boat. My next favorite comedy of the trip was the chain smoking tour guide for the Church of the nativity. He had learned his shtick at the cafes in France, and translated it into an angry tour guide pointing at Holy sites with a cigarette butt. Third place prize for most absurd is the "wilderness" experience where four hundred tourists are funneled into a narrow parking lot,shuffled like lemmings through a turn style...when for miles in every direction there is actual wilderness with not a soul to interrupt ones spiritual contemplation.

Both the tour of the refugee camp and the tour of Hebron were "real". And while depressing for real reasons, refreshing for our immersion in actual life in the Holy Land. Israel proper is so European and developed the Christian sites often feel about as Holy as riding a fake cable car over the Golden Gate, but old Hebron is alive, even in its death. Fresh goats heads, complete with blood, hair and teeth, resting outside the shop in front of the closed cave like road that should lead to the vegetable market. The steal gate, metal detector and soldiers reminding us that the Grave of Abraham and family is not quite as Holy as we might hope. Then again, the tourist is the outsider here, and the seriously religious the norm, indicating perhaps, that we Christians don't quite share the same theology of space. Recall the response of Jesus to the woman at the well, "One day we will not be concerned about whether to worship God on this mountain or that (on this side of the temple or that) but we will worship in Spirit and in Truth." Maybe, since for Christians the "Kingdom of God is within you" means our "Holy Sites" are doomed to be shallow, or to put it differently, our real Holy sites are to be found deep in the heart of live human beings, in the harvest of olives and the breaking of bread with a farmer and his family.