A Confession, a Dream, and a Church

A couple blogs ago I mentioned that I didn’t receive any dreams during the time I was asking God for discernment in deciding what to do about grad school. That wasn’t entirely true. It slipped my mind at the time of writing that blog, and it wasn’t necessarily relevant, but I thought I should confess, especially now because it’s convenient for a blog as I wrap up my time here shortly.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the oldest standing and largest structures in Jerusalem’s Old City, is the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. There is a lot to see there, the last 4 stations of the Via Dolorosa, or ‘Way of the Cross’, several chapels from the various Orthodox and Catholic traditions, beautiful mosaics, paintings, and tremendous columns and ceilings. Perhaps the most important and most highly revered of all the locations in the church is the tomb of Jesus. I have been to the Holy Sepulchre perhaps five or six times now, but despite this, and after living in Jerusalem for a year, I never entered this holiest of holy places until yesterday. There have been various reasons for why this has been the case, most often because there is a mob of tourists standing in line to see it and when there are one, two, three tourist groups of fifty to a hundred tourists each waiting, the line forms a thick coil around the church that seems endless, while on other occasions it has been that one priesthood or another would require the tomb to do a ritual and allow no one else to go in. These are certainly earthly reasons, unsurprising to anyone who is familiar with the milieu of Jerusalem, especially the constant tension between pious reverence and accommodating tourism at holy sites, but I am still inclined to assign some spiritual importance to this as well, which came in a dream.

Sometime during the 1970s an archeological excavation was done in the Holy Sepulchre which revealed an even older sanctuary buried beneath an existing one (which is saying something considering the present one largely survives from the early 300’s AD). On one of the walls the archeologists found some ancient graffiti depicting a merchant ship and “DOMINE IVIMVS” written beneath it, which reads “Lord we shall go,” or less accurately, but what I think the contemporary vernacular would be, “Lord we came.” This graffiti attest to the site's importance for pilgrimage from an extremely early date in the Christian faith.

In my dream, I finally was able to experience the peace and awe of being a pilgrim. I finally entered Jesus’ tomb and sat down inside the small room. Rather than being rushed in an out by a priest, as is normally the case in real life, I was able to sit, relax, and experience the comfort of the Lord’s presence. In my dream there were books for people to draw or write a message celebrating their arrival to the tomb. The recently filled ones remained in the room and fresh empty books were plentiful. I imagined the filled books were occasionally removed and kept somewhere important to represent the collective experience of each Christian soul making this pilgrimage through the ages. I flipped through a few pages of a book, admiring the different colors people used to write, their unique handwriting, their imperfect spacing on the blank pages, and their drawings and adornments. I felt like a part of something greater, part of a beautifully imperfect human dimension, a throng of humanity not writing as people reaching out to God but as people who were sitting in God’s very presence, the writings of people that have reached their destination. And so I felt; ecstatic in the presence of the God with us. I wrote as one that has finally arrived, “Lord I came.” These laconic words encompassed everything I wanted to express to God as though he were before me, both the reason I direly hoped would leverage grace, and my thanks for the journey.

I went to the Holy Sepulchre one last time the other day and discovered the line for the tomb only a few dozen people long. I finally waited my turn, was crowded and hurried in and out. I had enough time to kneel and say a short prayer. But this was only the physical component of the spiritual experience I had weeks earlier. This was the frame not its contents, and I felt at peace. I know I have completed the journey.

Signs, Dreams, and Decisions

It was a decision that was more than a year in the making, researching, writing, perfecting…obsessing; but like I often find the case to be, it took the coercion of a deadline (even an extended one) to force me to make my decision. In trying to decide which grad school to attend, I made as much use of my personal relationship with God that I could leverage, praying and asking for signs and dreams. I developed an affinity for the ‘dream’ revelation after a vivid dream that took place little more than 2 years ago now, in the middle of a course on apocalyptic literature, which having forced me to read Daniel about 7 times in a two weeks span, apparently had a profound effect on my subconscious. It was not long after waking, processing, sharing the dream with others, and writing it down that I realized it was not the first dream with profound metaphorical or allegorical implications that could be described as nothing less than ‘revelatory,’ about my current life situation or perhaps even the future. As I train more and more to effectively become a scientist of the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern culture I feel it is important to maintain some grounding in the individual spiritual experience, and dreams are something that provide an outlet for that because they escape the realm of present scientific verification. Granting my very skeptical nature, dreams allow me to circumvent the irresistible desire to discern if they are merely illusory, or genuinely theophanic, they can be neither dismissed nor verified, and I like it that way. I think perhaps it’s someone of a gentleman’s agreement between God and I; I ask for little more certain than a dream, and I suspend my skepticism when they come. From time to time, it works, and it’s really the only somewhat objectively manifest spiritual function that I experience. All that said, I got no dreams…apart from ones without the trappings I expect in the aforementioned ‘revelatory’ sort.

What I got instead were signs. What I forgot to ask for however was the means to interpret them… Doing the manual labor I spend so much of time occupied with, my mind has the freedom to roam and contemplate decisions like this one, and there were a few moments when I felt something was being show (or shouted) to me. The first was the shepherds that daily graze their sheep and goats in the field adjacent to our worksite, the pleasant simplicity and serenity of this daily scene offered me some rest and reassurance that the sun would still rise regardless of what I chose, and I was able to be at rest merely in watching the herds among the other various critters scurrying about the work site. Two other events I interpreted as signs I couldn’t deduce a substantive meaning from despite my feeling that they had one. I believe it was a Saturday that I came to the work site to put in some extra work, hammering away at decades old window sealant that had hardened in the frames of broken out windows. I stepped away for a moment to use the bathroom, and at that very instant a tremendous branch, the size of a large tree itself, simply snapped off and landed on the fence bordering the work site and our neighbors property. Being out of sight, I assumed the loud sound was some children that have vandalized the property in the past, and I thought to myself “at last, an opportunity to confront them and yank them by the ear to their parents.” When I came around the corner and saw this huge branch blocking my path, I was surprised to say the least. As I write this, two things come to mind, the first that the tree falling on the fence was merely to say I was on the fence, a fairly obvious observation…or perhaps it was a reminder of a scene in the originally dream I mentioned earlier which itself contained a large broken tree on its side. The next sign occurred a few days later after I flipped over a brick to discover a scorpion beneath it. Keen to keep it as a pet and show it off to my neighbors I caught it in a water bottle and continued working. As I finished working and reached for my water bottle for a drink I remembered at the last moment to look down to make sure it was the bottle of water and not the bottle of scorpion. It was indeed the bottle of water, but the notion of having the option to drink refreshing water or a scorpion, and my heightened sensitivity to looking for signs meant I took this to be one, though I couldn’t discern which school was the water and which was the scorpion.

The final spiritual contribution to my decision was when, hours before the deadline, I prayed, and grabbed my, by now dusty, Bible to sit down to read it for direction. I opened it at random, like so many middle schoolers seeking divine guidance, but the place to which it opened truly did have meaning for me. It opened to James 1, likely not due to a divine hand, or my own, but because the pages and their binding had grown so accustomed to opening there. This truly was a sign, for as I read the familiar words I was reminded of who I was and received the affirmation that as long as I was true to myself, kept the words of James that I am so passionate about close to my heart and continued to persevere under trial, I would receive the crown of life promised by God.

It was with this divine blessing, some incredible and unexpected financial contributions from my immediate family, and enough planning an calculating for a lifetime on my part, that I’ve decided to attend Harvard.

So now, what does this mean for my ministry in the Middle East? The obvious questions is concerning it’s length. I will start Harvard’s program in mid-June which means that I will be coming back to America as of June, just a month from now. While this puts a hold on ministry here, I sincerely believe the training I receive at Harvard will, in the long run, allow me to be of far greater service to the current situation in Israel-Palestine, and perhaps the entire Middle East and America as well. As I mentioned in a prior blog, one of the reasons Harvard was my number one choice was because of its pluralistic environment. While I understand “pluralistic” is a vulgar word to many conservative Christians, attending Harvard Divinity School will provide me with opportunities like no other seminary in the world to study in precisely the situation I find myself here, with the hope of an outcome that will allow me to serve better here because of it. It also doesn’t hurt that I will have a world class education from the top university and top Biblical Studies and theology scholars on the planet.

I have a lifelong history of pairing ministry with the academic study of the Bible and hope that you too can see attending seminary as a continuation of my ministry rather than an interruption of it. In fact, I hope you see it as the opposite, in my commitment to do Masters level work in theology I hope you can see that in so doing I have made a lifelong commitment to serving God. Because of this, I would also welcome continued financial support through seminary if you feel so called, as there still remains a substantial need to be met, both in the money I have spent ministering here, as well as in what I will need once I begin seminary.

From my past, and future blogs I hope you can see that I truly do love serving here, the life, the culture, the places, the people, I could go on. God willing I will not be gone long.