Day 15 - Caesarea Maritima
Please pardon another short entry, today was a less dramatic day, but more profound in a way, and I'll get to why in a minute. Our main site today was a side trip to the Herodian harbor town of Caesarea Maritima along the Mediterranean coast, about halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Built as Herod's way of ingratiating himself to Caesar Augustus, it is another set of ancient Roman ruins including a cardo (something like today's equivalent of a main street) running through the city, a track used for chariot races, and a grand theater. (We've seen several of these types of sites now now, and while the general consensus is that the group members are a bit more awed by the religious ones than those of this nature, the splendor of the waters as blue as the sky certainly still made it something special.
We also saw an area in which Pontius Pilate would have kept an office of sorts, and from which he would likely have been summoned to Jerusalem for the trial of Jesus. It took us quite a while to get back as the traffic into Jerusalem was beyond belief due to the festival referred to yesterday. I'm writing this a little after 10:30 at night, and I can still hear the commotion (following an amazing fireworks display) outside my window. Apparently things have gotten a bit out of hand in past years, as the day revolves around school children as the primary celebrators, but apparently no major security breaches have taken place. Still, we were glad to be, for the most part, only exposed to the fringes of it.
I did want to comment, however, on the (I think) quite special chemistry this group seems to have. You hear so many horror stories especially on trips this long about tensions and bad blood that seem to break out among members of a group like this, but it seems to me that although several of us knew each other (a few very well) prior to this trip, even those about whom this is not the case are now talking like old friends. Various combinations of us had two highly enjoyable sessions up on our roof deck tonight, both before and after dinner, and discussed multiple topics, humorous and serious, significant and insignificant (several of us capping the night off with a lively game of hearts in which a certain player (ok, I'll admit it was me) learned that the bad karma you get from dropping the queen of spades on a priest in three consecutive rounds will always come back to bite you in the end!!!!).
But in any event, we got plenty of laughs at dinner too, aided by Father Michael's now famous story telling penchant. It seems rare for groups like this to relate to each other in such a seemingly unblemished way (especially groups with characters like we have) but I just felt this was worth a comment, and perhaps this is just the spirit of St. John's shining through. Well, four more days--can't believe it. Tomorrow we will have mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and then head to Jericho (where hopefully one day soon the situation will be such that the walls can come tumbling down again!!)
To peace.......
Alex
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