Sent: 11/30/2007 7:56 AM
Hi Everyone,
The skies have turned gray and the rains will return next week, but for now Jerusalem is still pretty warm, light jacket weather. It's the season when we start to think of escapes to the Rift Valley to warm up. I had a meeting with our staff archeologist this week on a case study we are preparing for the Delos Initiative (something like Word Heritage Sites, but for sacred landscapes of cultural and spiritua value). We had picked En Gedi, the oasis on the Dead Sea, as our first example:
It is not only in the Bible, but has one of the oldest temples in the world, Chalcolithic, up on the cliffs in the upper reaches of the oasis. It aso has natural value as a tropical sanctuary rich in special plant and animal species.
We realized quickly that we need input from the managers of the nature reserve there, so I arranged to spend three days in January down there talking to people and taking notes. (Okay, and soaking in the hot springs and taking in the sun, and warming my old bones in this tropical paradise less than two hours from Jerusalem.) In the interest of scientific research, two friends immediately offered to come down and help, of course.....
Meanwhile back here in Jerusalem, tomorrow the German Lutheran Church in the Old City will hold its annual Christmas Market (Weinachtmarkt). It is a miniature version of the real thing in Germany, with crafts, charity tables selling Christmas cards, people making Belgian waffles and selling Christmas cake and cookies, tea, coffee and gluhwein. This is the big annual event for the German expat community in the Jerusalem area, but it is also popular among Palestinian Christians and Israelis who have contact with the Palestinian Christians or the Germans.
A bunch of us will meet up there, a lady professor from Bir Zeit, a Catholic nurse, a German librarian who works at the Holocaust Museum, and a few others like this, check out the tables, grab coffee and catch up on a year of news. We have all been seasoned in the edgy world of Israeli/Palestinian relations and such meetings are a chance to share our experiences with each other.
I am particularly curious to hear their views on Annapolis of course, but I also want to hear how they live their faith lives here here. They are all practicing Christians, from a wide spectrum. Like me, all these ladies are professionals, long term outsiders resident in this part of the world where tribal and ethnic loyalties are the bedrock substrate of religion for locals, Jew and Arab alike. We have a lot in common and I don't hear enough from them. In these circumstances, Catholic and Protestant dissolve, and we are one community, neither Jew nor Arab. It's one of the few groups where I really feel I belong.
Finding another one like yourself is important. I had another meeting on data management with our systems analysis team for the "masterplan" of the organization where I work. I don't know if this "masterplan" will ever amount to a hill of beans, but I have a strong liking for the systems analysts who work on it. Like me, they are into puzzle solving and highly creative at it. We really enjoy our brainstorming sessions. This time we talked in a larger group for a couple hours, and then after lunch they sent their young database developer to my office. He had a few questions and ended up staying another two hours. He had no idea that such a thing as conservation informatics existed in the world and is quite excited to stumble into it. I have invited him to another jam session we are having with the informatics guy who just joined Israel's LTER (long term ecosystem research team).
The LTER guy just immigrated from New Mexico, which is full of informatics specialists, and is finding his feet. He was afraid that he was the only one in Israel so he was delighted to find me, and vice versa. Our jam sessions tend to be intense and leave everyone else in the dust, so I thought this systems analyst guy might be one of the few to keep up and enjoy it. We also have a group in Tel Aviv meeting on data managment for different land management bodies, and I am bringing the LTER guy there as well. We all suffer from being the only one where we work and nobody really understands what we do.
Things are looking better. I've had a very bad year, but it's passing. Health is almost normal again after a year of illness and weakness. I am changing in a lot of ways. At work I am shouldering more responsibility for group efforts (this giant European project is waking up). In my congregation, I finally walked away from a situation that distressed and blocked me for years. It wasn't easy, but I feel better now, and open to develop in other ways. It is hard to break old habits but the alternative is to be fossilized and frustrated. I know lots of people who end like that too.
It's not good just to blow up in angry rebellion and then sink back into the same old routine that caused it. The harder alterntive is to analyze the situation, figure out the problem and identify what is best for yourself. One thing I learned is that I have to be true to myself and my own beliefs and principles. If I bend that too much in order to liked, to be part of a group, to be obliging, then I end up lying to myself. That is the root of a lot of spiritual disease. The way out has to start with the truth.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
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