Travel

‘Floored’ by history – The city of Madaba

Madaba which means ‘calmly moving water’ in Aramaic is located about thirty kilometres south west from the capital city of Amman. In the Bible, Madaba, a Moabite town is mentioned in Joshua 13:9, 16 and in Numbers 21:30 as ‘Medeba’. David also vanquished an Ammonite and Aramean coalition near Madaba (I Chronicles 19: 7). His victory was short-lived, however, as in the mid-ninth century BCE the Moabite King Mesha freed the city from the control of the Israelites (2 Kings 3). This is the land that Moses gave to the Reubenites as their inheritance. Historically, at the time of the Exodus and conquest in 1406 BC, Madaba and Mt. Nebo were part of the territory of Moab.

The city of Madaba

Around 614 AD the Persian sacked Madaba and it was further ruined by an earthquake in 747 AD after which it stood abandoned for a thousand years.  In 1880 a group of 2000 Christians from Karak settled in Madaba. The Ottomans allowed the Christians to build Churches but only on the same location as the ancient Churches. The sites of the ancient Churches going back to the Byzantine period were marked by mosaic floors and this helped the Christians identify these ancient Churches. A total of 14 Churches were reconstructed which earned the city the nick name; city of mosaics.

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Travel

Walking into HIStory, discovering my God of mystery!

I have always been a man on the move; hurricanes sometimes get a complex in my presence. Even for the love of God I can’t see myself as dense or as dead as the Dead Sea; onward and forward is my motto. Yet here I am embarking on a journey that will only let me take one step forward if I am willing to take two thousand steps back. That’s the power of the ‘terrae sanctae’ or the Holy Land.

For quite a while I have held out on embarking on such a journey for I have been put off by the many narratives of pilgrims who have expressed their disappointment about the commercialization of this sacred land by business establishments and governments. Yet deep within I feel my heart tugging me to Jerusalem, longing to walk the sands of time in the city of God and sing with the psalmist, “at last our feet are standing within your gates O Jerusalem.’ (Psalm 122:2)

My journey will begin in the wee hours of the fifth of November 2018 and will end in twelve days. Like Egeria the nun who chronicled her pilgrimage in 380 AD or the unknown ‘pilgrim of Bordeaux’ who chronicled the oldest known Christian itinerarium recounting his journey to the Holy Land in the years 333, I too hope to pen not only what my eyes see but also what my heart dares to experience.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where God brought an end to Moses’ long journey on Mount Nebo will be the starting point of my journey of faith. From this mountain, my journey will take me to the Holy mountain of Jerusalem and the many cities of Israel which Our Lord set foot on.

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Faith

The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)

I am reproducing for your benefit a series of questions and answers taken from the Catechsim of the Catholic Church that will help you understand this day better.

What happens to us when we die?

In death, body and soul are separated. The body decays, while the soul goes to meet God and wants to be reunited with its risen body on the Last Day.

What is eternal life?

Eternal life begins with Baptism. It continues through death and will have no end.

Will we be brought to judgment after death?

The so- called particular or persona judgment occurs at the moment of death of the individual. The general judgment, which is also called the Last Judgment, occurs on the Last Day, at the end of the world, when the Lord comes again.

In dying every man arrives at the moment of truth. Now it is no longer possible to repress or conceal anything; nothing more can be changed. God sees us as we are. We come before his tribunal, where all is made right of if we are to be in God’s holy presence at all, we must be “right” with him, as right as God wanted us to be when he created us.

Perhaps we will still have to undergo a process of purification, or maybe we will be able to fall in to God’s arms immediately. But perhaps we will be so full of wickedness, hatred and denial of everything that we turn our face away from love forever, away from God. A life without love, however, is nothing but hell.

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Faith

Solemnity of All Saints   

To my mind, eulogies delivered in Church often over focus on the human skills and qualities the deceased loved one possessed, rather than the virtues of their Christian calling by which they lived. Sometimes the emotions of the eulogists run so high that virtues are magnified to the level of sanctity and   I am often times tempted to look into the coffin to see if the person spoken of is really the same person that I know.

And yet there have been funeral eulogies which have deeply moved me. One such eulogy that deeply impacted my life was the funeral of the father of Fr Anil Rego, one of the priests of the Archdiocese of Bombay. The deceased gentleman’s spouse, Philomena had passed away a few months earlier and now it seemed that Leonard had died of a broken heart. The son who delivered the eulogy spoke not of his deceased father but of his parents, for he said he could not conceive even talking about his deceased father without mentioning in the same breath his mother. They were joined at the hip, not at birth, but by marriage and they lived their Christian calling as a holy family.

I left the Eucharist feeling deeply moved with the distinct feeling that I had attended the funeral of a saintly man who lived a saintly Christian life. I had never met Leonard Rego in life and yet in death he had stirred my heart to love Christ even more and I believe of all those sitting in the congregation that day. I went back to the parochial house nourished by both, the Eucharist and the example of a man who lived a saintly life.

While most saints have a particular feast day on the Catholic calendar not all of those feast days are observed. The Solemnity of ‘All saint day’ is observed to honour the many saints in heaven and those who are saints in the heart of God but never declared by the Church, perhaps people like Leonard and Philomena. It is good to keep in mind that saints canonized by the Catholic Church are not persons who were ‘made saints’  by the Pope but persons, who  by a process of discernment, were declared to be ‘holy’,  for such a reality already existed in the heart of God .

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Art/ Heritage

ALL HALLOWS EVE: ‘The Adoration of the Trinity’ by Albrecht Durer (1511)

Halloween! It is a fun and freaky day filled with parties and parades, pranks and pumpkins and of course tricks and treats. It is with great pleasure that people attend horror gatherings dressed as vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, skeletons, witches or other fancy characters. Party halls and homes are decorated with tombstones and coffins. For it is believed that on this fatal day the veil between this world and the next is lifted and all hell breaks loose!

However, just as the many masks worn by children and adults on October 31st, Halloween itself is guised under a long forgotten faith and a super enchanting history. Popularly attributed to the Celtic traditions, the Catholic origin of the festival can be traced to the papacy of Pope Gregory IV (827 – 844 A.D.) who instituted the feast of All Saints on the first day of November. In anticipation and preparation for this great liturgical celebration, a Vigil would be organised the night before. This vigil was known as ‘All Hallows Eve’ or ‘All Holy/Saintly Eve.’ Thus Halloween is simply a corruption of the original root word.

Beyond the modern macabre of the culture of death lies a Catholic celebration of great gusto and life. The spirit of this feast is fabulously rendered by the great German artist Albrecht Durer in one of his most celebrated paintings titled ‘The Adoration of the Trinity’. The massive altar piece was commissioned by a rich merchant, Matthaus Landauer, of Nuremberg in 1508 for a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity and All the Saints.

The composition though complex bears a symmetrical scheme. We are greeted at the terrestrial sphere by none other than the artist himself. The horizons of the earth-bound are bedecked with stone-clad medieval castles, dry desert regions, the empty sea and chilly glaciers. However the grass, quite literally, is greener on the other side (foreground). Our docent, Durer, stands at the peak of a hill, holding a wooden board bearing his credentials. His dwarfed being is juxtaposed against a massive multitude of heavenly hosts. It is the ‘New Jerusalem’, the ‘New Garden of Eden’ and the ‘Unending Sabbath’.

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