Ryan, Theodore and George start their day at 1am with a hike up Mt. Sinai to watch the sunrise at 5am. Then they hurry down the mountain and join us just 10 min into the Liturgy at the Church!
We arrive at the Monastery around 5:45am and walk up to the Monastery complex to join in the Divine Liturgy with the monks. I think Fr. Meletios and Fr. Martin attended the Matins service before that, since they spent the night at the monastery. The inside of the Church is the most amazing I have ever been to. The presence of God there is undeniable. We are all so happy when Ryan, Ted and George join us just minutes into the start of the Liturgy. Fr. Meletios tells us that we have the blessing of the Archbishop to receive communion, which we all do.
After the end of the Liturgy, we venerate the relics of St. Catherine, which Fr. Nillos brings out into the church, and each one of us received a ring of St. Catherine. We spend a few minutes with Fr. Nillos, who tells us the story of the Monastery and all the events that took place there. There are several places on the internet that give a great summary, I encourage you to read them. Just the story of St. Catherine is the most amazing, I think she is now one of my favorite Saints! We take pictures of the Burning Bush, the well by which Moses met 7 daughters and his wife Sephora.....
We then go into the Museum of icons. The icons of St. Catherine's monastery are some of the most famous in the world. The time in the icon museum is just not long enough, to look and appreciate what we are seeing. Steven did a great job of taking pictures of the various notes and also manuscripts, I feel like I missed most of the museum, concentrating on the icon of Christ Pantacrator and the icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent (the book "Ladder of Divine Ascent" was written at St. Catherine's Monastery by St. John Climacus, where he was an abbot in (....)
We are then met by Fr. Justin, a monk from Texas, a historian and keeper of monastery's library. He actually takes us to the library room and shows us a few rare manuscripts that will be shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts during an exhibit next year, maybe....
And all along, as we move throught the monastery that morning, we experience rain!!! It only rains maybe 4 days a year and it rains while we are there!!!
We also quickly visit the ossuary, a place where monks' bones are kept, all of the monks who lived here since the 6th century. It the desert it is impossible to find places to bury everybody separately, so the graves are recycled and the bones stored in the ossuary, separated anatomically. The body of St. Stephanos is kept intact in a glass case.
We finish with a stop in the gift store and head down the road to the bus.
Drive to the hotel in Jerusalem is long, with a change of buses at the border (Jalal picks us up). Some way into our drive we run into traffic problems, caused by really bad accident. See Fr. Martin's Facebook entry, he found a link to an article about this accident. Very tragic, a whole family lost its life in a head on collision with a bus.
Oh, and Fr. Mel gets his acupuncture treatment, while riding the bus. All sorts of services included on this pilgrimage!
We stop a couple of times, once for lunch at the dairy kabutz, and again for coffee somewhere at a rest stop. We make it in time to the hotel for a quick dinner and then a meeting to look back a little at our trip and our experiences. I hope everybody agrees with me that this was the most amazing trip ever. Of course the places we visited were amazing and spectacular, but what I liked the most was all the people with whom I got to see these places. We were a totally random group that in the end felt like family, each and every single person. I miss each and every one of the very much. At one point Dan joked that I must take drugs early in the morning, because I have such a happy smile at breakfast. It made me realize that I am so happy seeing them all each morning, there is no other way to greet them but with a huge smile. So here is your answer Dan! :)
Oh, I guess I still need to write a few words about my Day 11, which we had as free day. If anybody else wants to send me a summary of their free day, I will add that to the post. It might be fun to do the last day that way.
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