Justina, Pray for Us

It was if it had been meant to happen. There were so many accidents of fate leading up to it.

My son, Winslow, had come to spend the weekend with me in Jerusalem, his first visit to the Holy Land.

We had aleady spent a couple of hours on our own walking tour of the Old City, which at one point included climbing the 200-odd steps up the narrow winding tower of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer.



I was beginning to tire, but it did no good trying to steer Winslow toward an early lunch. Now he wanted to see the Jewish quarter. Reluctantly I gave in, and off we started down more narrow and often winding streets. We quickly found it too sanitised and boring (read: no shops), so I started navigating us out, taking streets I had never seen before and trusting to my sense of direction.

Just as I was rounding a corner, Winslow behind me, I heard him say: "Hey, why don't we check this out?" It was St Mark's Syrian Orthodox Church, said to be built over the house of the Evangelist Mark, and in whose Upper Room the Last Supper was held.

I couldn't really resist a suggestion by my own son, who had already been forced to endure visits to a number of churches, to visit just one more.

Neither of us had any idea what awaited us inside, but it kept us spellbound for more than half an hour.



It was actually she, Sister Justina, who seemed to be a sort of custodian and who asked if we wanted her to give us a tour of the small church. More out of politeness than any real interest, I replied yes. When we finally gave Justina a kiss good-bye all that time later, I was in a state of blessed spiritual agitation.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I defer to Canadian Anglican priest Kevin Dixon, who wrote the following account of his meeting with Justina last June and which I found on his blog, holybuzz.

"Justina is a nun of the Syrian Orthodox Church. This stream of Christianity represents a tradition that has been passed down in Jerusalem from the very first followers of Jesus. Some of the beliefs of this church are different from our own; for instance, Syrian Orthodox Christians believe that God first gave the Church the Holy Spirit not at Pentecost (Book of Acts, ch. 2), but rather when Jesus on the cross gave up his spirit and “breathed” his last. In the Syrian Orthodox view, with this last breath came the Holy Spirit.

"Sister Justina met us at St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Church. She is a little woman, maybe 4′ 6″ (137 cm), and quite wide in proportion to her height. She was dressed all in black so only her face showed. When she began to speak in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, I wasn’t sure if we were being welcomed by a hobbit or a character from Shakespeare.

"She told us about her own mystical experiences in the seven years she has been resident at St. Mark’s. For instance, she described her own 'Pentecost' when she greeted a visitor who spoke Hebrew and no English. Sister Justina doesn’t speak Hebrew, but she said that over the course of a one hour conversation they understood every word that was said. She also showed us an icon painted on leather in the first century by St. Luke the Evangelist himself. The power of her belief was compelling. It underlined for me that one person’s faith, shared, can touch the heart of another deeply.



"At the conclusion of her remarks, she sang the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic -- the language of Jesus, and the liturgical language of the Syrian Church -- in a beautiful, keening, Arabic style. It brought tears to my eyes, not least because in recent years the Lord’s Prayer has taken on new depth and meaning for me."

Kevin Dixon's description of Sister Justina is spot on, and closely traces much of what Winslow and I experienced. I would add that she wore a black wool stocking cap that seemed to be too small: She would keep pulling it down to her eyebrows as if she were cold, and it would immediately pop a couple of inches back up her forehead.

I would also add that she spoke in a powerful and compelling voice, often punctuated by references to how she had shed her tears in long hours of solitary prayer in the church.

What Dixon didn't mention was that Justina had spent nearly 20 years teaching math to high school seniors in Nineveh before leaving Iraq, and that she was extremely anguished by the fate of the tens of thousands of fellow Iraqi Christians who had been driven from their country, with others martyred.

She also spoke of having personally been involved in the healing of a young woman from cancer and of how the image of St Luke's Virgin and Child had appeared in the Florida home of a family whose seriously ill newborn was being prayed for, and how the Virgin had brought healing to the infant.

I did't ever look at the time, as the time passed. For most of the time, Winslow and I were privileged to be alone with Justina, though an Irish gentleman eventually joined us. But I do know that occasionally I would anxiously glance in Winslow's direction to see if he were growing restless, and he showed no sign of it.

I wish I had thought to ask Justina if I could take her picture, but the image of her sweet but impassioned exposition of her faith in the Blessed Trinity and of her special love of the Holy Spirit will always remain in my heart.

Pray for us, Justina.

Thank You, Ra'ed and Pauline

I will be saying good-bye to Jerusalem tonight and returning to Nicosia a few days early.

As always, my stay at the Jerusalem Hotel was a delight. Ra'ed and his fiancee, Pauline, are Orthodox Christians and the charming hosts of this family-owned hotel, with its family atmosphere. And the staff are always ready to make one feel at home. Today is my 56th birthday, and Pauline gave me a lovely collection of pen-and-ink drawings of the Old City

The hotel is located only a five-minute walk from the Damascus Gate into the Old City and just across the street from the Garden Tomb, the Protestant answer to the Catholic and Orthodox Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

For anyone planning a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Down to the River

Father and Son in the River Jordan


Bishop with dove and Israeli army escort


JERICHO, West Bank, Jan 18, 2007 (AFP) - Thousands of Orthodox Christians joined in a festive pilgrimage Thursday to the Jordan River site where Jesus is believe to have been baptised.

First a handful of brave souls clambered over a security fence that had been set up to keep them back from the last few, very steep, metres (yards) leading into the river, a few kilometers east of the town of Jericho.

But sections of the fence was eventually broken down by the press of hundreds more in their enthusiasm to reach the slow-moving muddy waters.

They came from much of the Orthodox world, including Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and as far away as Georgia, as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories, but most of them were Russian.

Dozens of people could be seen earlier, modestly hiding behind sheets held up for them, or simply wrapped in towels, changing out of their clothes and into thin cotton tunics to prepare for a reenactment of their own baptisms.

The event was to mark the Feast of the Epiphany, the time when Jesus began his public ministry by receiving baptism at the hands of John the Baptist.

Western Christians celebrate Epiphany on January 6, which is 12 days after Christmas. The Orthodox, who continue to use the old Julian calendar, mark the date on January 18.

The celebrations, in a carnival-like atmosphere under a warm sun, began at the 5th century monastery of St John the Baptist, which sits on a hill overlooking the river several hundred metres away in what is normally a closed Israeli military zone.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, was received there by hundreds of faithful and clerics and a marching band of youths, complete with bagpipes.

As he stepped out of his car, he was greeted by another cleric who had been holding a white dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, which was released into the air.

After prayers in the monastery church, the dignitaries and pilgrims processed down a winding desert road between mine fields to a pavilion just above the river bank, where were more prayers were sung.

The patriarch then went down to bless the waters of the river itself.

That was the signal for hundreds of people who had been waiting nervously behind police barricades to press forward toward the river, whose steep banks were lined with scrubby trees and rushes.

Israeli soldiers and police did their best to control the crowds, but were eventually rendered useless.

Only a few metres across the narrow river was the Jordanian side, and a number of soldiers had come down to the water to watch.

The scene was a joyous one.

Theona Kakidze had traveled from Tblisi, Georgia with her priest and a group of about 25 pilgrims.

"It is very beautiful," she said. "I can't explain what I am feeling now."

Down by the river, words were unnecessary.

A Russian and his son, who appeared to be about 10 years old, had gone down into the river together. The man embraced the boy and they both disappeared under the water, before surfacing, and repeating the ritual two more times.

That was to commemorate the Orthodox batismal rite, which calls for immersion in the name of the Father, then of the Son and then the Holy Spirit.

Less brave souls had made their way down on to the trampled reeds to dip plastic bottles into the river and then pour water over themselves, blessing themselves as they did.

Two generous and enterprising young men were dipping large tin cans into the water by improvised "fishing poles" and filling the bottles of others.

Standing next to them were two Israeli civil defence workers, armed with coils of strong yellow rope in case anyone needed rescuing.

One woman, clad from head to toe in black, had immersed herself in the river and seemed unable to get out. After several attempts with the rope, two strong young men grabbed her hands and dragged her unceremoniously out of the water.

Elsewhere, people could be seen guarding shopping trollies full of litre and a half bottles that they had filled with the water to take home with them to Russia.

Back on the dais, after the final prayers had been chanted, people scrambled forward to dip their bottles into the water of a large copper baptismal font that the patriarch had blessed.

One Greek nun, who couldn't make her way up, handed her bottle to a man above her, and he dipped it into the font, bringing up not more than a few teaspoonsful.

She took the bottle back with a word of thanks in Greek, and they began to chat.

Then, in a moment iconic of the divisions that plague humanity, and Christianity, she asked the man: "Are you Orthodox or (Roman) Catholic?"

He replied that he was Anglican. She began to berate him and said "this is only for the Orthodox. The Catholics have nothing to do with the Orthodox."

But an elderly woman, with whispy white hair and kindly eyes standing next to her smiled with gratitude when the man, his hand still wet from the font, offered it to her and she pressed it against her face.

Albion Land