Touring Abila

     For the evening, we had scheduled a walking tour over the site, an area which included two hills, or tells, including Tell Abila, the area where J had been digging over several seasons. Areas A and AA contained the remains of two churches, and several other public buildings, and the remains of the city walls. We continued our walk down into a saddle area that housed the larger ancient city, all of this dating back about 5500 years, from around 4000 BC to AD 1500, including the Islamic, Byzantine, Roman, Greek, Iron, and Bronze ages.  In this area were the remains of several 7th and 8th century churches, paving stones of Roman roads, a cavea of what might have been a Roman theater, a possible Odeon, and several gates, and crossing the saddle were the remains of a bridge which led back up another hill. This entire area was bordered by olive orchards, the Wadi Qualibah, which was the spring and source of water for this once thriving ancient city, and tombs and tomb complexes. Walking back up the hill to area D, where columns with limestone capitals belonging to a 6th century Christian Basilica stood majestically reconstructed, we all took a break and sat down to receive a small devotion delivered by J. Out over in the fields we could see shepherds grazing their sheep. This seemed to set our minds on things more holy, things above us that were invisible, rather than things below that had once been hidden but which had now become visible. As I sat there listening to him, I reflected on the idea that what each of us is searching to find, whether it be lost cities, lost faith in God, or just lost parts of ourselves, lies below the surface of what we can actually see. Below what we allow others to see. The discipline of archaeology has been said to be one of destruction.  One must literally destroy each layer of dirt as it is uncovered in order to dig deeper into the past. As each chronological layer (or archaeological period) is uncovered, someone has to make the decision whether or not to continue digging deeper, or to let that history forever represent what story gets told. Someone has to decide whether or not it's worth going deeper. However, once the decision is made to continue digging, the previous season's excavations can never be repeated. What was uncovered will soon be gone. As I sat there listening to J and observing the stones and rubble and loose dirt that lay over the earth's surface all around me, and the restructuring that had taken place and was yet to take place, I began to catch a glimpse of how a person might learn to love all this. It made me think about our own stories, and what gets told and what stays covered under layers of dirt. It made me wonder about what I might uncover during this long, hot summer, and whether it would be worth what I was going to have to endure to dig it up. And how many seasons of my life would it take? In the closing of his devotion, J prayed, thanking God for this opportunity, and asking Him to bless this season's dig, and to watch over and protect everyone on it over the next eight weeks. I added to his my own prayer: Dear God, give me the courage to walk down whatever road you open up before me. As the sun was setting in the sky, we walked back to the buses, and drove back to camp.

I Convert to Christianity

     The moment a person decides that one thing is more true than another, and then decides to accept that, doesn't really change that person into anything better or different than they were before, at least right away.  And this is what I assume when I think about how so much paganism got mixed in with Christianity in the first place. Those Romans (and Celts and everyone else) couldn't just throw out everything that they had believed in, along with every last ceremonial practice, at the moment of their conversion, and why should they have? As we can attest, Christmas and Easter sure make for two joyful occasions that who knows what they would have looked like without all their symbolic pagan pomp attached. Stripped to the bare bones, much more like their Jewish counterparts, I imagine. And so it was with me. I couldn't just toss to the wind all my former beliefs and practices. Nor was I ready to enthusiastically embrace everything that came with my new religion. Well okay, I might be jumping the gun here a little because I only had an idea about what Christianity might mean for me in terms of my daily life, and so far as I was aware, I only knew one family who were professing Christians, and they were my daughter's best friend's family, and they had been so helpful to me as a single mother that I could hardly fault them on anything as far as their demonstration of love. But I did know that I could never join their church, as Christie had attended with them many times and they truly scared me. Plus, I had already spent a bit of time trying to undo the psychological damage that I had felt they were laying on her.  For example, sometimes she would come home crying, saying that she wasn't saved because she couldn't do certain things. Then I would have to explain to her why she shouldn't worry about it, and this on several different levels. (To answer the question as to why I let her attend in the first place--she was only 7 or 8 when she started, her attendance was sporadic, the programs consisted mostly of very shallow children's materials and games, and they served food and lots of sweets, so it was always this fun party atmosphere. It would make me feel too mean to say no.) And there was J, who, as I mentioned earlier, was also an Evangelical Christian. However, to the best of my knowledge no one else in my life that I knew of was Christian. (Woops, I forgot. My mom's husband was a much lapsed Catholic.) So, not a lot of potential influence coming from any direction. However, even though the idea scared the b'jeebies out of me, I decided rather quickly that I probably needed to pick out a church (remember, nothing was going to appeal to me at this point. I could barely even stand the idea of going to church; I just thought that maybe I should. Plus, I still had lapsed worries about building up bad Karma for so strongly disliking Christians!), and since I just happened to live in a church parsonage, and that church just happened to be the one where J attended, problem solved.

    Only J didn't seem overly excited by my conversion or by my attending his church. I think he had doubts as to whether I truly converted or was just pretending. Honestly, who could blame him for that, except that he had been in on every conversation that I had had about Christianity, and had even recommended reading materials, which I had actually read, etc., etc.. But then there was the fact that my nature was not changing hardly at all, and I was still being such a negative influence on him, i.e., he still had trouble resisting me, and I wasn't even trying to make it easy for him not to. I think his mantra was, "I'm only human, after all." And while I do think he was maybe more than a little concerned with what his fundamentalist friends might think about his dating a new convert, I think he was more afraid of what I might say or do in front of said friends, which would have, I guess, reflected poorly on his judgment. And so we continued off and on for two more years! No one knew we were seeing each other. In all honesty, he was the most secretive guy I  ever met, and as time passed I was beginning to feel more and more hurt by his not introducing me to anyone, or involving me in his campus ministry activities. It's not like either one of us was married, for goodness sakes!  Also, fortunately or unfortunately (I've never been really sure which), for the most part, during those entire four years, I kept my daughter out of our relationship, as I was never sure where it was headed. He also never seemed to be bothered by this.

     Alas, finally, and as fate would have it, just when I was beginning to decide that I had had about enough (and after I had finally met his mother, who was extremely antagonistic and disapproving), he asked me to marry him! We had argued about this a week or two earlier. In a rather heated, intense moment he had looked squarely in my face and asked (read: almost yelled), "What do you want from me?" I told him that I wanted to marry him, and he responded with, "And then what? What will you want after that?" I very calmly and quite cleverly (I thought, since I was so upset), said simply, "Anniversaries, like anyone else would want." At the moment when he asked me to marry him I had just enough left over feelings for him still lingering around in my psyche that even though I replied with so much less enthusiasm than I otherwise would have, I said yes. There he was, again in front of me, but this time on his knee offering me his mother's wedding rings from her 2nd husband who she had divorced and didn't really like. (Maybe she had given them to him to help save him from spending money he didn't have--or maybe not.) In any case, no one other than my daughter (who by this time was 11 years old) and one close friend of mine and his girlfriend came to our wedding. (And knowing that we had no one else to invite who would want to come, we kept the event very small and private. A friend and colleague of his who was an ordained minister performd the ceremony in his home. I still think even now that everyone assumed we were doing this rather quickly, and therefore something  had to be amiss! Like I said, no one knew we had been dating for four years, and J never made the effort to clarify this.) Anyway, I wore black and cried the whole time as we stood there exchanging our vows. Afterwards we took a short Labor Day weekend trip, as we both had to be back in school on Tuesday. The real "honeymoon" would come the following summer when he would take me for a two month trip overseas to Europe and to Jordan. Maybe that would make up for everything.