Monday, December 6, 2010

Category II tag a: Travel

Today is the second Sunday in Advent: lighting the candle for John the Baptist.  This makes me think of our visit to Israel, and to our brief stop at the River Jordan.  It was in some ways, nothing like what I expected, yet in other ways what I hoped it might look like.  I rather expected a huge church over the spot where Jesus was baptized, and the river mostly obscured by religious stuff.  I had hoped it might not be like that.  And I was not disappointed.  There is a song that says "The River Jordan is chilly and wide" or words to that effect.  Well, it might be chilly.  It was February, and I saw a shell in the water and reached in and took it as a souvenir.  The water was a bit chilly.  I wouldn't have wanted to swim in it, or be baptized in it, for that matter.  But it was, after all, February.  Wide, though, it is not.  Not where we were, anyway.  As for big churches, there may be one a few yards down river from where we were, on the Jordan side.  We were on the Israeli side (or maybe it was Palestinian, I don't remember), but we were on the west bank of the Jordan.  This site didn't claim to be the exact spot of Christ's baptism, but for us it was close enough. 

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