A Mountain Top Experience

Have you ever seen those paintings of hills and valleys where the artist has numerous "layers" of hills going off into the background, and each hill has a different tone of "haze" from light to dark and you say to yourself, "there are no such hills, with such tones of light and dark."

Today was a beautiful day of gentle (and very cold) rain. But the tall hills (can't call them mountains, cause I have lived in the American Rockies and these would be hills out there.....yet for Ohio we might call them small mountains. And less any of our Turkish friends correct me....indeed there are mountains in Turkey! I know that! But these are very big hills in the Selcuk-Ephesus area. Anyway........) The clouds and haze and rain all made for a beatiful day off in the distance surrounding the town.

We visited the sacred home of the Virgin Mary. I don't recall studying anything about this in my seminary work and one has to take this for what it is. The story goes that the Virgin Mary, after Jesus died, spent her last years of her life in a house on the top of one of the local hills. It is a major tourist attraction. Pope Paul back in 1966 and Pope Benedict in 2006 have made a pilgrimage to the site and declared it holy. It's a twisty-turn-y drive from the main road to the summit and once you are there, there is room for a ton of tour buses, so this shrine gets a lot of trade in the summer (not so in the winter). We had a beautiful sunny day though. The house has been rebuilt and there is evidence that it was inhabited in the first century. A German nun in the 1800's had a dream that this is where Mary traveled to and lived out her life. The story goes that the Apostle John accompanied her here and wrote his Gospel in the vicinity.

The house/now chapel is stone. A shrine to the Virgin is in the small chapel. There are a few chairs in the place with candles to light. A priest happened to be in there when we were, so it felt quite holy. And indeed it is. The guide gave a long explanation of how this all came about, but it seems to me that whether the ultimate story is true or not makes little difference...the site has been blessed by the Holy Father and it is now sacred. Thousands from around the world come to this site each year and spend a few quiet moments in prayer. Like any sacred tourist site though....it is protected by uzi-armed military....there is a kiosk selling pictures and holy-themed bookmarks and icons.

I was on the shores of India where the Church of St. Thomas is located. They had a shrine in the sanctuary where the bone of one of the fingers of St. Thomas was enshrined. In the mountaintop shrine in the middle of Sri Lanka is the Temple of the Tooth....it is the tooth of Buddha. In each case, the people held that place to be holy and regardless of the historical accuracy of the site, because it has come to be revered by so many, it therefore becomes holy. I think that the greater importance of those sites, whether historical or a part of the heritage of the area is that people the world over seek the sacred in the midst of their everyday lives. Life can be coarse and the body becomes weak and weary, but the soul continues to seek out the sacred. Sacred places can be so because of a one time amazing, stupendous event which is touched by the creator or they can become sacred because men and women choose to set aside that place as one which refreshes the soul.

Such is the site of the home of the Virgin Mary.

Blessings abound.....Bob