"Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem"

I was glad when they said to me:

‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’

And now our feet are standing

within your gates, O Jerusalem.

 - Psalm 122:1-2

I arrived today in Jerusalem, that great city at the heart of the Jewish and Christian faiths, and to a lesser extent, the Muslim faith (the holiest cities in Islam are Mecca and Medina, but Jerusalem ranks as #3). After praying about Jerusalem and Israel in the psalms and reading about them in the Scriptures for my entire life, finally, I was here, standing within the gates of the Old City, walking the very land that Jesus and the prophets walked. 

I will be staying at the Ecce Homo Convent, run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Zion and the Chemin Neuf community. I'm looking forward to being in an explicitly religious lodging environment, after staying in generic secular hostels so far for this journey. Although I've enjoyed my time in the hostels and met some great people, it's been harder to carve out space and time for prayer, or to just sit on the grounds reading Scripture or saying the Daily Office without getting weird looks and questions from the staff about what I'm doing and why I'm not out doing something. 

Ecce Homo has a wonderful chapel and a larger basilica where I can go to pray at any hour of the day, and their idea of "dorm-style accommodations" are not the large room full of bunk beds that the hostels provided, but a small private room, lacking total privacy only by the fact that its walls do not reach all the way to the ceiling, and that it has a cloth curtain instead of a door. (Pictured at right.) It's amazing to have this kind of privacy for $24/night. (Pilgrims, take note! This is a wonderful place to stay on your pilgrimage to Jerusalem!) 

I'm also glad to know that this is the last move I'll have to make before my departure for the U.S. a week from Thursday. After moving to a different city every few nights for the past 11 days, I'm looking forward to settling in a bit here. There's a closet in my room and I actually hung my clothes up in it! It's nice not to feel so much like I'm living out of a suitcase as I have been.