I also told her of the surreal experience I had that very morning while wandering around in the Old City. I had landed in Tel Aviv with ten other members of the Olive Trees Foundation for Peace just a few hours before dawn on that Sunday morn. We all checked into our rooms at the Ambassador; they all crashed, but I was wide awake.
As soon as the sun rose I began to explore, and after attending mass at St.George Cathedral, I wandered around the Old City, which was eerily empty. I stumbled upon the site of the Pool of Bethsaida and experienced dà ©jà vu, which was more real than imaginary.
Between 2000 and 2001, I was a first year student in the Episcopal Diocese of Orlando's Formation Program for Spiritual Directors. I knew going into the program I would never be hanging out a shingle as a Spiritual Director and that I was there for other reasons. I was drawn to the program because of the curriculum, to deepen my prayer life and study the lives of the saints. During the first year all the students attended three weekend retreats.
I remember it as clearly now as I experienced it then.
There were seven of us in the class, and we were instructed to close our eyes, listen to the story, and allow our imaginations to lead us to respond to the character that called to us.
Our leader prefaced the story from John 5:1-6, by telling the legend of the angel from heaven who would descend and agitate the waters of the Pool of Bethsaida.
Only the first leper, blind, or invalid who made it into the water would receive a healing. One day while Jesus was there, he walked by a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years.
Jesus asked him, "Do you want to be healed?" The man answered he had no friends to help him get into the water first.
Jesus asked him again, "Do you want to be healed?"
Our leader then went silent, and in my imagination I was immediately upon the back of that agitating angel.
I hadn't thought of that experience until four years later when I found myself at the site of the Pool of Bethsaida.
What triggered the memory of that guided meditation was the recollection of a dream I had had a few weeks after that day we call 9/11.
In my dream I had stood at the edge of a dried up pool where crumbling stone columns were overgrown with vines and weeds and scores of doves and pigeons nested and flew. To my right was a large shade tree, but to my left I saw a few square squat dwellings with large satellite dishes attached to them. I remembered thinking the moment I woke up from that dream what a strange place it was, but then I quickly forgot all about it.
That is, until the afternoon of June 12, 2005, four years later, when I found myself standing at the edge of a dried up pool where crumbling stone columns were overgrown with vines and weeds and scores of doves and pigeons nested and flew. To my right was a large shade tree, but to my left I saw a few square squat dwellings with large satellite dishes attached to them. What a strange place,I thought; how could it be that I had seen this scene in a dream a few weeks after that day we call 9/11?
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