Life on the wild side

I tend to live life on the safe side. I am a rule follower in most cases (one of my friends once said that I don't just follow the rules, I make the rules), but there are some times when I chose to step out of my safe set of rules and live life on the wild side. If I am going to break the rules, I want to make it worth my time. On my last day in Israel that is exactly what I did.

My friend Stacey and I were enjoying our last day in Jerusalem and decided that there were a few things we wanted to do: sit on the ramparts of the Old City wall and read our Bibles, visit Shabaan's shop one last time, and stop by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. All of these objectives seem innocent enough, but when one has spent the last 16 weeks exploring those old habits die hard. Into the church we went. We had certainly been there before and had looked at all of the readily accessible public places. This time we wanted to see just a little bit more. There was a balcony that ran above the central "shrine" in the church, directly under the large dome. We wanted to find a way up to the balcony. Stacey and I entered a corridor in the church and then passed through a door (I honestly did not see the sign that said where we went was private, but Stacey saw it and entered anyway), finding ourselves in a small chapel. It was quite plain, ornamented only by a rather ugly Mary - she looked a lot like a porcelain doll dressed by someone with very poor taste - in one corner and a crucifix on the front of the table in the room. We sat for a while, took a few pictures to document our discovery, and then we were discovered. A very distressed monk ushered us quickly out the door, back into the corridor that lead to the church proper. Fairly certain that we had managed to do what very few, if any, IBEX students had done before us, we went back to exploring the more readily accessible areas of the church. We would have to give up our hope of getting onto the balcony and satisfy ourselves with the knowledge that we entered the monastery at one of the most significant church buildings in liturgical Christianity and had the pictures to prove it. (You must understand that there is an unspoken competition among IBEX students over the history of the program to go places and do things that no other student from the program has done before, most often places and things that are officially off limits. It's the stuff of legends!) In our wanderings we met a young man who was an art student, there in the church working on restoring the mosaics. A few smiles later we found ourselves back through the corridor and into the monastery, following our guide up the stairs and out onto that very balcony over the center of the church. Once again we took pictures to prove that we were actually up there. We scurried back down and out of the monastery without being caught, carrying with us the thrill of our adventure. We were kicked out of the monastery at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and then went back in. That's a tale that few can tell.