The Mount of Olives has become a centre-of-gravity-place for me. It contains a whole concentration of the beautiful elements of Jesus life. From my window in Via Dolorosa, the highest point on the skyline is the bell tower of the Ascension. Below it, on our side, are all the associated sites of Gethsemane. Beyond it, on the far away side, looking to the Judean desert, are Bethphage and Bethany. It is an extremely small area and all of it was within Jesus’ walking distance, and therefore within an almost tangible sense of His presence.
Nowhere was this more real to me than on the only remaining piece of wasteland, ‘no-man’s’ land, on the Mount of Olives that I could see. It lies between Gethsemane and Atur. At the six o’clock Mass in Gethsemane one morning I met three Sisters of the Little Family of the Resurrection, contemplative Sisters all in white, the Superior Italian and the other young ones from India. In order to reach their convent, the road lead up the way, not quite vertically although it felt like it. Then the Sisters followed a very rough footpath through a wild open side of the hill until eventually coming to the rickety gate hanging on its hinges at their convent. I was to say Mass for them later, getting there in the dark of the morning. Later in the day, in the same wild spot I found a Bedouin family had camped with their sheep and goats. Then out of that group of shepherds and their flock came a little Polish nun, Sr. Christina (Polish), with two little children from the nearby orphanage. I guessed she had been smuggling some food to the Bedouins. I could hardly believe all of this happening totally to my amazement - the appearance of ‘no bodys’ in a ‘no place’, unknown people (like myself) in an unknown place. It conveyed the real Mt. of Olives to me more vividly than the nicely tended olive trees of the Basilica or the beautifully kept gardens of Saint Mary Magdalene’s Church and the other well known shrines. These great Gospel Sites all have wonderful and moving histories, but I shall cherish my own unwritten (not the full picture), secret, history of meeting Jesus in his little, hidden, unknown friends (children, Bedouins, little Sisters) on the same bare and rough and poor hillside. All I can say is, thank you, Jesus, for keeping this little space of place and time for me in this quiet and expressive way, in your own Garden of Memory.
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