Yemi brought us the thin white shawl that men wrap around their shoulders in church and we wore these into the sanctuary dominated by an immense candelabrum.  In front of the altar.  Ushers dressed in what looked like old hospital / ambulance driver uniforms with giant crosses on the back.  They distributed prayer sticks that are about five feet tall with a carved four inch cross piece at the top for a handle.  Different ministers in the service droned, the curtains opened and the closed and then opened, etc.  Ushers brought a silver cross through the congregation to kiss and then a collection box and then a little kissing pillow with money on it.  Through it all more and more people arrived, the men sitting on the left and the women on the right.

    We stood for a long time, swaying and bowing and praying, just when you felt tired, there would be a place in the service for us to sit down.  The man in front of me bowed at the waist, bending his legs a little and straightening his legs and back at the same time.  It reminds me a little of duck diving a surfboard through a wave.  We needed those praryer sticks just to hold us up.  After the pitch blackness, the light started to come in through the stained glass windows.  The images in the windows apart from the Amharic inscriptions look strikingly familiar from American churches.  The prophets, Adam and Eve, etc. all look ethnically white.  Religious art includes such a wonderful variety of different depictions of religious figures.  I sat about midway down the nave close to the center aisle.  Hailie Selassie’s throne was obscured by a pillar but I could see the three couples who were getting married later that morning.

    I did something that I never did before - after a couple of hours of the liturgy of the word, I fell deeply asleep during the sermon.  The preacher’s voice was just so relaxing.  And that was a good thing.  I couldn’t have made it through the service or the day without that short rest…

    Now we’re above Debre Libanos looking over a grand canyon in a glass window hut enjoying a coffee ceremony.  The children love the little monkey outside.

    Anyway when I returned from dreamland and woke up again, I had a new spiritual vitality.  Maybe something about the droning along with the chanter or the sunlight now shining through the stained glass, or my fatigue or the trance or the context of my prayers were the cause, but the spirit was with me in a whole new way.

    As I said, the couples who were crowned and seated on the thrones were married at the end of the service.  The choir played cestrums, drums and pounded their prayer sticks.  We enjoyed watching the dance.  Before this the children went up to communion.  I wish Heidi and the children could have been there but it was a four hour service and I was glad that they were at home.

    How does someone describe a spiritual experience or talk about that sense of connection and community that felt so tangible then?  You can’t do it.  There is a kind of “more” that William James writes about.  I see a lot of that “more” here in Ethiopia.  To see the young people filling the churches and kissing the church walls and gates is so moving.  When we visited St. George’s Cathedral, the archdeacon told us that the young people’s surprising involvement could in part be explained by over a decade of freedom from the Derg, the communists who came to power in 1974 and in part hoped to eradicate religion.  He also talked about the terrible effect of AIDS on young people in Ethiopia.  This crisis has meant that this generation has had to face terrible tragedy that naturally leads to questions about the meaning of our existence.

    The Holy Spirit is also bringing people here.  I will never forget the way that people prostrate themselves outside churches, kneeling and kissing the ground, gates and walls of these places.  This holiness is changing me.

    Now, it is very late at night and writing so often over the whole day means that I have forgotten what I have told you…  We don’t wear shoes in churches here and the long services need to be long so that I can stop thinking like a tourist and leave behind my worries about fitting in and start thinking like a pilgrim, like those people in the New Testament who seek Jesus out and raise their voices so that he can heal them.

    Yesterday afternoon church finished at around 9:45 a.m.  We had lunch at the other’s hotel with Heidi and the kids whom I especially missed since we have not been apart the whole time of our travels.  Next we went to St. George’s Cathedral where Hailie Selassie was crowned emperor.  The church has the more traditional octagonal shape (versus the rectangular nave and columns of Trinity Cathedral) with something like five concentric spaces of increasing sanctity leading up to the holy of holies.

    Outside pilgrims crowded around kissing the gates, floor, etc.  Within the gates people walked up to the church walls and prayed.  We went in and were instructed by the archdeacon who told us about the choir – the group of men who dance with prayer sticks and use them with cestrum and drums to make music.  He said people learn to be in the choir from age 5 to 20.  He told us about the service and history and special rituals of the Ethiopian Coptic church which only in the 1950’s or 1960’s began having a patriarch from Ethiopia rather than Egypt.

    So we sat there in two rows on the inside of the outside walls and received our basic course of instruction on Christianity here.  After this we walked around the outside of the inner section of the church admiring the artwork there depicting important events in Christian and Ethiopian history (such as Haile Selassie’s speech, generals, etc.).  then we went into the small history museum outside the church in the former cathedral offices (it has a bell tower with a narrow winding staircase).  There we saw the coronation robes, chalices, Ethiopian crosses, photographs of important Ethiopian churches and learned more history.  Reading my own history of Ethiopia has helped me to understand the context of much of what our various guides tell us.  It did however give a more complicated account of the Ethiopian’s victory than our guide’s description of how the Holy Spirit blessed the Ethiopians.  After this the guide showed us a few crosses and books.  Heidi kindly bought me a Gondar style brass hand cross that is a little larger than the size of my hand.  I love it.  I haven’t done a great job of conveying all that the archdeacon told us.  Let me say that I love what I am learning here.  Christ is alive here and we share so much in common with these Christians.  Still the style and way that they express their faith and hope seems so new and different from forms of Christianity transmitted through European missionaries.  The blue matatus, the minibuses that are the basic form of transportation which Ethiopians call “Blue Devils” have crosses and expressions of the ancient church on many of them.