After visiting the patriarch, we saw his museum.  The paintings showed the religious history of Ethiopia.  The children were impressed by all the jeweled pectoral crosses and other treasures.  We ate a Burger Queen – yes, queen.  Everyone went to our house to look at icons.  Rather than going out with everyone for supper our family stayed in.

Yesterday we began the day at St. Michael’s Anglican Church listening to Andrew Proud who has been the Addis chaplain for the past five years and is now a kind of regional Anglican representative to the Horn of Africa for his bishop in Cairo.  He talked about life during the Derg, the communist era.  For a six month period of time the communist would dump dead bodies on the lawn between the rectory and the church.  I guess the Anglicans were the only ones who could offer Christian burial.  Andrew talked about their huge ministry to Sudanese refugees who came to the city to receive money by mail from overseas relatives.

The Anglicans started a meal program for the refugees.  When they gave blankets to them, their neighborhood stoned the refugees.  The Anglicans realized that they needed to do more for the Ethiopians and started a library at the church.  Neighborhood children buy a yearly membership at a low price and study there and in the church classrooms.  I love how this started.  One ministry led to a kind of problem.  Solving this resulted in a larger, longer lasting ministry.

It sounds as if the Anglican church has an active ministry among Sudanese at the border.  We were blessed to meet Andrew and the new priest who only arrived with his wife (Michael and Margaret Star) last summer.  It was a great pleasure to meet these new friends.  Their ministry far away from home inspires me.  It was interesting to see how new ministries get started and to hear about the problems of rapidly growing churches in Sudan.  We learned from their successes and failures.  One of the Sudanese in a delegation was talking about his tribe’s enemies and said, “We need to extirminate them in the same way as the Jews.”  Imagine a wonderful kind-hearted Anglican priest as he tries to correct this way of thinking!

With regard to issues of sexuality, Andrew says he gets lots of questions about schism with the US.  This is the body of Christ so he deeply hopes it will not come to this.  He also points out that Peter Akinola of Nigeria has the most extreme and strident voice.  I’m not sure how much authority he has over the other Anglican primates.  Andrew said that although his bishop is deeply conservative on these issues he is someone who will speak in a reasonable way as we talk about how to move forward.

Andrew also talked about his ministry in Somalia.  Somaliland to the north of the country was British and is relatively peaceful.  Mogadishu and the south are where the conflicts are and where tribalism is a more powerful force than anywhere else in Africa.  I do have a new respect for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s position.  There are so many good ministries that are put at risk as we talk about the changes in the church that life in our current societies demand.

Our guide Kadu when he took us to the anthropological exhibit at the National Museum told us that one must choose between whether to believe science or religion.  He said that he believes in religion.  And the modern world brings us altogether and makes it necessary to live and work together.

The last thing Andrew talked about was the disruptive and destabilizing policies of Eritrea.  People in leadership there receive money from other muslims and then support conflicts on Ethiopia’s borders in Somalia and Suday.  Yemi, our tour leader has such strong feelings about the Somali people.  She regards them as violent, unprincipled, dishonest, etc.  This is such a difficult picture of the region than that of my friend Nick who did his UN work in Somalia and previously dated Somali woman.

We had tea on the lawn between the sanctuary and rectory.  Margaret was going to have tea with Hailie Selassie’s granddaughter after we left.  We went to the the Merkato after this.  The contrast between these two places almost couldn’t be greater.  The quiet peaceful lawn inside the walls surrounding the Anglican church and this crazy market where everything is for sale.  We saw a man straining under a huge (pick-up truck-sized) load of foam cushions.

We drove along a road with scores of tiny auto parts shops.  There was a shop that pretty much only sold plastic tail lights.  We left the car on the street and went into the tented section of the market that sells tourist souvenirs.  I was struck in the back of one shop as fellow travelers closer to the front kept asking its owner to look at more and more.  I felt uncharacteristically claustrophobic and spent the rest of the time on main-road alley at the intersection.  Neither Heidi nor I have ever been on a tour before and are bending over backwards not to delay the group.  I think it makes both of us mildly crazy that our whole group of 11 seems always to be waiting for the same one or two individuals.  Because we stay apart from the rest of the group it also feels sometimes as if we are captive.  If we’re not feeling well for instance, it seems like we are too far away just to get home for a rest or family time.

Our whole group ate ravioli at an Italian restaurant.  We had some extra time because the Patriarch’s secretary called to say that Timkat was starting later than we had thought it would.

The day and the hour finally arrived.  So much of this pilgrimage concerns Timkat.  If this feast had not been so important to the Ethiopian Church  we would not have come to Africa this year.  Everywhere in the city you could feel the change.  Many of the shops and stalls along the street were closed; masses of people walked along the shops and the stalls along the street were closed.  Crowds of people walked along the streets wearing the white shawls which are the traditional garment Christians wear for worship.  We had to try several routes before making our way to one of the churches where the ark of the covenant was being taken from the sanctuary in procession.  Epiphany has many meanings.  Along with Christ’s baptism and the celebration of Jesus as the light of the world and the journey of the magi, Ethiopians have added a commemoration of the reception of the Ark of the Covenant.  Symbolically this seems to suggest that Ethiopians have usurped Israel as God’s chosen people.  This is why their churches are so much more than our churches.  They stand symbolically for the destroyed temple in Jerusalem.  Their importance does not derive from the assembly fo people that is the church that meets there.  The holiness of the ark seems to be what makes these places sacred.

Apart from this church’s standard orthodox position or insistence that nothing about churches changes, this sense not so much that they are God’s people but rather that God has presented them with an absolutely unique gift – this feature is a defining one for distinguishing our two forms of loving Jesus.

From the great busyness on the city’s streets we all retreated back to the minivan and bypassed the long procession so that we would arrive early at the site where the city celebrates Timkat.  I mentioned the abuna’s gratitude and special interest in America.  This place renews my respect for what America stands for.  In many ways we received special treatment because of the freedoms that Americans cherish and that they insist upon as the birthright of all people regardless of where they were born.  Along with the other foreigners who were his special guests we were conducted to a small fenced off area in the midst of a massive set of polo fields.  Our special badges allowed us to sit next to the abuna under the blue tarp by a a pool and a fountain with a giant sculpture of Jesus  being baptized by Jesus.

We sat both on fancy leather chairs and cheap plastic ones and until the ceremony really got started there was a sense that the honored guests had to compete with each other for a seat.  Everything about the seating seemed so informal and unplanned.  If there weren’t enough something like an usher would start a new row, sometimes between two existing rows.

The choir/dancers with their prayer sticks, ceremonial kerchiefs and cestrum’s danced on a raised stage outside of our small fenced-in area.  It also was set apart from the gradually forming masses of crowds.  Heidi videotaped this through the ironwork and bars of the fence.  Like Zachaeus I climbed an odd circular staircase attached to a small building within the fence.  From there I could see everything and have the chance to contemplate all that this event and pilgrimage means to me.  It’s hard to say that I had a  moment of peace and quiet in the midst of so much noise and the crowds, but relatively speaking, it was much quieter up there than down at our chairs next to the huge loudspeakers.  These were booming so strongly that I could almost not think of anything else.  I flinched with each syllable they produced.

From that staircase I could see the context in which this was taking place, the immense crowds, the distant city buildings and the hills that look so much like the Berkeley Hills or Bolinas.  (It even looked like there was a kind of far distant cheapskate Hill with a large crowd on it).  The male and female choirs were so extraordinary but I can’t describe them any better than the pictures I took.  Like the church service on Sunday I thought a great deal both about how I should be acting as a participant in the ceremony and how I should be feeling about everything that was happening around me.  Bishops, priests, and deacons were everywhere wearing brilliant vestments.  Everyone could sense the joyfulness of the occasion.

I was so lost in the moment (and busy watching our bags with Micah), that it came as a shock when I looked up and saw Melia up talking to the Abuna.  I didn’t know whether to go left and take her away or to go to the right and do the same thing, so I stood there for a moment stunned.  Apparently, when Melia saw Abuna she waved and he invited her up to talk with him.  Micah was helping so much in watching the bags and I felt badly that by the time he got over there it was too late.

That moment in front of crowds of thousands, reminds me so much of Heidi.  When she was a little girl at a huge Hawaiian rights demonstration, she went up and sat on the governor’s lap until her mother finally found her.  Melia and Micah have such a great effect on the Africans we meet.  The children make them smile and reach out to touch them.  This repeated experience may be one of the best parts of this travel for me.  You see a look of love on their faces that makes me sure that humanity is all one family.  It is amazing to feel so confirmed in our love for these children by their attention.

I should be able to provide more anthropological/ethnographic observations about the beginning of Timkat, but it is late here at Yemi’s house and I am not feeling very well.  Last night we went out to Yod Abyssinia for traditional food and dancing.  It was the first time the children came out with all the adults making this a very long day.  They performed dances from the various regions of Ethiopia.  We left about half way through and the children fell asleep in the car.  Needless to say I need a refuge from the spiced meat typical of Ethiopian cooking.  Tomorrow I will tell you about today as we prepare to see other regions of this great country.

I forgot to mention that Heidi was on national television and the front page of the Ethiopian version of the New York Times.