LOST COMPASSES

THE CITY OF JERUSALEM....

Everyone has their own special corner of the world. It's where you go to hide from that world in order to find the compass you lost. Bearings are important on this journey, but true-north is not easy to find. And so we pause here.

One of the most paused-in corners of the world is Jerusalem's Old City. Home to three of the world's great religions, it's filled with teeming, seeking humanity all year round. Enter through the Damascus Gate and you enter a city of "furious passions, visions of holiness, and longings for something better."

Forget the little tour-groups from Texas and Spain. It's the noisy locals who you need to drink in just as you find them. Orthodox Jews readying for the Western Wall...Muslims gathering for prayers at the Temple Mount... Christians with crosses along the Via Dolorosa...even Coptic priests in black skullcaps from a world not even Dan Brown has tried to fictionalize.

Even those who proudly insist they are not religious, seem to get religion here. If only for a little aromatic while. Later, the mere curiosity-seekers leave the city behind. However, there are those who take the city back home with them. Who now begin to put legs to their prayers. You wonder if the UN were to meet here, would the delegates feel the same way? Or would they simply pass another resolution about old borders rather than new bearings...?

.....AND THEN ALL THE REST OF THE CITIES

Far from the graying Holy City are the glittering new cities. Cities of light and glamor from Paris to London to New York and on to Tokyo and Shanghai. The histories here are not of prophets and bearings, more of profits and boasting. These are where the action is, where the decisions are made, and where the appetites are sated.

In the great metropolises of the planet, people engulfed with people are engulfed with the here-and-now. And why not? All we have is the here-and-now. Oh wait...for just the littlest of whiles, that's not what visitors to Jerusalem feel. There their compasses spin into whole new directions. Back here they spin back into their thousand different directions and pursuits as usual.

One may ask: How would Abraham, Jesus and Mohamed fare in today's modern cities. Chances are, what they had to say would be drowned out. Nobody would have bothered to persecute them. Probably just pass them by on the way to the new mall...