(DANIEL) Travel back home after a pilgrimage is a complicated affair, both externally and internally. Making a half-dozen transportation changes, getting through customs with the exotic and unwieldy paraphernalia we’ve picked up, traveling through 8 time zones is a test all its own. Internally, traveling back home is a long trip as well, offering both anticlimax and adventure. The trip is over, and normalcy comes in like the tide, sweeping away all the exotic sights and sounds of a faraway place. I find that a good chunk of me is still resonating with the places I’ve just been: the Ethiopian taxi driver traveling back to work in Las Vegas plays me his videos of Timkat from his home town he has just visited and as I hear that strange chant that sounds familiar now I’m weirdly homesick for a place I barely have any right to call home, and I leave it behind wistfully.

On the other hand, the spirit of adventure travels back with me: I return to the life I left in a different place, as a different person, if only slightly. And I love my life and work, so as the Blackberry that I have been carrying uselessly throughout the trip suddenly chirps with many dozens of email notices, my attention is pulled fully back to the present and future with a surge of new energy.

Traveling so far beyond my familiar cultural context sends me back home with sharper hearing and sight: I’m noticing the accents, the body types, the body language, the cultural assumptions of the fellow travelers around me in the airports. I notice how my body and mind have shifted to a different rhythm after two weeks of doing one thing at a time. Now contemplating speeding back up to the New York City pace feels so similar to the challenge I felt two weeks ago as I contemplated all the challenge and possibility of travel in Ethiopia.

Washing out the fast-dry travel clothes and putting them away until the next trip, sitting down at the desk by the window with a hot cup of coffee (nearly sacred in Ethiopia, which gives it new richness and attachment), sorting out the mementos, pictures, and memories, and listening for what’s next --that’s today’s piece of pilgrimage work for me.

What’s yours?

One final note: if you’ve enjoyed following this trip here on the Trinity website and want to see more photos that document the trip, you may CLICK HERE to link to the Ethiopia travel photo pages of my personal website:

http://www.simons-galito.com/Ethiopia/Photos/Photos.html

(DANIEL) As with any pilgrimage, going back home is part of the deal, and it’s one of those things that reveals both the circular quality and linear quality of life. As one thing ends another begins, and yet our journey is not just a turning of the crank. We ARE in a different place than when we started two weeks ago.

We’re close enough to departure now that all our thoughts are turning home, and just as it was in those first 24 hours when we arrived we are in that in-between space where we are neither here nor there. Today we filled our bags full from the Mercato, Africa’s largest open-air market. In the afternoon some of us visited the National Museum, which houses Ethiopia’s archeological treasure trove, including the remains of the famous Lucy.

We said our farewells in the evening, and got ready to head back to our lives where we left off, though probably more has shifted in us than we realize. It will be hard to measure, since so much of this experience and reality will fade fast when we return to our normal routine.

“Normal” seems to be coming at me like a fast train, just as I was beginning to settle into the rhythm of this culture. Taking the good infection of the endlessly flashing smiles of local people back to the streets of Manhattan in February seems like a tall order! I’m also eager but intimidated by the task of trying to unpack the learnings and inspiration of this trip with the folks back home at Trinity. I’m so glad Mark, Marilyn, and Clay were with me. It’s been great to travel and reflect together.

In one sense it takes a lot of translation and these cultures seem so many worlds apart. And in another sense, this has been one of those places that so easily reveals our common humanity, which New York City also does in its own peculiar way.

So here’s to this ancient and alive country, and here’s to the booming and vibrant city that is home; and here’s to rich religious traditions that lead us to ask new questions! Here’s to the pilgrimage that never ends but goes on and on and on!

(DANIEL) Today those of us who arrived late to Lalibela went around with Mesfin to visit the rest of the eleven rock-hewn churches. It was St. Gabriel’s feast day, so we started at that church, dipping into the chanting and drumming on a more intimate scale than Timkat. In the afternoon we flew back to Addis Ababa; everyone’s thoughts are now turning back toward home. I’ve been here long enough that home begins to be harder to imagine than this place --a good sign that this trip has been as much about interior travel as it has about miles logged.

Shorthand take on my impressions of Lalibela: this is the kind of place in which I could take a month of sabbatical time!

the roof of St. George's church in the backgroundWe return to Addis Ababa today, and I’ll have one brief chance to download this week of blogging and photos, then I’ll finish up from the States. Look for more in a day or two!

(MARILYN) One of my main reasons for coming to Ethiopia was to see what the music is like. Is it like that in South Africa that Americans seem to love to sing in church or is it different, useable, and new? To my delight one of the first places we visit is the icon museum at Addis Ababa University. There are several rooms devoted to musical instruments and their uses.

In a nutshell: there are certain instruments used for church and others used outside of church. Church instruments are the drum and sistrum (an ornate silver metal pronged device with a handle with wires strung between the prongs on which metal disks slide back and forth,). During Lent the drum is replaced by a stringed instrument. For music used outside of church there are two stringed instruments: one that is like a small harp or psaltery. One hand controls the pitch of each string and one strums a rhythmic pattern. The other stringed instrument is a small one-string bowed instrument with a mellow sound that is made by pulling the bow, made of wound horsehair, across the one string, also made of horsehair and tuned by a large wooden peg on the neck. The pitch is changed by varying the length of the bowed string with fingers pressed lightly on the string. There is no “finger board” backing the string as there is with western instruments. The other instrument used outside church is the flute, which is a simple wooden tube with finger holes. It is played held in front of the body rather than in a transverse position like our metal flute. The drum is used both in church and outside. In church, however, it is a large egg-shaped instrument that is made from a single piece of wood hollowed out. Each end of the drum has a different circumference and is covered by ox or cow skin lashed across the length of the body of the drum. The night we had dinner in a traditional restaurant with traditional music and dance, we saw drums being played that looked very much like a trap set, but with no snares and played with sticks.

At Timkat the music was nearly omnipresent. Chant is amplified across the city. When we reached St. Mary’s to begin our Timkat, there was chanting (seemingly always a male voice singing alone) being played over the sound system on the outside plaza. Inside the church during the preaching the chanting was easily heard. As we sat there, we could hear the approaching churches in processions with their choirs leading spirited singing (which is always unison) with a drum playing a simple pattern to keep time. Most choirs, which seem to be synonymous with youth groups, also danced as they sang – all in close rank with clapping, a semi-running dance and singing in a call-and-response form. They are obviously in good shape to be doing this for hours! This is the music I think would translate to western use. I’m told that it is modern church music as opposed to the chanting that is heard throughout the formal part of the Timkat celebration.

We have a good vantage spot to see the dancing and singing during the formal Timkat service. Double lines of dancers in full costume face each other about 5 yards apart. Each dancer carries a sistrum which is played by letting the disks fall first to one side of the wire then to the other in a regular pattern, but not on every beat. To my surprise the sistrum is not shaken which would be my intuitive method. The two accompanying drummers for each performing group carry their very heavy drums, held in place by a strap over one shoulder and under the opposing arm, in front of their bodies about waist level with one hand on the large head and one on the smaller. They dance and drum behind the double lines of dancers moving back and forth following the dancing lines that come together and then back away from each other in an elegant and graceful way. Near the end of each dance the beat quickens and the movement becomes faster. Finally the drummers take center stage and dance around each other playing all the time.

Congregations sing mostly responses either to long chants or to short calls. Because the cantor seems always to be amplified it is hard to hear exactly what the congregation is singing. There is no harmony as there is in the music of South Africa. Even with the stringed instruments in secular music it is usual for the instruments to play in unison. The variety in sound comes from the high degree of ornamentation that both singers and instrumentalists use in some predictable pattern that becomes more understandable to these western ears as the pilgrimage goes on. Women seem to sing only in groups at Timkat as part of the congregation or as the soloist with a small instrumental group in a secular situation. The sacred chants were first composed by St. Yared who is often shown in icons standing before a priest (teaching him the music) with other musicians with drums and sistra standing nearby. The legend says that Yared learned the music from three birds that sang the “heavenly music” to him.

I have inquired about how to purchase an Ethiopian drum and ship it to the USA. But Jermonde, a student at General Theological Seminary in New York who is with our group and is experienced in Ethiopian worship says that there is a place in St. Paul, MN that makes all the drums used by the Ethiopian Orthodox churches in the United States. They are much lighter to carry and have an even more resonant sound especially good for outdoor singing and dancing. I will have to learn the modern congregational music I heard from recordings, which do exist, but are not prominent where we have shopped. I recorded some of the chanting at Timkat, but ran out of memory on my recorder. I think I can create some useable music for us to sing in our upcoming Palm Sunday procession.

This is the second most important pilgrimage site in Ethiopia, after Axum. It contains 11 churches cut down into the rock. Each church is one single piece of stone! Remembering Axum’s destruction, King Lalibela decided this was one way to keep his monuments from being burnt down!

Our group of 8 flew in at noon, and while the other group was off visiting the mountain church of another of the Ethiopian saints, we begin visiting the first set of 11 rock-hewn churches. The churches are clustered out on a promontory, fed by artesian wells, and the small town’s spirit gathers around them.
It’s St. George’s feast day, who is perhaps the most popular saint in Ethiopia, judging from the iconography, and so it brings out the town in their white feast-day best; they gather at St. George’s church for a day of singing, drumming and dancing. People are perched on the cliff edge, dancing in the pit of the church, spread out in groups over the hillside, it’s got all the hallmarks of Ethiopian celebration: heavy involvement, multiple things happening at once, lots of laughing, singing everywhere.

Meanwhile Yemi has gone to the market and selected two sheep for dinner. They are roasted for us outside a tukul hut she makes available for our party, and we eat a dozen different dishes Ethiopian-style, from a common platter, with our hands and injera bread (it’s an art, and not as sloppy as you’d think!). She brings in a musician and folk dancer, who teach us the local shoulder-dancing tradition (the after-party is the most fun, when the folks who prepared the meal for us take to the floor and show us how it’s really done!)

All of us are hitting our wall for travel fatigue, and this feast is a wonderful way to signal the last lap toward a good finish, and the beginning of a next chapter, as our minds start to turn toward our return to the capitol tomorrow and our return to our own country and communities the day after.

I’m recognizing that familiar juncture where I’m at that two-week threshold, where I need to wash all my clothes, lay low for three days, and then either return home or head out for another month! If I were staying I would go south into the tribal lands and into the Omo Valley. But I have a return ticket and work waiting, so that’s going to wait for another trip --a good way to leave a new country one has learned to love!

(DANIEL) Pilgrimage begins where tourism ends. Tourism is at its best when everything goes according to schedule --consumers demanding services provided, as shown in the glossy brochure. Pilgrimage is a different beast: it comes into its own when things start to go wrong and the soul becomes attentive and resilient in the reality of the moment.

Today the group stepped into that discovery more fully as we received word that Ethiopian Airlines had just instituted a rule that domestic flights would fly their passengers without their luggage as needed, due to load limits. Not a great hardship when one considers the daily reality of the people around us, but it was a shock to the group’s expectations: traveling only with a daypack for the next several days, and leaving all the unnecessary necessities behind. It’s a clarifying exercise to have to repack a bag with a 15 pound limit! In addition, the airline overbooked the plane to Lalibela, our last stop on this historical circuit.

So 8 intrepid volunteers stayed behind and had one of our richest days yet. We trekked 80 km out of Axum mostly on dirt track toward the arid and otherworldly Eritrean border to visit Ethiopia’s oldest standing church, at a monastery built on top of a mesa that can only be reached by scaling a cliff by rope and leather harness!

It was all the adventure that it sounds like it might be, and on the way back we diverted off the main track to see something I hadn’t expected and had never heard about: a huge 5th - 8th c. B.C. temple at Yeha, standing in the bowl of a ring of mountains, built by the pre-Axumite kingdom of Damat, a blood-sacrifice, lunar/solar cult from Southern Arabia. The stonework was massive and perfect, stacked without mortar, like the pyramids, but perfectly symmetrical and true after 2,800 years.

The cubic temple with its still-perfect stones stood 40 feet tall, without fanfare or tourist attention, next to the parish church, in the middle of a goat-herding village, one of those wonders of the world simply for its unlikeliness, its testimony to a forgotten but technologically advanced culture, long predating the Ethiopia that surrounds us and which seems itself so ancient.

It’s also testimony to where I started: that pilgrimage begins where tourism ends. None of today was on the itinerary. It was all making the best of an uncontrollable mistake. Finding the temple at Yeha was not part of our conscious pilgrimage, but it uncovered something inside us: wonder and more questions.
And the whole day became all the richer by paying attention, or as C.S. Lewis calls it, Preferring the Given.

(DANIEL) Today we arrived at the holiest of all Ethiopian cities and the centerpiece of its pilgrimages: Axum. Here is where the Ethiopians believe that the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant resides. The story is colorful, involving the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon, and her child by him, Menelik, who returned to Solomon’s court as a young man to train, and then was sent back to Ethiopia by Solomon with 12,000 of his nobles, who in their migration also absconded with the Ark.

This modest and dusty little town of Axum is full of other relics that make it surprisingly rich, if overlooked. In the 3rd century Axum was one of the four great empires of the world, along with Rome, Persia, and China. It was more extensive in Africa than the Egyptian empire, and included Saudi Arabia and what is now Kenya. There are fields of obelisks outside of town, one of which is the largest single stone erected by humans, and these stones stand over mausoleums of kings 95 percent of which are un-excavated.

Much of what we saw in the morning dated from the fifth century, on the cusp of Christianity taking hold in this part of the world. So much of what was gone was destroyed by Muslim (and even Jewish!) crusades. In the afternoon we arrived at Ethiopia’s holiest of holies. We came to St. Mary of Zion compound, which houses a huge and active church (the equivalent of St. Peter’s I suppose) next to the older church that predates it (and which itself sits on the foundations of the old gold-encased church that was destroyed by a Jewish warrier-queen in the 9th century!)

Like the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and most other Holy-of-Holies, the core is often far less impressive than the casing and the custom around it, and same with this site. Both those buildings huddle around the blockish shrine that is the equivalent of the Kabbah in Mecca: the chapel of the Ark of the Covenant. We were told there were sharpshooters all around, but only one monk actually keeps the shrine, surrounded by a dry moat.

Of course the Is it? / Isn’t it? question is the first one that pops to the western mind, but that one if far down the list for Ethiopian Christians. And it doesn’t seem like simple naivete. I’m aware that faith and devotion and custom and relationships and culture and loyalty are so intertwined and can hardly be separated and still make any sense. All these things, including the Ark of the Covenant in this little building, are utterly live for them.

(DANIEL) We continue the itinerant part of our trip, where each day we jump a quick flight to the next city --30 minutes can equal 12 hours or more by ground! We flew this morning from Lake Tana to Gondar, the medieval capital of Ethiopia. Gondar was the crossroads of trade routes in all directions, and in this period the kings undertook a huge massive amount of building.

On the pilgrimage side of our travel, Gondar became one of the principal religious centers as well and at one point the king planned to move the Ark of the Covenant from Axum to Gondar. Its church is still one of the most important ones in the country.

Ethiopia slid back into its dark ages when Gondor fell into civil war, then was collapsed by earthquake, and later overrun by Muslim crusades. The royal compound is mostly what remains, still vast, and much of it still standing. It gets tagged the Camelot of Africa, and still holds the echo of what once was.

(DANIEL) Lake Tana is Africa’s fourth largest lake measuring about 45 miles across. It contains 37 islands, 20 of which hold monasteries. These monasteries are important links to the past, since they were protected by their remoteness from the destruction of Muslim crusades in the 16th century.

Today we visited several of the most important ones, and stepped into yet another world (and had a wildly unsecure boat adventure that everyone who experienced it will remember!).

This lake and its islands became the religious center of Ethiopia when Debre Libanos (Day 2) was decimated by the Muslims. The monasteries are extensive compounds, with all the buildings built in hut style, circular with concentric rings of access. In the churches there is literally no surface left unpainted, and the icons tell the stories of their favorite saints (see the photo gallery for today to see the signal story of the monastery Kidane Meret, the “Covenant of Mercy.”

My sense of the richness of this branch of faith keeps broadening and deepening with each place we visit. I begin to sense just how narrowly I can define tradition, and the real question to anyone talking about Tradition is “Which one?” Together the tapestry is quite broad and varied.

And today, Ethiopia, so long monolithically Christian, but with an old history for tolerance (they welcomed the Muslims in the 7th century when they were being persecuted everywhere else) is entering in a new cycle the same struggle so much of the world is engaged in right now. Muslims are building mosques fast, and the tensions are rising even faster. Ethiopia must begin to imagine in its own new reality what living pluralistically means, while keeping the distinctness and richness of everyone’s traditions and celebrations. People are fearful, and hopeful that Ethiopia can lead again as it did once long ago. Even now, the Ethiopian Orthodox are treated far more generously by Muslims inside and outside Ethiopia because of that memory of solidarity and common brotherhood from long ago.

(DANIEL) We’ve left urban Ethiopia behind for remoter parts, and landed today at Lake Tana, the headwaters of the Nile and third largest lake on the continent, another creation of the Rift Valley. In the center of this vast lake lie monastic islands that we will visit tomorrow, but today was a travel and recovery day, into which we sandwiched a visit out to the Blue Nile falls about an hour outside of town.
The falls were grand, a spectacle worth the hike, but what struck me the most was the texture of rural daily life all around us as we hiked and drove. We are in a part of the country where everything is done or made by hand. Plows are made of wood and pulled by oxen; houses are mud and stick, or round pole houses, roofed in straw. Kids run free or tend livestock. Everyone is doing some basic survival task, but at a pace that suggests a completely different understanding of time.
Our accommodations are more primitive than Addis, and the group is responding to this shift, and is trying to work out how travelers abroad become supple enough to adapt to local custom and scale, and yet keep stable enough to feel generously open and curious to all the richness around us. Still, as we adapt to less, I recognize that we are still living at a level far above nearly every African we have seen today.
Pilgrimage by definition has a large element of challenge in it; it’s a hero’s quest and so heading to this remoter place helps us get closer to what we came to do -- closer not just to exotic sites but to a way of being.