Faith

This year has been a year of exploration and self-reflection for me.  I have had the time to do a lot of thinking about issues that aren’t usually at the forefront in my mind.  I can only hope these opportunities are making me a better person.  In the course of two weeks, I was fortunate enough to have two experiences which I never expected I would have—I visited Petra, Jordan, and I visited the Dome of the Rock.

Petra is a beautiful old city, carved in the stones that make up the sides of a valley in Jordan.  It’s over 2,000 years old and is home to ancient burial tombs, beautifully sculpted facades (like the one made famous in Indiana Jones), and plenty of remains of idols and shrines. 

The Dome of the Rock is simply magnificent—blue and colorful, exquisitely detailed.  While I was on the Temple Mount, Church bells rang out throughout the Old City, and just underneath the exit, we found the Kotel.  Just another reminder of the “oneness” of human kind—of how we all fit together. 

I recently visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for the second time, and the awesomeness was not lost.  It is huge and engulfing, at once holy and spooky.  There, too, I was reminded of the “oneness” of human kind, when we exited the Church and were greeted with the Muslim call to prayer.  All these sites had the effect of making me feel not just small, but puny, though not insignificant.  Just one more cog in the experience we call “life”. 

And it has me wondering if believing in something greater than oneself is a part of human nature.  All three of these sites (two of them religious) are pure expressions of praise towards a manifestation of a higher being.  They are simple in meaning, though not in design, and are genuine and true.  We have proof that 2,000 years ago, and even further back than that, people were appealing to something greater than themselves for support and help with all facets of life.  In the time that these beautiful monuments to Greater Beings were constructed, people didn’t need “proof” that something more than them existed—they just believed.  Faith, though hard to achieve in its purest form, is a beautiful thing.

Each of these sites reminds me that we are all just looking for answers, and though we might not arrive to the same conclusion, our paths look pretty similar.