We’re back home from a very successful pilgrimage with the Delmar Travel and Tours, where I ended up doing nine episodes for my TV Show Straight from the Sky instead of the four that I thought I’d be able to do. The reason that I was able to do more was due to our tour guide. She is Exie “Romema†Schlossberg who is a Filipina originally from Leyte and married a Messianic Jew. I learned that to be a tour guide in Israel, you have to take a two-year course on the Bible and learn Hebrew. She not only learned both, she also had a very strong faith in our Lord. She is in my book the most famous Filipino in all of Israel because she knew people everywhere we went!
For me, that pilgrimage was akin to a retreat, a marriage encounter and a bible study rolled into one! While in Jordan we did have an excellent tour guide named David whose history of the place during the time of Moses was superb. But he had no spirituality to share with the group. Thanks also to our priests, Fr. Gerry Matriano of the Redemptorist Church and Fr. Dante Barcelona, a Franciscan whose spirituality uplifted everyone.
In Israel we did have some kind of undeniable divine manifestations that happened during the pilgrimage. The first one came as we were all looking from a distance at Mt. Tabor, which everyone knows is the place of the Transfiguration. It was a cloudless day, except for a solitary cloud right on the summit of Mt. Tabor. Could it have been the Shekinah glory cloud?
At the Church of the Annunciation, the place where the Angel Gabriel appeared before the Blessed Virgin Mary, we arrived in Nazareth around 11:15 a.m. and from the bus we had to climb up the steep slope to enter the Church of the Annunciation. When we finally got there, the front yard of the church was teeming with tourists so we had to wait for our time to enter the church until those ahead of us were already done.
Finally as we went inside the church, it was already five-minutes before noontime. As we reached the main altar, the church bells rang so loudly, as if all the churches inside Nazareth were ringing their bells and a group of male pilgrimage surrounding the altar then prayed the angelus aloud. We were so filled with emotion that we were praying the angelus at the very place that the Angel Gabriel announced the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I had two other manifestations but of a personal nature that happened to me. After I touched the very place that the Holy Cross was inserted in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher I went straight to the Catholic Church beside it. It turned out that this church was the very place St. Jerome translated the Holy Bible from Hebrew to Greek to Latin.
On one of its columns were ancient graffiti and the name Valerianus. My first name is Valeriano and I felt a divine presence in that place. As I got out, it turned out that the name of the church is St. Catherine of Alexandra. Call it coincidence that the church in the City of Carcar 40 kms south of Cebu City was finished by my great grandfather Fr. Manuel Rubio Fernandez, an Augustinian Friar, the father of my grandfather Don Jose Avila.
I was at the Cenacle, the place for the last Supper when I was finishing one of the last episodes for my show when I was doing my extro. But since I wasn’t satisfied with it… I had to redo it immediately. As I said thank you for watching this show… the bells of the Church of the Dormition began to ring as if, God was pleased with what we had done.
Finally the last manifestation came at the very spot that our Lord Jesus Christ was placed inside the dungeon in the house of Caiaphas. We were told that on the wall was graffiti of a cross. So I took a photograph with my camera… but no cross appeared as I didn’t want to use my flash. But when I took a shot again, quite timely someone also took a photo but used a flash and the cross suddenly appeared in my camera.
These are just some of the few manifestations that many of us in the group believe was divinely inspired. But if there is anything one can learn about being in Jerusalem, it is called the City of Peace. But is there really peace in Jerusalem? I submit I found my inner peace inside the walls of this ancient city and sort of felt that I was at home, after all, we did learn much about the City where our Lord Jesus Christ once walked; a city that rejected him and crucified him on a cross. No wonder Jesus wept for Jerusalem.
I would like to believe that the rejection of Christ by the Jews is a contributing factor to the division happening within the walls of Jerusalem where all the three major faiths on this earth call Holy. But only religious fanatics within Judaism or Mohammendanism and Christianity cause this disunity. I dare say that it is time for us to embrace the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, “To love one another as I have loved you.†Indeed without this love for our fellowmen, we can never hope to achieve any lasting peace… even in this city of peace called Jerusalem. It is love that brings lasting peace.
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