I have now seen the most beautiful church of my lifetime—the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. This church is built as a memorial to the Spirit of the Lord’s visitation to the Virgin Mary, giving her the message that she would bear the child, Jesus. The setting was thought to be in a home/cave in Nazareth. In the 4th century AD, this cave was identified as the one in the Gospel story (although one can never know for sure). In any event, it was a setting very much like this one, if not this one, where the event took place.
The first floor of the church is a large open room with marble floors and stone block walls. It is somewhat dark in the room. The center of the room holds a sunken level (of about 3 feet) which is also marble flooring, shaped in a half-circle. Behind the marble floor is a cave that has been excavated from the mountain. You can see the opening to several rooms in the cave. It looks like a typical home/cave setting from the first century. The ceiling of this area is a large wood-beam expanse with a 12-foot diameter pentagon shaped hole leading up to the next level. The light coming through that hole spreads through the whole room, but mainly highlights the cave at its base.
I went upstairs thinking I had seen the church only to find a beautiful sanctuary directly on top of the lower structure. This room had lovely arched stained-glass windows, and incredibly beautiful modern pewter sculptures on the sides. It has a wooden roof structure that looked ancient, but the wood was too well preserved to be so. There were angular wooden arches around each side of the room, tying into the ceiling structure. The pews were simple dark wooden beams that had a quiet elegance. In the center of the room, right in front of the altar was a pentagon-shaped marble railing, which surrounded the hole in the ceiling of the room below. The hole and railing allowed you to see the cave of the annunciation to Mary, which was directly below the railing. The spiral ceiling above this area was a white material with an intricate pattern that automatically drew your gaze upwards. It was magnificent! The floors around the pentagon were marble and had continuously inlaid with somewhat abstract biblical images. The floor of the entire room contained such designs. I don’t have too many photos of the room, as some of my pictures were blurry—perhaps I was too moved to be still at the time, I don’t know. However, I do have some post-card photos, which I will add later when I get home.
Next we took a boat ride over the Sea of Galilee. The water was bright blue, and fresh. It is the largest fresh-water lake in either Israel or Jordan. As we were going across the waters my mind wandered through the many biblical stories involving the Sea of Galilee, including Jesus calming the storm and Jesus (and Peter with Jesus’ help) walking on the water. I could not help but feel closer to those stories as a result of being in the place of their origin.
Tomorrow, we go to Jerusalem for five days. My suitcase needs a break from this packing and unpacking every day. It is getting pretty worn out.
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