In 1961, when I was 19, my parents took me on a trip around the world. One of the places we went was to what is now simply called Israel. But we said we were going to Jerusalem. In those days, the city was divided into three sections. I believe they had the Muslim (It was technically Jordan), Christian, and Jewish sections.

I was 19 years old and not paying much attention to the contemporary politics of the place. Instead, I was drawn to ancient history, especially, the history of the Roman Empire at the time of Christ. It put me into a state of awe to be walking the same streets, seeing the same countryside. It was hard to wrap my brain around the fact that I was in the exact place where Jesus walked.

We came in through Lebanon. You couldn’t come directly from certain other countries, but I don’t know which ones they were in 1961. We were only there for a very short time, but I have some pictures  and diary entries to refresh my memory.

One of the funniest things that happened when we got there was that we were told we had no reservation at the hotel. (By accident? We do not know.) So we joked that there was no room for us in the Inn. As a result, we had to sleep in a sort of dingy annex. Mother and I slept in one room together, and my father slept in the single room that was meant for me because they were all afraid that I would be attacked in the night. It was a dangerous time in Israel and the divided city of Jerusalem, but not as dangerous as today. There were rules we must follow. For instance, we were not allowed to wail at the Wailing Wall. It was forbidden to approach it, as if you might begin to lament if you were an American. There were some places we were not allowed to enter.

It was cold, gray, and indeed, much colder than we had expected.  We were dressed as warmly as we could, wearing layers of clothes. I don’t think we had a particularly good guide, but we saw the Garden of Gethsemane, which I knew from the Bible. We saw ancient olive trees, some of which were supposedly new when Jesus was alive. Many people still dressed much like they did in the Biblical era. We went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There was an inner church that was supposed to commemorate where Christ was laid to rest and where he was risen again. We visited the Mount of Olives and looked over the fields of Boaz. It is all jumbled together in my memory with a few really clear mental visuals.

I found my mother‘s diary.

And I knew where to look for the photo album from that trip. I wish there were more pictures to help me remember. I’ll have to look at Mother’s diary more closely to see what I can glean from it, and hope it triggers memories that have long been buried. The diary is very interesting, but her writing is cramped, and it’s hard to read. I wish she’d written more about it. If only she had filled in more details about her feelings, both spiritual and objectively historical, about the state of the Holy sights juxtaposed with the friction of the divided city of Jerusalem and the sense of danger in the land.

I remember in the old part, the cramped city, with streets impassable to cars. As the grade became very steep, the narrow roads became steps, no longer fit for a car to drive on.  They could only be traversed on foot. The scent of the place is still fresh in my memory, but it is sadly indescribable. It smelled of age. It smelled of centuries of cooked food and ancient stones, mixed with the smell of kerosene stoves, which were heavily in use due to the very chilly weather.

I bought a set of creche figures crudely carved of olive wood , which I kept for many, many years to add interest to my Christmas decorations. I don’t know who has them now, but one of my children does.  Otherwise, I don’t have any souvenirs from Jerusalem except a small Bible whose cover is decorated with mother-of-pearl.

Even though our stay was short and was interrupted by Ramadan, which kept us from visiting a place we were trying to see. That segment of our trip made a huge impression on me. It just seemed so unreal to me, and yet there we were. We saw things that our Lord saw. We may have retraced his steps in some places. It felt very spiritual, despite some tourist traps and the commercialization of Christian traditions and beliefs.  It was thrilling to be there. The details may be fuzzy in my mind now, but the feeling of awe has never left me.

Copyright©. 2026 Bonnie B. Matheson