Happy New Year!
Tomorrow it's Epiphany, the time of year when we remember the Magi's journey. I've been thinking about the route of their journey and it strikes me that they'd need an armoured car to get through that region of the world now. My prayer this Epiphany is for more pilgrims of peace in the middle east. Here is the likely route of the Magi:
They would have probably started in ancient persia. Modern day Iran - part of George Bush's Axis of Evil - Iran is about to have sanctions imposed on it by the UN due to fears about it's nuclear weapons programme...yet in the 1980's the US was happy to sell arms to Iran when it was fighting the evil of communism. Iran has frequently called for Israel to be wiped off the map and had a recent conference of Holocaust deniers.
They then travel onto Iraq and probably to Basra...Where one person is assassinated every hour as Iraq's second city descends into civil war. They'd journey up the river euphrates passing Bagdad and then cut across the desert to Damascus in modern day Syria - another part of Bush's Axis of Evil. Syria fund Hezbollah in Lebanon, causing massively destablization in that region due to the assassinations of senior officials in the anti-syrian government of Lebanon.
Then they'd drop down to Jerusalem, before going onto Bethlehem. Israel is symbolised by two walls. The western wall of the temple, highlighting the prayers of the religious Jews and the wall that divides Israel and the occupied territories. The magi would of passed through the wall...
What a grim journey...
