Tantur Newsletter, July-August 2015
For Seasonable Weather
written by Dan Koski, Tantur Staff
It’s late August at the time of this writing. The days are warm but not oppressively hot, with clouds once again returning to the sky. Evenings are now cooler, the olives are ripening, and the first leaves of our deciduous trees in our garden are starting to turn color.
And with it, the sound of staff cleaning rooms, printing off program documents, and getting ready for another start of a busy autumn.
It seems that it was just last week that we were busy preparing for the arrival of our summer programs and visitors, and yet here we are, looking back at one of the busiest summers in recent memory. We were blessed with a mild June and early July, although we paid for it in full in the latter half of July and most of the month of August. August was, in fact, one of the hottest months on record in the Holy Land, and even those who timed their visit to Tantur in part to bask in the warmth of the summer probably felt that they got a little more than wanted in that respect.
But, as the local Christian folksaying goes, with the feast of the Transfiguration (August 19th on the Julian calendar) comes the end of summer, and so it did once again. So while summer was a bit dramatic in terms of its weather, summer came and went as it has for time immemorial, with crops surviving and the olive harvest still set to begin next month.
We are living in a time of uncertainty in the Holy Land, with troubling news from the region entire as well as from within. This is an inescapable fact – with climate change also now increasingly being added to our list of worries. Yet God continues to send us seasonable weather, as the prayer in the divine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom goes, and with it, our fervent hope that we can continue the work of our Institute through the year, welcoming each new program, group, scholar and visitor will be able to complete their journey and their appointed tasks to the benefit of all.
The full newsletter is here: