It was a most beautiful mass, on the side of the mountain from which Jesus gave his most famous sermon from which are derived the Eight Beatitudes. The open-air chapel was very small as there are about 15-20 similar small places on the side of the hill so that multiple groups of pilgrims can hold small private masses. There were six rows of low stone benches of about six-foot length arranged on either side of a three-foot center aisle. The chapel was private and secluded from all the others, as I am sure all the others seem so, relative to their own perspective.

The service started with song and ended with song. Father Brian gave the mass, Father Carl to his left and Deacon Mark to his right. Behind the celebrants, the Sea of Galilee was a pale blue, matching the sky above of thin, wispy clouds. The shore of the “other-side” as Jesus refers to it in the bible, opposite Tiberius, seemed equidistant from the side they cast off from in their boats, and I wondered where it was that Jesus walked on the water during the storm and where it was that Peter begin to sink when he became afraid, before Jesus helped him back to the boat and the storm stopped.

I am sitting in the back, to the right of the middle because I wanted to take some pictures. Sue is sitting on the second bench from the front at the far right, next to a hundred-year-old plus olive tree, and I wonder why she does not join me, but the space is small, and we are still close. The tree Sue sits next to has hundreds of names and initials, carved into the wood with what must have been small pen-knives, like you might see on many other wooden surfaces in public places. There were names of many different languages and scripts so foreign as to seem ancient and from the carvings of scrolls and stone tablets.

Hervy is singing in his beautiful voice as we file up for communion. We sit down, then stand for the final prayer and song, and it is done. After mass, Rauf talks to us of the specialness of that place, as he does at each of the sites we visit, then the brothers and sisters trickle away.  Sue is sitting still, next to the tree. I look at her, puzzled, then see the light of the early morning day reflected in her tears.

I sit next to her and take her hand. “What’s wrong? I ask.”

She looks at me. It’s quiet now. We are alone. I hear birds in the trees. “I received a message,” she whispers. It’s hard for her to talk. I see the belief in her eyes. It is contagious and the faith of one envelops two.

“It happened during the Eucharistic prayer.” She said. I had to lean closer to hear.

“Father had just said, ‘Remember your brothers and sisters who have gone before you,’ and then its like someone told me to look down and I saw it. I saw ‘Helen’ burned into the wood of the tree in thick letters that stood out as though they were two-feet high, like it were the only name there. It was written as how she would write it. How she wrote her name. It’s like it was she who wrote it for me to see for me to tell my mother.”

She takes a deep breath, and continues, “When I saw her name, I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to join you, to sit with you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave this place. It’s like this feeling of having to be here. In this exact place. That I had to stay here, right here, almost like I could feel her there, right by my hand. I feel this urgency, like I have to tell mom right now, that she needs to know this now. I need for her to know this joyful message. Now.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Thing is, I never liked her handwriting when we were little. I thought it big and clumsy. That’s why I remember it. I know it’s hers. I couldn’t tell you how Jim’s or Clem’s or Fred’s handwriting looks. But I know Helen’s. It’s almost as though she did it on purpose so that I would know now at this very instant that it is her, and that she is okay, and that she wants me to tell mom that she is with God.

And then when Rauf talked about the sermon on the mount and the beatitudes and the miracles performed and how we must be open to the grace and beauty of God and believe in the miracles and the signs that He sends…it all seemed so relevant, so real…” her voice trails away.

Sue and I sat there, staring at Helen’s name in the tree, as though it were the only one there on that day, in that one chapel of many, on the side of the Mount of Beatitudes where Jesus once preached to the thousands, clustered along the northern shores of the Sea of Galilee.

Helen was Sue’s sister who passed away ten years and two months to the day. She passed away of what we considered depression, taking her own life. It was a very difficult time for the family, the significance of that and what it represented for them as Catholics, or of any faith for that matter: –that act of taking what is not yours, but God’s. Sue knows that this troubles her mother most, and Helen is forever in her mother’s and all her family’s prayers, and there remains to this day that doubt and that fear of forever being separated from Helen beyond this ephemeral gift of mortal life so generously given.

I take Sue’s hand, we stand and turn left on the narrow path between the trees. Within a few steps, we encounter the second Beatitude of eight on the side of the mountain.