I had many insights from this time but one of the most valuable was to do with biblical geography.
I gained an understanding of distances between places that had been just names in the Bible and a realisation that going up the Mount of Olives is not easy, Jerusalem is very hilly!
Back in New Zealand at Easter, I can't help but think of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem.
In this dusty, rather humble church, which is more than 1600 years old there is a chapel with the tomb where Jesus was laid.
In that sense it must count as the most sacred Christian church.
Visiting this church was a surprise because I had to readjust my biblical geography.
I had never realised the Hill of Calvary and the tomb of Jesus are both in the same church.
I had to readjust to the fact these two important places can easily fit into the same church.
At one end, stairs take the pilgrim up to a second floor which is placed on top of Calvary.
The pilgrim then comes down the stairs and 40m away is the tomb of Jesus.
Geographically, the place of Jesus' death, on the Hill of Calvary, and the place of his resurrection are very close.
This is not only a geographical point.
In a spiritual sense, Calvary and the place of resurrection can be very close together in our lives.
Suffering and death reside next door to joy and hope and new birth.
One minute we are weighed down with sadness, next minute we can see some hope, there is a glimmer of joy which breaks through.
At Easter we celebrate the great joy that engulfed the world when the women, the first witnesses of the Resurrection discovered the tomb was empty on Easter Sunday morning; Jesus had risen.
While we acknowledge death and suffering are facts of life we face each day we also acknowledge that just around the corner, only a few metres away, is the promise of hope and new life.
I remember as a youngster finding a hen's nest and observing it carefully for days as the mother hen sat and warmed the eggs.
Then one day the hen was gone. Initially, I felt sad to see the broken half eggs shells.
They looked so empty and lifeless but of course they heralded the hatched chickens proudly paraded by the mother hen.
Good Friday and Easter Sunday are only two days apart but they encompass the extremes of human suffering and joy.
We all experience times of meaningless and hope whether we have a belief in God or not.
There is only a short distance between having a good day or having a bad day.
The Easter story has Jesus embracing these extremes. He faced all the suffering and injustice a hostile world could inflict upon him.
Then he died, not a very happy ending.
Then something happened; his friends found an empty tomb.
To the early disciples, the empty tomb, like the broken hen's eggs, could mean only one thing.
From death had come new birth, Jesus had burst forth to new life.
It was like seeing the broken eggs of a nest and realising the chickens can't be far away.
As human beings we know only too well how grief and joy, hope and despair can coexist within our hearts and in our world.
At Easter we acknowledge Jesus experienced this too in his life and death.
Most of all we remember that through all this Jesus showed us there is very little distance at all between us and God's gift of hope and life.
● Fr Michael Dooley is the parish priest of Green Island and Mosgiel parishes and the newly appointed Vicar General of the Dunedin Catholic Diocese.
