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residence, said Doan, was Gehenna, the section of Jerusalem where residents in antiquity burned garbage; this was the vivid image Jesus often used to illustrate hell. A few days later over dinner, one of the Jesuits was speaking about some improvements made in the city and said something I never thought I’d hear: “Gehenna is lovely these days.”
    George inquired about the possibility of making a retreat nearby. Doan said that in the Garden of Gethsemane the Franciscan friars ran a cluster of about fifteen small buildings, hermitages, that were available for prayer, though reserving them was difficult, so high was the demand.
    As Doan described more places on his worn map, sleep almost overcame me. Thrilled and exhausted, I promised myself to review his notes later. Thanking him, we gathered up our notes and left behind his map.
    â€œOh no,” he said, “that’s yours for the week. Also, we have our big meal in the afternoon and a smaller meal for supper, after Mass, at seven o’clock. And you are most welcome to celebrate Mass if you wish, Fathers.”
    As we walked from Doan’s office, George smiled. “Ready?” he said.

C HAPTER 2
    Yes
    â€œHow can this be?”
    I N A PERFECT WORLD George and I would have visited the important places in the life of Christ in sequence: we would have started in Bethlehem, moved to Nazareth, continued on to the Sea of Galilee, and ended up in Jerusalem. But since that would have meant flying from the States into the so-far-nonexistent Bethlehem Airport, we couldn’t arrange it. So Nazareth, where the story of Jesus truly began, came in the middle of our pilgrimage.
    After a few days of touring around Jerusalem, as Doan suggested (more about Jerusalem later), George and I took ourselves to the Avis car rental around the corner from the Pontifical Biblical Institute. The details of the transaction were marginally less complicated than applying for a mortgage, but early one morning we rented a little gray car for a reasonable sum, found a GPS for a few thousand shekels, and picked up a road map for free. The GPS was, oddly, rented not from Avis but from a suspicious-looking gas station across the street. The helpful woman at the car-rental desk estimated that Galilee, northeast of Jerusalem, was a four- to five-hour drive.
    The GPS seemed largely uninterested in taking us in the right direction. Though George is an excellent driver (i.e., better than me) and we expertly navigated our way out of Jerusalem, we quickly found ourselves lost. At first it had seemed a straightforward journey. All we had to do was find Highway 90, which snaked north, alongside the west bank of the Jordan River, and follow it to the Sea of Galilee. But it soon became clear that we were far from any highway, stuck in the middle of an arid countryside of rolling hills dotted with small gray-green bushes.
    George’s patience dwindled as the roads narrowed. Who could blame him? At one point, the GPS said, “Turn right,” and we pulled onto a deeply rutted dirt road.
    â€œUh!” he said. “Where are we?”
    I examined the map. “Shilo,” I said.
    â€œYeah, right!” said George, evidently doubtful that we were near one of the great cities of the Old Testament where the Ark of the Covenant rested for many years.
    â€œWhere do we want to go?” he said. “I’ll plug it into the GPS.”
    We wanted to go north to Galilee and along the River Jordan, so I searched the map for a location on the way. “Gilgal,” I said.
    â€œOh, come on!” said George. Another famous Old Testament town, one that figures prominently in the life of Saul—he was made king there, among other things.
    But it was true. I was constantly surprised how the storied names of biblical locales popped up in the most familiar of circumstances: on a simple map, on a graffitied street sign, or in everyday conversations. “The traffic to