Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land (11 page)

I'm sure it pains Jesus to know the bloodshed that was done in his name. As a pilgrim, it pains me to have any part at all in this history. Yet I feel the power of pilgrimage, of people making this journey for the sake of their beliefs. There's an inherent power in a pious purpose. My fingers cannot stay away from one of the crosses etched in stone. I wonder about the Crusader who carved it. What did he believe? What drove him? I feel the primitive beauty of the simple lines. Was it a mammoth effort to carve these lines, or was this Crusader so overcome with religious fervor upon reaching this sacred place that it was a trifling thing for him to press the point of his knife blade into solid stone?

“They're beautiful, aren't they?” Charlie says as I linger over the crosses.

“I can't decide if they are or not,” I answer. “Do they defile the wall or adorn it?”

“Blood atonement isn't pretty,” Charlie says. “But thank the Lord for it!”

There's no mistaking the piety in my fellow pilgrim's heart. Charlie loves Jesus. He asks me for a page and pen so we can make a rubbing of the cross. The rubbing doesn't come out well without the right tools, but at least it's some kind of evidence of where we've been, a kind of paper trail that we are working out our own salvation by being here, by exploring these ideas (Philippians 2:12). Perhaps the rubbing is an attempt to reconcile the opposing forces of religious history: piety and oppression. Perhaps the rubbing is foolish. Perhaps every pious enterprise appears foolhardy when seen from great time and distance.

In a few moments the whole group stops again, this time at the Chapel of the Prison of Jesus, which honors those who are prisoners of conscience. We crowd into the small space in order to conduct a brief prayer service. My body presses against the warmth of an elderly pilgrim on one side and cold stone walls on the other.

We have been in the church for more than an hour. Stephen says that now we will go to two chapels, each with the “original” tomb. The first chapel is used by the Syrians, though it's owned by the Armenians. The walls are coated black with incense.

“Why don't they clean the walls?” someone asks.

“Because neither side will pay for clean-up or renovation,” Stephen answers. “Each thinks the other should pay.”

He smiles wryly and we return the smile. We are beginning to understand this Holy Land.

This Syrian/Armenian chapel has a
koch
tomb (from the Hebrew for “oven”). Stephen says that this may not be the original tomb, but it's a terrific model for how the real tomb probably looked. I look around and don't believe him. He can't know everything. Someone gave him bad information. This is certainly not the way the tomb of Jesus looked in my Sunday school lessons. Everyone can picture the rock that was rolled before that tomb — a nice, round rock, clean and white. After all, it was a perch for angels!

But we are deep underground. There's not a bit of natural light. Nothing is white or clean. Picture a black wall with a brick oven
set into it, the kind for making pizza. That oven door opens into the tomb. Each tomb has two parts. In the larger front part, the “foyer,” so to speak, the body would be anointed. Then the body would be pushed into the second part, one of the deeper recesses, and the tomb would be sealed. Eighteen months later a family member would open the tomb and scrape the bones together and put them in an ossuary, or bone box. In the Hebrew scriptures this scraping/gathering is what is meant by the phrase “and he was gathered to his fathers.” Stephen makes scraping motions with his arms to cement our understanding. I shiver involuntarily.

We are allowed to enter the tomb three at a time. Kyle, myself, and a woman from another pilgrim group stoop very low to enter. We are practically on our knees on a filthy floor. We shine the flashlight around. The only other light comes from a single wick burning in an oil candle. There are multiple doors all the same size: small. You couldn't crawl into those doors. We are in the shared foyer, and the doors lead to the deeper recesses. You'd have to lie down and have someone shove you in. Head-first or feet-first? We count two open doors and two sealed doors.

“Are there bodies in there?” the woman asks.

“Yes,” Kyle says confidently, as if he knows.

We all shudder. Then we crawl back out. We cross a large, open area to another chapel to see a second original tomb. This one is housed in a structure made of stone and marble that is ornately carved. This tomb is closely supervised. A man who is distinctively dressed in a round fur hat and long black robe lets people into the tomb four at a time. He signals entrance and exit every few minutes by clapping his hands vigorously, which makes his enormous cross necklace swing against his chest. We wait obediently until he claps for us.

Inside the structure, the tomb itself is all marble. At least it feels clean. The washerwoman part of my DNA is happy. I put my shekel in the box to pay for a candle. When I kneel to light the candle, I am beside Michael, and our knees are on the marble floor. Ashley and Jessica are on Michael's other side. I feel depleted rather than Spirit-filled. Maybe I've used up my
allotment of Spirit for the day. Maybe the Spirit can't penetrate all the marble. Maybe the fur-hatted man clapping his hands drives the Spirit away.

When we leave, I'm glad that this is the last site on the agenda.

We find the other members of the documentary group to discuss logistics. Then we all walk slowly back through the Old City of Jerusalem toward the Damascus Gate, shopping as we go. When some of the others buy small silver Jerusalem crosses on necklace chains, I decide this is a good idea. I try to count how many I should buy: two daughters, three sisters, one mother, one secretary, how many friends? I cannot think. I buy only six crosses, knowing it won't be enough. I cannot bring myself to buy more. I hate to feel like a tourist stocking up on postcards when these are crosses bought on the day I touched the rock of Golgotha and wept at the Stone of Anointing.

On impulse, I buy figs from a street-seller. I've never had fresh figs before. They're plump and as purple as eggplant, streaked with green. They feel alive, and are delicious.

By the time we get back to Saint George's, it's past five o'clock. We're supposed to attend a vespers service immediately. But my pilgrim feet hurt. I'm thirsty and hot: I feel like I've been thirsty and hot for days. At vespers we will not be allowed even a water bottle. So Kyle and I detour to the cathedral courtyard for a different sort of vespers. Taybeh beer is made in a Christian village near Ramallah. Drinking it will be an act of solidarity — like intercessory prayer. We raise our bottles to the Christians of Palestine.

I say to Kyle, “I suppose, if it's possible to get drunk on God, Jerusalem is the place to do it.”

“Amen,” he agrees.

“Honestly, I feel a bit punch-drunk,” I say.

“Would that be the Spirit doing the punching?”

We laugh at the image. But the truth is that all of us gorged
ourselves on spiritual experiences today. We were spiritual gluttons. Does that make us pilgrims or tourists? I want to slow this pilgrimage down and allow room for the Spirit. But I want to drink it all in because I may never be able to come back. I don't want to miss a thing.

Dinner is chicken and saffron rice. Then there's a meeting of the whole group in the lecture room to share the day's experience.

“Where did you experience a communion of the saints?” is the question.

People describe moments of connection with pilgrims past and present. I think about my connections. My experience at the Western Wall would seem an unlikely sort of communion. But weren't the Jewish mother, the baby, and I all connected by our hope in God? And the Crusader crosses, those strange acts of devotion. I didn't want to claim my connection to their bloody history, their savagery. But aren't we connected by folly? Perhaps future generations will see our folly more clearly than we do.

Michael describes an experience of the Spirit while in the marble tomb, a sense of the Spirit right there beside him, which made him appreciate the enormity of Jesus' crucifixion. I had been kneeling beside Michael and hadn't known he was moved. How intimate, how personal these holy experiences are! It's hard to give voice to them even to the person beside you.

After the meeting, the smaller documentary group has a brief worship service on the rooftop. Jessica leads us, using some David Crowder music and the text about the healing of Blind Bartimaeus, which forms the basis of the Jesus Prayer. My very long day has come full circle. To close, we stand and take turns praying. It is sweet, even as our language betrays our doctrinal differences.

After the Amen, Brian produces a bottle of wine and small glass cups like jelly jars. We pour the wine and drink, still standing in our prayer circle. The lights of Jerusalem are spread at our feet. The moment feels sacramental, and no one moves to break the circle.

Shepherds' Field, Bethlehem

CHAPTER 10

Birth and Death

I am the gate for the sheep.

J
OHN 10:7

T
ODAY IS
T
UESDAY.
Bethlehem.

When I go down to breakfast, the documentary group is sitting at a table, looking dispirited.

“What's wrong?”

Jessica sighs. “Tomatoes and cucumbers are all right, I guess. But for every meal? For breakfast?”

“Let's just hope they have something different for lunch,” Ashley says with a forced smile. “Not chicken.”

“Why bother hoping?” Charlie says, emphatically. “Lunch and supper will be the same as always: chicken and yellow rice. And yellow —
why?
” Charlie's drawl gives the word “why” two syllables.

“That's from saffron — ”JoAnne begins to explain.

“Believe me, you don't want to know why it's yellow,” Michael says, and everybody laughs.

After breakfast, Stephen begins his lecture with a simple question: “Was Jesus born in Bethlehem?” Warm, dry air wafts through an
open window, and I want to get up and look out at Jerusalem. “There are some good reasons to answer, ‘Probably not.' ” Some of my fellow pilgrims shift audibly in their seats, telegraphing discomfort. I squiggle deeper into my molded plastic chair and open my notebook.

The earliest writings in the New Testament are the Epistles of Paul, and the apostle never mentions Bethlehem. In fact, Paul mentions Jesus' birth only in two passing references to the fact that Jesus was born of flesh. Usually, when Paul talks about Jesus, it is “him crucified.” Perhaps Paul preached about the birth elsewhere and that record has been lost to us. Or perhaps Paul didn't know the tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

The earliest Gospel is Mark's, and he is silent on Jesus' birth. Luke's famous account of the census — Mary and Joseph's journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, which we read and hear every Christmas — is problematic because there is no historical record of the census that Luke mentions. Did this census, in fact, ever happen? Stephen's voice underscores the improbability. Another wrinkle: No one disputes that Nazareth was Jesus' hometown. Was Nazareth, then, where he was actually born? Still another wrinkle: There is a second Bethlehem in Galilee. Which one is the correct location?