The Holy Land

I haven’t posted in a while, but hello everyone. I am back in Rome for the last month of my sabbatical, after a one-week pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The schedule was a little too ambitious and I got sick the second-last night we were there, but I am feeling better now. All that said, the pilgrimage was a memorable experience. We spent four days in Galilee and four days in Jerusalem. I have a much better sense of the geography of the Bible now, especially of the Jerusalem area.

Highlights of the visit would be: Nazareth, Capernaum, Tabor, Qumran, the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, and the Old City of Jerusalem. Most of the Jerusalem sites were overcrowded, especially the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is the strangest church building I have ever seen. I got away from my group to visit the Western Wall (the only remainder of the ancient Temple) in the Jewish Quarter, and I found that a touching experience. What was most touching, though, was the Via Dolorosa, the street from Pilate’s Palace to Golgotha that is the basis for the Stations of the Cross in Catholic Churches today. We stopped at each of the outdoor stations (one through nine) on the way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the Via itself is basically a shopping bazaar like something straight out of Indiana Jones.

Picture this: I am climbing up the Via Dolorosa trying to imagine Jesus and his Cross and remembering each of you again by name; I am looking out for dog poop and loose paving stones and ducking under racks of hanging scarves, souvenir shirts, and carpets; a private Jewish property owner has placed an enormous one-storey menorah at the top of the street; a muezzin is calling the Muslims to prayer over loudspeakers in a long, minor-keyed and haunting chant; the shopkeepers are pushing to ask if we want to come in; several of the other priests are trying to bargain from shop to shop on a kiddush cup that they see as a chalice; from time to time, we file into one of the tiny chapels dedicated to the station and say our prayers; one time we have to say our prayers out in the middle of the street; and suddenly we are on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre, where there is a whole community of Ethiopian monks.

We clamber down a staircase to get to the only entrance to the Church, and once inside, we climb up again on a narrow spiral starcase to get to Golgotha. Everywhere there is simply a crush of humanity, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of incense and rose oil. The building is dark. Candles hang in decorated holders at every key shrine in the Church. Different sections of the building are controlled by different ancient Christian traditions, and they do not get along---although today they are on their good behavior. The eleventh station is in a Franciscan chapel and the twelfth is in a Greek Orthodox chapel, side by side. We finish the stations, and after wading through the crowd, we get to venerate the place where the Cross stood---the rock is covered in a massive glass case with an altar on top of it. (It is actually very likely that this is the exact place, since the Emperor Hadrian built a temple over it in an attempt to obliterate the Christian cult. The Emperor Constantine later tore the temple down to build the antecedent of the present Church.)

We go back down the narrow spiral staircase, and find ourselves at the Stone of the Anointing. We are not far from the nearby rotunda and the Chapel of the Anastasis (Resurrection), but there is such a long line to get into the shrine over the tomb that we are not able to get in. Finally we pass back outside into daylight and fresh air, and I try unsuccessfully to get a photo of this strange Church.

The whole time I was in the Holy Land, I kept thinking of Ogden Nash's smart-aleck couplet, "How odd of God / To choose the Jews." The whole place was odd. I am still thinking this through. God chose a desert to be the Promised Land? He chose a People and then dispossessed them for two-thirds of their history? In the unforgettable words of the Psalmist, “It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

The Masses at Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre were prayerful, but on the whole this was not exactly an inspiring experience. My predominant memory is how crowded everything is. If I have taken one thing away from the experience, it is a deeper appreciation of what Jesus meant when he said, "It is better for you that I go" (Jn 16:7). What we have in the Church and the sacraments is much more intimate than what we could have if he were still preaching and attracting crowds in the Holy Land. It is so much more accessible and personal.