A Reluctant Christmas Pilgrim

Excerpted from The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium. (c) 2001 by Charles M. Sennott. Reprinted with permission of Public Affairs. All rights reserved. Buy the book from Amazon.com and help support GraceOnline.

Pilgrimage: Christmas 1999

Sunrise brushed the desert sky in red over the soft brown folds of the Judean hills as I set out along a ridge of the Kidron valley, heading toward Bethlehem. I stopped at a perch overlooking Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery that dates back to the fifth century. Considered the greatest of the desert monasteries both for its architecture and its history, Mar Saba is embedded in a sheer cliff face that towers above a trickling river. Its two watchtowers are joined by a massive, saw-toothed wall that plunges downhill, protecting and enclosing the domed chapels, sacristies and cupolas, tombs of martyrs, and glass reliquaries that cradle the skulls of seventh-century monks slain by invading Persians. The Great Laura of Mar Saba (laura being the Greek for "monastery") is among the more indelible images of the Holy Land.

  Within the ancient rhythm of the ascetic life preserved in this castle of prayer, the monks were just finishing chanting the divine office, as they had every morning for 1,517 years, when the first light of day sliced in on the iconostasis of their Church of St. Nicholas. This community, once a thriving paragon of intellect and theology for Byzantium's 150 desert monasteries, is among the mere handful that still adhere to the austere life of the desert fathers. In the sixth century, as many as 700 monks occupied the cells honeycombing the stone cliffs of Mar Saba's Great Laura. Now there are no more than a dozen, with their black-hooded robes and long white beards, clinging to the life of sacrifice and prayer and meditation-an ancient tradition gradually slipping from grasp. Mar Saba's most famous monk was the brilliant theologian John Damascene, whose efforts to bridge the gap between Christianity and Islam in the early eighth century, during the rule of Caliph Yazid (with whom he had a close friendship), exemplify the role that the Christians of this land historically have played in linking East to West. The frail, tiny community of successors to the habit at Mar Saba struggle today to offer charity to nearby Palestinian villages and at the same time to stave off thieves and toughs from the neighboring tribes, such as the Tamari, among whom Islamic militancy has flourished.

 I was hiking with a small group of Palestinians and European tourists and a few expats. As we stopped to ponder the view of Mar Saba in the soft light of a winter dawn, I noticed the flicker of kerosene lamps inside some of the dwellings. The monastery had no electricity. This outwardly solid and imposing structure sheltered a fragile way of life. I was reminded that Christianity is an Eastern religion in its origins, rooted in the desert wilderness and the ferment of the Middle East. Mar Saba presented a searing vision of the end of that culture, the last echo of Byzantium.

I was reminded that Christianity is an Eastern religion in its origins, rooted in the desert wilderness and the ferment of the Middle East.

Hoping to use the cooler morning hours to keep up the pace and make Bethlehem by midday, we soon moved on. We hiked through valleys that formed natural wheat-threshing floors, and along ancient, terraced aqueducts. On the horizon stood the crumbled remains of the Herodion, a massive circular palace built in the first century B.C. by Kind Herod, inside a volcanic rock formation. Here and there along the rocky pathways were cisterns sealed by huge stones to prevent the theft of what was still the most precious commodity in the desert. A shepherd herded his flock down into a wadi, a gully where water collects in the rainy season. These timeless scenes gave us fleeting glimpses of life as it had been two thousand years earlier.

It was Saturday, December 4, 1999. I had joined up with a group of seven hikers who had been en route for six days and were on the final leg of the "Nativity Trail," which stretches from Nazareth to Bethlehem. They were planning to end up in Manger Square for the official ceremony launching a millennial celebration called Bethlehem 2000. As we made our way along the ridge, we stopped again to take in the panorama of Jerusalem to the north and the hills of Bethlehem to the south, and in the distance to the east, the more jagged, barren shale wilderness that tumbled down to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. We were walking in the footsteps of biblical characters--pilgrims, perhaps, though no one on this hike would have described himself or herself that way. Jumana Ayyad, 22, a smart young professional Palestinian woman from a Catholic family in Bethlehem, summed up her reasons for coming: "I am walking because I want to know my own land better. Is that a pilgrimage?"

Still, as we trod the path of the prophets through the ancient hills, I experienced an overwhelming sense of physical connection to a spiritual realm. In this open desert expanse I felt somehow closer to that realm than in the crowded, bustling cobblestone alleys and pathways of the Old City in Jerusalem, or Manger Square in Bethlehem. These hills seemed so far away from the tourist shops and the idling, air-conditioned buses waiting for armies of pilgrims in matching sun hats to be shuttled to the next site on the package tour. To devout Christians, the Via Dolorosa, with its souvenir stands and T-shirt shops, can seem crassly and depressingly commercial. Along the Way of Sorrow you can buy a glow-in-the-dark Jesus statue for the dashboard of your car, or a genuine handwoven crown of thorns to take home as a gift. Wooden crosses can be rented for just a few Israeli shekels from a man named Jihad, who holds claim to this concession just outside the Crusader doorway of the Holy Sepulcher. Among the keepsakes most prominently displayed by the shops are hologram posters of Jesus. The Lord is featured with solid European good looks, brown hair and blue eyes. And as you walk among the Semitic faces, the Jewish and Arab men who are the residents of Jerusalem and who certainly bear a much closer resemblance to Jesus, this hologram of the handsome, blue-eyed Jesus shifts in the light from eyes open and in smiling glory to eyes closed and in tearful agony. The other two monotheistic faiths have their fair share of kitsch as well. Shelves are lined with plastic replicas of the Second Temple, ceramic seder plates stamped with "Jerusalem 2000," and plastic shofars. There are alarm clocks in the shape of the Dome of the Rock, which resound at the appointed hour with the Muslim call to prayer But no matter how much this commercial industry of pilgrimage assaults you along the path, it is impossible to stroll the Old City--regardless of which quarter you are in--and not be struck by a profound sense of time, of origins. You are surrounded by the idea of, if not the belief in, God. And in fact, the businesses catering to this human enterprise called pilgrimage are as ancient a tradition as the religions them-selves.

After three years of living in Jerusalem, I had learned to resist my instinctive cynicism about pilgrimage and to become more accepting of its tactile spirituality. I had come to see it as a human experience as ancient as man's relationship to God. There was something about putting one's hand on the stones of Jerusalem, about standing within earshot of the place where the first utterances of the existential dialogue between Man and God were heard, or are believed to have been heard.

Through the centuries, believers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have ascended the same desert paths that I was walking on my way to Bethlehem; they have climbed Jerusalem's rocky, terraced hillsides to the walled Old City, to visit the holy places of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran. In a way, the history of these three faiths is a history of pilgrimage and of emigration--the movement of people along a path they feel compelled to follow by economic and political necessity and by the will of God. This is true of the central prophets of all three faiths. In Judaism, Moses led his people out of slavery in Egypt and through the Sinai desert to a hill-side just east of the Jordan river, where he pointed them toward the Promised Land. In Christianity, God set Jesus on his path from Bethlehem to Golgotha. In Islam, Jerusalem's central mosque, Al-Aqsa, which takes its name from the Arabic for "farthest place," is revered as the endpoint of the prophet Mohammed's "night journey" from Mecca to Jerusalem. Here he ascended to heaven, according to the Hadith, a collection of Islamic sayings and stories.

From the earliest days of recorded history, Jews went to Jerusalem to stand before God at the Temple. By 300 B.C., throngs from all over the Mediterranean and the Near East regularly converged on the City of David, the Israelite king who had built a resting place for the Ark of the Covenant and surrounded it with protective walls, establishing a religious ideal and a symbol that he hoped would help transcend the jealousies dividing the twelve tribes.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem in the days before his arrest and crucifixion, he too came as a pilgrim. He had traveled there from Galilee, for the feast of Passover. Jerusalem was then under Roman authority and the local rule of the Jewish kings of the Herodian dynasty. Imagine the city at that time, with the massive, Herodian Temple rising from its center and the smoke from animal sacrifices coiling up into the air. Huge crowds would have been lining up to buy their sacrificial animals, to have them ritually slaughtered and burned on the altar in the Temple's inner chamber. Historians estimate that pilgrimages during feast days in Jesus's time typically tripled Jerusalem's population, which rose from 40,000 to 120,000 as Jewish believers flocked to the Temple Mount (the site of the Second Temple) to pray and make sacrificial offerings before God. Indeed, this overcrowding might explain why Jesus and his disciples reportedly sought lodging outside the city walls, just over the Mount of Olives, in the village of Bethany. Moreover, the disturbance Jesus caused in the Temple during this crowded and emotional holiday must have seemed likely to lead to popular unrest; on some level, Jesus was viewed as a security risk that neither Rome nor the Jewish rulers could tolerate.

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