Reflections on the last last day:
After promising not to write on the Holy Sepulcher, I find myself eating my words. To clarify, I am not “the blonde,” nor am I Jane. This is Siobhan, now safely back in Pennsylvania and still reeling from my experiences in the Holy Land.
Jane, Ashley, and I remained at Dormition Abbey a full day after everyone else spirited away in the dark of night. It was a bit surreal: at dinner there were 10 of us, after cards 6, and after dawn only 3. The ladies remained, and at 5:30 we met in the garden. The morning was chill and misty, as I’ve come to expect from Jerusalem mornings, and we set out for Holy Sepulcher on my third dawn-time journey.
I love Jerusalem in the early morning: the streets are clean, glistening with morning dew and soft sunlight, almost empty but for a few stray cats stalking birds and a few other people, pilgrims, I like to think, strolling toward their holy destinations. At Holy Sepulcher there are maybe 20 or 30 people inside, including the Franciscans, Armenians, and Greeks responsible for its upkeep, the three of us, and a healthy handful of other pilgrims who decided to beat the crowds by arriving early. Like the streets of Jerusalem, in five hours the church will be packed with bright colors, whiffs of incense and perfume, and languages as varied as Babel.
Speaking of Babel, I like to think of Holy Sepulcher as a post-Incarnational answer to that ancient tower. Holy Sepulcher is a bit like a beached ship, washed ashore with a crew of disparate personalities who love their vessel but are suspicious of one another. In 1517 when the Ottomans conquered Jerusalem, they found a large Christian church filled with Armenians, Orthodox, and Catholics, each group resenting the presence of the others. They had their own little rituals, refused one another entry to specific chapels, and only compromised by saying, “On Tuesdays Catholics get the tomb from dawn to 7:00, Armenians 7:00-10:00, Greeks….” The Ottomans looked in on this arrangement and thought it wasn’t worth the agony to try to get the different groups to get along, so they passed the “Status Quo Law” which stated that everything that happens in the Holy Sepulcher must happen exactly as it did in 1517, or one of the other sects can take over the failed sect’s time/space. This plays out as the Franciscans making a procession every single day at 3:00 in the afternoon, during which they MUST arrive at a specific location at 3:05, another at 3:07, etc.
When the British came in, they renewed the Status Quo Laws, as did the Jewish when Israel was declared an independent Jewish state. Hence the Babel metaphor. But a lot has happened since 1517, and the various sects are not quite as disparate as they once were---I don’t mean theologically, but ideologically. We’ve all grown up a bit, and we know that God doesn’t like his children fighting. So yes, the Franciscans still do their processions and get to the same place at the same time each day, as do the others, but there’s not so much hostility: the people of Babel are learning multiple tongues, communicating across languages.
The diversity of Holy Sepulcher is one of its most endearing qualities: it’s a shabby building, clean but a bit run down. It was with the help of a Massachusetts couple that the dome over the tomb was renovated within the past couple years, but the whole church has a lived in feel, like a family home with a lot of kids. Arriving at 5:30 in the morning is like being the harried mother that gets up early to enjoy her cup of coffee before the kids start running around, screaming and tattling with a thousand spiritual needs.
To the right of the entrance a tucked away staircase climbs Calvary: at the top there’s an Orthodox chapel where the True Cross once stood. I spent a lot of time in that chapel. During the day, hordes of people wait in line to spend a few seconds in the Tomb before being asked to leave in consideration for others, at the place of the True Cross, occasionally a modest line of 20 people forms, but usually the chapel is left completely empty. Perhaps most tour guides only mention the tomb, or perhaps most Christians are only interested in the Resurrection, but like my fascination with Gethsemane, it is the Crucifixion that seems to me the most important event remembered in that building. Christ died. Christ suffered and died. Yeah, Christ is Risen, but I’m confident God could and would have raised us on the last day even without the amazing resurrection of his Son. What makes our God really special is that he became human, so human that the beginning and end of his life was marked by blood, sweat, and pain.
It is because the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us that I can look with confidence to the resurrection on the last day. What a proof of God’s Love.
~~~~~~~~~
The main church is arranged like a wheel: the hub is the Tomb, the spokes a dozen little chapels devoted to the soldier who recognized Jesus as the Son of God, to Mary Theotokos, to the pillar on which Jesus was whipped, to a rock stained with blood. . . . Beneath the wheel, like an axle, lies the spacious Armenian chapel where a charcoal drawing of a boat and a few people was discovered with a caption in rough Latin, “Iddimus Dominus” or, “we go to the Lord.” This drawing has been dated to the first century, when a pilgrimage to Christ’s tomb would have involved sneaking through tunnels beneath the Roman army to the place where the Roman emperor had erected a temple to Venus (out of spite? ignorance?) under pain of death. It is a great reminder of how much our ancestors would risk to touch a place Jesus touched. It also indicates how strongly the link between Jesus the Nazarene and the Lord God was felt so early in the tradition.
Beyond and below this chapel, another Armenian chapel is built over the place where St. Helena found the True Cross.
But I know what you’re really interested in is the Tomb.
The tomb was almost entirely destroyed by the Persians; what stands now is a reconstruction, not the stones Christ Jesus touched. The floor, however, is the original tomb, the bed rock of the area which the Persians could not destroy. The entrance to the tomb is like a little church all to itself: a domed, pink structure decorated by cherubim and a dozen giant golden candle sticks, surrounded by the sweet-smoky clouds of over a thousand years of incense. Ducking into the ante chamber, six or seven feet across and twenty feet high, you enter into silence, suddenly realizing how loud the whispering of other pilgrims is on the outside. In the center of the antechamber is a little table supporting a single candle. The only light.
A second small door, four feet tall, a foot and a half wide, waits for you on the other side. Inside, you can see a chamber just large enough to hold a body and not much else. Entering, you kneel, resting your head, your arms, on the stone worn down by pilgrim hands and tears, you touch it, you cannot imagine standing to leave again, for your heart has suddenly been pierced by that sword of love uniting us to the sufferings of Christ and him to ours. There is enough room for three people to bow their heads against to funerary stone, though I have crammed in there with as many as six. There must be decorations in the tomb: I have a vague memory of something glittering around me, but I do not know what they are. The plain, grayish white limestone where Jesus was laid and the angels reported the good news had more opulence than any amount of gold and jewels throughout the church.
When you leave Holy Sepulcher, there is no holy water font to mark your going, just solid wooden doors, which I always find myself touching like a mezuzah, and then you are away again, back in the streets and market places where Jesus once walked.
Siobhan
No comments:
Post a Comment