Confirmation in Jerusalem: Searching for God in the Holy City

A massive wall stood before me, stretching from either end of the horizon. Forty feet tall, the wall was topped with crevices and ramparts, arrow slits and ancient stonework. Between the road and the wall sat a large pavilion, illuminated against the night by harsh fluorescent, descending twenty feet from the road to the wall. A small chasm separated the pavilion from the wall, with a bridge connecting to a gate ten feet tall. Vendors stood in the pavilion hawking their goods and vegetables as pedestrians ambled through the gate. Despite the diffusion of modern technology, I could feel a continuity of life, emphasized by the vendors and the walls. It seemed that here life continued much as it had for thousands of years in spite of war, death, disaster, and the unrepentant forces of change. Taking in a deep breath and smiling, I entered the Damascus Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Earlier that Thursday, I had left from Irbid with Kinzer and Stephen, two friends from AU in my program, as well as Allie, a friend from Macalester in my program. We took a bus to Amman and a taxi to the King Hussein bridge border crossing between Jordan and Israel. On the way there we ran into several friends of Kinzer and Stephen – students in Amman whom they had met during their previous trip to Istanbul. We chatted while waiting for bus before arriving on the other side of the border in Israeli processing, which was surprisingly easy. Bidding goodbye to our compatriots from Amman as they went off to visit Ramallah, we continued on our way.

Hopping onto another bus, it took about forty minutes to travel from the border to Jerusalem, during which time Stephen made friends with a Jordanian who let us use his smart-phone to figure out where the heck our hotel was. The number of times my travel arrangements have been saved by an impromptu Jordanian friend made on the bus… (literally, this is the third time this has happened to me or my group). And so, after our bus let us off right outside the Northern Damascus gate, we made our ways into the Old City of Jerusalem.

The City was an intriguing site, 8PM in the evening. Even at a relatively early hour like that, most of the shops were closed. The roads were an absolute mess in the best way possible, many lacking clear signs, forming a maze with constant side-streets breaking off only to turn you around back in your original direction or on a completely different road. Luckily, with the instructions from our Jordanian friend, we were able to relatively easily find our hotel which was located on a small sidestreet, tucked in a corner and completely un-noticeable save for a two feet sign hanging off the building – “Citadel Youth Hostel.”

The hotel was fascinating – the lobby a cavernous hut-like space with a 7 foot ceiling composed of seemingly ancient stonework. A four story building, the hotel was composed of two completely separate towers which wrapped around each other through the building before letting out onto open roofs with gorgeous views of the city. Sitting atop the taller one, I could see the Dome of the Rock twinkling in the distance, a massive blue lightbulb against the dark.

Afterwards, we went out to grab a quick bite to eat. I ate my first pizza since arriving in the Middle East and drank a couple goldstars – the very tasty Israeli national beer – before setting out for some quick night-time exploration. Several hours later, after having traced the outer western wall and found a life-size windwill in the middle of modern Jerusalem, we settled into bed.

The next morning, I woke up at 6:00AM to attend mass, believe it or not. We had decided to attend the morning mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which according to tradition contains the site for both the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Despite having gone to bed only five and a half hours previously, I rolled out of bed, wiped the crust from my eyes, and staggered out of the front door of the hostel. After wandering around the empty morning streets of Jerusalem for twenty minutes and making several wrong turns, we finally found our way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

One of the members of the group from Amman, a Palestinian-American who had visited Jerusalem several times in the past, said that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had the least impressive exterior and most impressive interior he had ever seen on a church. The exterior blends seamlessly with the rest of the surrounding block; I wouldn’t have even known it was a church if not for the two massive domes rising from the building. The interior is gorgeous, filled with gold-laden shrines and entombed rocks of great religious significance.

We slowly proceeded into the building, reaching the Holy Sepulchre itself outside of which mass was being conducted on wooden benches haphazardly laid out on the surrounding marble floor. The Holy Sepulchre is a twenty foot tall wooden structure in the rough shape of a rubix cube said to contain the tomb of Jesus. Its exterior is decorated with incense, candles, and golden ornaments and the entire structure sits inside the massive hollow hallow hall underneath the large of the Church’s two domes. Standing at the columns of the edge of the room, the site was breathtaking, as the room was completely silent save for the occasional harsh whispering of tourists walking through. Out of nowhere, a massive organ sounded, and the mass began.

My experience at Church of the Holy Sepulchre that morning was perhaps the first clearly positive religious experience of my life. Certainly, the first such experience in a LONG time. It clarified my developing religious and spiritual beliefs and represented a new step in my spirituality not based on suffering and anger. Or, at least, not exclusively, and in a far more healthy way. If you’re not interested, feel free to skip ahead several paragraphs, but I’d like to go into the details here.

Over the past year, I’ve read several books from black liberation theologian James Cone, specifically “Martin and Malcolm: American Dream or Nightmare” and “God of the Oppressed.” They have both had a large impact on my political and spiritual outlook, as I’ve emotionally connected with many of the ideas expressed by King and Cone (I love Malcolm but surprisingly didn’t connect with him as much). Essentially, Cone expressed true Christianity as fundamentally a religion of libratory struggle against oppression, with Jesus a revolutionary figure explicitly focused on social and economic justice. King believed in the UNIVERSAL DIGNITY of humanity – that every single individual person in all of creation has self-worth, dignity, and rights. I agree, one hundred percent, with both claims – claims that are fundamentally inter-related in my opinion. To me, these claims are not so much the product of a well-thought-out intellectual analysis as they are fundamental statements on the nature of reality. In my gut, in my soul, I feel them to be true. The struggle is holy because every single person is holy.

God calls us all to liberate those suffering from the banality of systemic violence – be they trans-folk killed for being true to their inner self, black folk shot in the face while their killers walk free, homeless persons starving away in the winter, victims of rape and sexual harassment, disabled folk pitied into nothingness, etc. There are many other examples and dimensions just as heinous. Jesus provides an example of the extent to which God calls us to sacrifice for liberation, as Jesus struggled with every fiber of being to make this world a better place until a suppressive state executed Jesus for political rebellion against the empire of the day.  In this context, the resurrection of Jesus represents a promise and a hope. No matter how dire things may seem, regardless of which direction the world seems to be heading or which injustices go unpunished and forgot, good will always triumph. Liberation will always come. Even if this seems crazy to think because of present circumstances, the resurrection of Jesus constitutes a divine mandate on the inevitability of Liberation. And it that’s hard to believe or challenges rationality, well, that’s why they call it faith. It’s the hope that keeps us going when all else seems lost.

I apologize if I seem somewhat extreme in laying this out. Personally, I think everyone has their unique path to God that brings them fulfillment based on their own experiences. I realize my path is very different from that of others and that’s okay. I would expect no less. But the really cool thing, the take away I found as I stood listening to the somber tones of organ and monk singing in synchronicity, is that I have found my path to God. There is no other God I could imagine respecting, let alone worshipping, than a God of the Oppressed. After years of screaming in silence and quite literally cursing in bloody rage against anything even resembling divinity, I no longer feel alone.

Even now, the memory of this experience resonates with me. I’ve been haphazardly thinking about all this over the past six months but I my experience in the Holy Sepulchre was the keystroke. I cannot remember having a religious experience of such clarity and positivity in my entire life. Later on, my Mom said she thought it was a miracle that I willingly attended mass in the first place.

Anyway, after my rapturous religious revelations, we continued our exploration of Jerusalem. We hiked over to the Western Wall and toured that, though unfortunately we were unable to explore the Temple Mount as it was only accessible to non-Muslims for a two hour period and there was a MASSIVE wait. We walked over to the Mount of Olives and saw the Basilica of Mary Magdalene before coming back to the hotel and grabbing a short nap. Upon waking up, we walked over to Mount Zion on the southern end of the city and saw the Dormition Abbey.

To be honest, I don’t really remember why all those sites are important or what is their religious signicance. That was the one downside about Jerusalem, you really get monument fatigue. Furthermore, I really don’t think you find God in a place – what matters are experiences. A place can be an experience –such as my whole shindig in the Hole Sepulchre – but it can also just be a sterile site. As well, almost all of the Christian sites in Jerusalem were gold laden, which kinda pissed me off. God did not command us to go build gigantic golden temples in his name. Those places are beautiful, but building them is not something we do for God, it’s something we do for ourselves. And that can be a big problem if in building them we forget doing what God actually cares about.

The mentality of many of the religious tourists was also weird. If you’ve been waiting years to do a trip to Jerusalem and are super attached to visiting all the sites and feeling your God in them, ok, I guess it makes sense that you’re a pushy-shovey-jerk trying to get into all the shrines and spend as much time as possible in each. It’s just weird seeing such aggressive body language in supposedly holy sites of a religion about helping and loving each other, not being a selfish prick.  It also reinforced my impression that the sites were not that intrinsically spiritually significant.

Anyway, that night we met back up with the group from Amman, who had come back from visiting Ramallah and were staying in the same hostel. We went out to a restaurant beyond the Damascus gate in the north and all had a scrumptious dinner before sitting outside and smoking hookah, which I am still pretty crappy at despite two months spent in Irbid.

The next morning, we woke at 6AM again, this time with the group from Amman. They wanted to see the mass and we were hoping to actually enter the Holy Sepulchre. After waiting half an hour we were able to enter but it was rather underwhelming, as we were rushed through so a massive Russian tour group could send everyone through before the Sepulchre closed. No similar religious experience the second time through. Afterwards I took a quick nap before we did some souveneir shopping, grabbed lunch, and hopped on a bus to Bethlehem and the Occupied Territories…

TO BE CONTINUED