No matter one's religious beliefs, a trip around the Old City in Jerusalem is as moving as can be. You have to prepare yourself for a bun fight - pilgrims, locals, tour buses and the rest, but there are always little moments of quiet when you can consider the multi-layered, tragic and heroic history of this city and the people who have lived within it. Having been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times, it's a wonder there is anything left. And let's hope its sacred place in all three of the Mohammedan faiths, will preserve it for as long as the earth spins.
I'd never really thought about what the 'stations of the cross' meant before walking up the Via Dolorosa and realising that these were the points where Christ put down the cross, and something happened. 'Station four: Jesus meets his mother.' This one caused a lump to form in my throat. The image of a mother seeing her son on his way to be crucified is beyond what my imagination can produce.
Some of our favourite places were the expanses or nooks where humans have not been allowed to intervene so much: the wide esplanade surrounding the golden Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque - where local boys can come and kick a football, so long as it's not prayer time;
the tiny Armenian chapel inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which none of the 6 Christian denominations who share it have been allowed to meddle with, or even clean in many years; and the Garden of Gethsamane where there stands, what they have calculated to be, a gnarled but flourishing olive tree from before the time of Jesus - over 2014 years old.
The bunfight in Bethlehem was more extreme with crowds of people pushing and shoving their way into the cave in the Church of the Holy Nativity where Jesus was born.
Not wanting to get too involved in the melee, I reversed away from a crowd entering a tiny chapel where a service was being conducted in Ukrainian. I was nudged by a cushion at shoulder height and spun round to come face to face with a life-sized model of the baby Jesus on a cushion, which I had missed sending flying by an inch. Only afterwards did our guide explain that this figurine is the very baby Jesus that we see broadcast on televisions around the world from the Church of the Nativity on Christmas day. We had a big laugh about it, but can you imagine…?
We then proceeded to the Shepherds' fields where a Japanese tour group was reciting the Lord's Prayer in Japanese, and singing together afterwards. In some ways it was a relief to look towards the brown earth of the fields, away from the cacophony of human sound and jigsaws of human intervention, towards a view that (if you closed your eyes to a large red-roofed Israeli settlement) would have looked very similar 2000 years before our time.
I'd never really thought about what the 'stations of the cross' meant before walking up the Via Dolorosa and realising that these were the points where Christ put down the cross, and something happened. 'Station four: Jesus meets his mother.' This one caused a lump to form in my throat. The image of a mother seeing her son on his way to be crucified is beyond what my imagination can produce.
Some of our favourite places were the expanses or nooks where humans have not been allowed to intervene so much: the wide esplanade surrounding the golden Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque - where local boys can come and kick a football, so long as it's not prayer time;
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| Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem |
The bunfight in Bethlehem was more extreme with crowds of people pushing and shoving their way into the cave in the Church of the Holy Nativity where Jesus was born.
Not wanting to get too involved in the melee, I reversed away from a crowd entering a tiny chapel where a service was being conducted in Ukrainian. I was nudged by a cushion at shoulder height and spun round to come face to face with a life-sized model of the baby Jesus on a cushion, which I had missed sending flying by an inch. Only afterwards did our guide explain that this figurine is the very baby Jesus that we see broadcast on televisions around the world from the Church of the Nativity on Christmas day. We had a big laugh about it, but can you imagine…?
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| The Catholic Church of St Catherine, and the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem |
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