Al-Quds

Leaving the American Colony satisfied if not completely stuffed, I made my way back towards the Old City for what had been the main reason for me to come to Jerusalem on what is really a weekend and not the best time to visit.

At the foot of Salahdin street is Herod Gate - one of the half dozen or so gates that lead into the Old City. It, along with Damascus Gate lead into the Arab Quarter, but unlike Damascus Gate, I've never been through Herod Gate. It was a lot less busy than it's neighbour to the West, and I wandered the narrow and confusing streets until I came upon cars - I hadn't known that cars could/or were allowed into the Old City, but I soon discovered that there are a handful of streets that cars can access.

I made my way to what I thought was my destination. The street was wider than most and I followed the few people I figured shared my task up a flight of stairs that ran flush with the road. I translated the sign from Arabic: Omariyyah College. The College is better known as the home of the Monastery of the Flagellation and home to the First Station of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa. This is the site where Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to be crucified.

I grew up in the church. My mother was the secretary of the United Church down the street from our home and some of my earliest memories consist of hiding on the floor amongst the chairs in the sanctuary - of climbing the stacked chairs in their storage room - of looking over the books I found in the narthex.

The love I felt in reading a cartoon Bible given to me by my Aunt and Uncle when I was young gave me an unfair advantage against my Sunday School peers in our occasional and lively games of Bible Jeopardy. While I didn't know it then - it gave me my first taste of historical narrative that I wouldn't fully appreciate until I was in grad school. While I have drifted away from the Church - and I've openly disregarded religion to friends and family - the reality is that agnosticism, a sort of theological cop-out, has been just that for me: I don't know God - but I'm not convinced enough to say that he doesn't exist.

So I have a BA in Religion. I studied the Bible in all it's historical inaccuracies and self contradictions and it only confirmed to me what I had suspected in the stories of Joshua and of Moses. That it wasn't written by God but by men who edited their work down and patched it together in the same way I just finished my Masters Thesis. The engrossing stories of amazing feats, presented to me in colourful drawings that fascinated me so much as a child were just that: stories.

My partner Danielle, the brilliant and beautiful woman I'm about to marry has had concerns about my lack of faith in something - anything - for years now. Its not enough to stop her from marrying me - probably because I deflect her questions with a "I don't want to talk about this" but it's enough to make it an issue. She just wants to understand my feelings about something that I don't even really understand about myself.

So somewhere between my Historian/Anthropologist academic Self; my liberal but dedicated Christian upbringing; the questions from loved ones and my current state of emotional trouble in the face of injustice, I joined a group of Franciscan Monks in a mobile mass along the route Jesus took on his way to his death.

I listened through the noises of the busy streets to the descriptions coming from the loudspeaker in Latin, in Italian, in Spanish and in English. At each station they said prayers, performed liturgy and described in those languages what took place here.... "Here Jesus fell for the third time".....

It took an hour and it ended in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There, in that massive building that I had found so amazing on my earlier visit a month ago, I finally waited in line to enter the cube on the spot where they believe Jesus was entombed. Beside me, in that crammed space a priest whose bag had an airline tag that told me he was from Rome, prayed alongside an American teenager. And as they did this I stood and stared at the surprisingly sparsely decorated tomb.

The whole procession was fascinating. What I couldn't help but think about was the intense juxtaposition between the noisy people in the street, the Muezzin call to prayer as our procession began, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers who followed us part of the way, the silence of the normally boisterous and quick to approach Arab boys. This was a city I had just recently called a "Shit-Hole" for the confluence of American Christian tourists, vapid North American teenage Jewish girls on summer vacation and the ubiquitous and enraging Soldier. Over the course of the hour I came to love Jerusalem despite its flaws and I momentarily let my anger go.

And it may have been any of those "selves" that took hold of me at each of the stations, it may have been the enormous emotional weight that comes with life here, it could have been anything; but at each station I leaned against the stones of a thousand year old wall and I cried.

I wiped my few tears, walked the hundred feet to the next station and cried again.

***

Picture

The Old City of Jerusalem - walking towards the Via Dolorosa