Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land (6 page)

Khalil exhales a few long smoke rings. “Do you fly away in an airplane by yourself very often?”

“Not as often as I'd like,” I say.

He tries to cover the fact, but he is aghast. He gestures toward my pomegranate as he lights another cigarette. “Is it good?”

“It is.” I offer him the fruit. He waves it away.

“I have a brother living in Alexandria, Virginia, who works as a limo driver. He is always telling me to come to visit.”

“Alexandria is only twenty or twenty-five miles from where I live,” I tell him. “You could come and see all the sights of Washington, D.C.”

“Abraham Lincoln,” he says.

“Lincoln was a great man. His memorial is the best.”

“Maybe I visit my brother and see this,” he says. “Someday.”

Six degrees of separation, it is said, between every pair of humans on the planet. How many ways are Khalil and I connected? Maybe one of those connecting threads is an American hero wearing a stovepipe hat.

Some of the other workers come out for a smoke break, laughing and talking rapidly in Arabic. They freeze when they see me.

“Thanks for the pomegranate, Khalil.” I stand up and acknowledge the other workers as I return to my room.

Dinner is chicken and saffron rice in the crowded dining room. I sit with JoAnne and Kyle as they talk Anglican politics — bishops and appointments — things that Presbyterians ignore. I tune out their conversation and plan what I'll say at my rooftop interview. I want to talk about the olive tree and the sparrows, but I'm afraid all my inchoate thoughts will be reduced to a sentimental sound bite:
I walked today where Jesus walked.
As Kyle dissects the implications of a certain bishop's appointment, I silently rehearse:
The Spirit came alive for me under an olive tree as I watched sparrows fly through the branches.
That might work, especially if I quote the Scripture that came into my mind. But I don't want to sound prosaic, or “bedside devotional.” The problem is that sound bites sound like sound bites.

No, the real problem is that I'm not ready to articulate these thoughts. If this were a sermon in progress, I'd shelve it for a while and keep on reading and thinking, until the ideas could get some words on their bones, until the Spirit could do its work. What else, what more could I share about today? A Muslim man plucked a pomegranate for me and I glimpsed the sad face of Jesus? True, but did Khalil's face remind me of Jesus simply because it was Middle Eastern and lined with suffering? Or was it that he, a stranger, fed me? I think of Mary Magdalene running into the risen Jesus outside the tomb and mistaking him for the gardener (John 20:14-16).

Stephen's comment — pilgrimage is like a well — seems right, and we're here to look for Jesus everywhere, to search for that refracted glimpse of Love. Did I catch that likeness in my conversation with Khalil? We tried to enter each other's worlds. We didn't do it perfectly, but we made the effort. So, yes, in that sense, Jesus was present.

For some people, my comment about seeing Jesus in the face of a Muslim man might seem like heresy. To others it might seem inconsequential, even boring. All roads lead to the mountaintop, they'll say with a shrug. But where I come from there's only one road, and nobody, especially a religious leader, should go around mixing Muslims with Jesus.

An employee checks the food dishes on the buffet and sneaks a glance at me. He was one of the men surprised to see me talking to Khalil. JoAnne and Kyle are still talking church politics, and I use my knife to saw vigorously on a piece of chicken. I didn't come to Jerusalem to rip apart my belief system. I came to follow the Spirit, to encounter Jesus in his land, amid his stories. I'm beginning to realize that I may have a pocket-sized version of Jesus, and being in Israel is enlarging that. Perhaps, at long last, I'm growing up.

As I tear a round of pita bread in half, I consider questions about Muslims and Jesus that I've suppressed over the years. There's the story of Isaac and Ishmael, the two sons of Abraham by different mothers. I was taught that God didn't intend the rivalry
between those brothers, that it began because of sin, specifically Sarah's lack of faith in God's promise that she'd have children as numerous as the stars. Sarah, who was beyond childbearing age, with the years clicking along, helped God out by sending her handmaiden, Hagar, to get pregnant by Abraham. That child was Ishmael. A few years later Sarah gave birth to Isaac. In a fit of jealousy, Sarah banished Hagar and Ishmael to the desert, and they survived only because God intervened.
*
From Ishmael came the Muslims; from Isaac came the Jews.

It strikes me now that it's unfair, in this pivotal story, to fault Sarah for trying to help Yahweh make good on a most unlikely promise. You could even call Sarah's actions a form of creative faithfulness. Besides, if God created humans, didn't God know that Sarah would do what she did? In fact, didn't God set her up to do exactly that? Making that far-fetched promise and then making her wait so long for its fulfillment? Was God toying with her?

God chose Abraham to covenant with, but the blessing of that reached further, to “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:2-3). This text must mean something more than what I've been taught. What if I took it at face value? One was chosen, but for the sake of all. Why have Christians felt entitled to claim this promise of chosenness, anyway? Maybe we're already riding in on the “all the families” phrase. Maybe that phrase can include Muslims, the other children of Abraham.

I inhale the scent of the yellow rice on my plate. This sweet, slightly metallic scent of saffron must be the smell of religion, of history, of Scripture. I'm breathing them in together. I've been in this Holy Land for less than twenty-four hours, and already my thinking is under revision. Not that I have any clarity. There are too many impressions in my mind, too much jumble. I can't follow any single thought to where it leads. Instead, I feel like I'm running into walls, which are probably the limits of words, or my upbringing, or my belief system. Perhaps even the limits of my mind.

I pick up my dessert, a ripe plum, and sink my teeth right down to the stone.

At my interview I do what seems safest. I share facts. For instance, I've always thought of Jerusalem as a shining city on a hill, and that isn't accurate. Maybe John Winthrop's figure of speech, so famously echoed by Ronald Reagan, distorted my imagination. Jerusalem is actually built in the confluence of three valleys and is more properly a city nestled between hills. I talk about that in the interview and probably don't sound very eloquent. I didn't write it out because I was worried I would somehow bash Reagan and that would end up in the documentary. Don't documentarians edit films to include the most embarrassing bits? I also talk about the
tsia
/Zion connection because the subject of water feels safe. I don't mention the sparrows because I'm afraid I'll sound, well, flighty.

Afterward, JoAnne and I rehash our interviews. She didn't know what to say, and she found the camera terrifying. This soothes me greatly, especially since she seems so self-assured.

“Oh, and I found out what ‘Tabgha' means,” she says. “It's the name of the place where Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.”

I lie down for a moment and, as soon as I shut my eyes, bread multiplies in front of me — Wonder Bread–like slices with golden crusts and billowy white insides. Before I can marvel enough at this miracle, JoAnne is shaking me awake. Time for an evening lecture: “The Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.”

I detour to the basement dining room and stir up a cup of Nescafé using double the suggested amount of crystals, and I chug it. Then I run up the two flights of stairs to the conference room to get my blood pumping. It works. I open my notebook, ready to record the chronology of religious hatred.

The Muslim Quarter, Old Jerusalem

CHAPTER 5

Opposing Forces

From one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth . . . so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him — though indeed he is not far from each one of us.

A
CTS 17:26-27

M
ORNING COMES TOO
soon. Today is the first day we must wear “modest” clothes because we'll be visiting holy sites. We need to cover our knees and shoulders. I put on a short-sleeved T-shirt and long pants, then tie a silk scarf around my waist in case I need to cover my head. JoAnne is puttering around, and I'm in a hurry to get some coffee, hoping it'll chase away the vestiges of last night's demons.

In the dining room I fix a cup of double-strength Nescafé, then help myself to a soft, warm pita and a hard-boiled egg. I carry it to the table where three of the men — Lutheran Michael, Baptist Charlie, and Anglican Kyle — are deep in conversation. Michael and Charlie are roommates, getting along famously. Kyle, the Anglican priest on sabbatical, is spending all his time with the documentary group.

“We were just talking about the Gospel of Mark,” Kyle says. “I read it last night and counted that Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee six times.”

As I slice my hard-boiled egg over the pita in overlapping circles, part of my brain wonders how Kyle had the time and energy to read an entire Gospel yesterday. It's taking all my energy to manage the emotions stirred by this pilgrimage.

“Do you know why he crosses that often?” Kyle asks, then answers his own question. “The devout Jews are on the west side of the lake, and the Gentiles are on the east side, so just by his movements, we can see Jesus trying to unite the two sides.”

“Or maybe he just didn't have a map,” says Michael, clearly gratified when Charlie laughs.

“So you don't think there's anything more to it?” Kyle is leaning forward. “You don't think the writer of Mark's Gospel was trying to communicate anything through his structure?”

“Why do you people always make it so hard?” Charlie shakes his head. “Why not let the Bible just say what it says?”

After breakfast our group of forty is divided into smaller groups, each of which will explore a specific quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. “Quarter” doesn't mean fourth, though there are four of them. “Quarter” means living quarter: Muslim Quarter, Christian Quarter, Armenian Quarter, Jewish Quarter. Our documentary group is broken in half, each with a cameraman. Brian, Jessica, Shane, and I are assigned to the Muslim Quarter.

The Old City is just down the road from Saint George's campus. We enter through the Damascus Gate, which looks exactly like the entrance to a castle, with enormous wooden doors flung open. There are only a few people coming and going this early on a Saturday morning. Inside the gate, the streets are really alleyways, with walls close on both sides, and stone underfoot, uneven enough to make my sandals wobble. Everything — walls, pavement, windowsills — is made of stone the color of a dirty yellow dog. The light isn't strong, not this early anyway, with high walls on either side. Garbage is piled in every corner, stinking like rotten fruit. Cats prowl around the edges, most of them mangy. Cooking odors drift into the street.