As I Wrestle With History In A City Where There's Really Not Much Else

The air is so thick with history here -- you can almost choke on it if you're not careful.

I work around the corner from the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, which is said to be where it will all start/end when the end of the world gets rolling (That's why there's so many cemeteries around it -- gotta be first in line to be resurrected you know.)

The raised area in the back is the Mount of Olives (the middle and lowest of the three towers in this picture is the Church of the Ascension, which I pass by on my short walk to lunch.) 

 I don't think about it very often though -- the air of history there tends to be more subdued, only manifesting itself in sporadic groups of tourists interrupting my path to the cafe.


 Just the other week I was at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City, waiting for a friend to get off work, when I decided to walk the 100 feet over to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of Jesus' death and burial, and hang out for a little while. It's a lot more crowded and tense than the Mount of Olives.

--Not least because the various churches represented here (Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, etc.?) can get pretty ornery about seemingly insignificant things. (Fist fights between priests of opposing factions are not altogether unheard of or shocking occurrences.)

But I guess if you devote your life to this stuff and spend the majority of your many years of existence living near and working in this one specific building, you might get pretty uptight and specific about a few things (e.g. how often the rock of Golgotha should be cleaned, to what extent the Greek Orthodox can put their weird gaudy gold candles everywhere, whether or not the Syriacs are allowed to renovate their burnt out chapel, the list goes on).

I'm currently standing on the hatch used by the church fathers to enter Jesus' tomb every once in a long, arbitrarily decided, traditionally delineated calendar tenuously agreed upon by the various churches. 

Inside that little alcove is a hole through which you can touch the rock of Golgotha, upon which Jesus was crucified and around and on top of which this church was built. That figure to the left is a priest of some variety of Orthodox (Cause no self-respecting Catholic would condone those garish bejeweled decorations) promptly stepping in for the periodic Windex-ing of the glass for viewing the rock and the wetwipe-wiping of the blessed armhole through which pilgrims can touch the rock. I felt incredibly blessed to bear witness to such a solemn and important ritual.

 Here the history is a little more palpable. There's the heavy smell of incense, the dark, germy rocks that had contact with Jesus somewhere along the line, and the cold, rough crosses carved into the stone walls by crusaders who hacked-and-slashed their way to the Holy Land and into Jerusalem so many years ago.

You feel it in the obnoxious throngs of tourists of all shapes and sizes and origins, and you feel it in the tension between the priests as they go about their meticulously structured routines and mind the strictly demarcated boundaries between denominations and sects. 



But that's just the beginning. I haven't even started on the history of Judaism and Islam in this place, and there are a couple more whole worlds of history outside the realm of religion too.

This is just a small taste of the backbone of history underlying and looming over this beautiful, complicated place. Thousands of years of Roman and Islamic and Crusader and Turkish and so many other histories overlapping and undergirding each other.

Then there are histories that define everyday life here more than any others. There is the history of Jews, filled with persecution and defiance, blood, loss, and exile in the face of an always stronger and oppressive power -- and there is the history of the Palestinians, filled with dispossession and resistance, death, fear, and pain, always at the mercy of some grander empire or ruler.

The air is thick with all of it mixed together, a thousand different stories remembered and countless lives touched and scarred forever by the past and now the present. The sour taste of endless cyclical violence and a blinding fog of irrational fears and hatreds. It fills the air and all of our lungs, and then it sits on the city, pinning it down beneath the tremendous weight of memory. 

I appreciate the history; I enjoy learning about Jesus' life and what we know about it. But I can't seem to ever be touched by it. No matter how often I walk the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Pain, the way Jesus walked under the weight of the cross, I can't seem to find meaning in it for my spirituality today. I don't get anything out of it.

I see the people around me as I walk and I can't make the disconnect. I can't find the beauty of this history because I can't see it apart from the people here now, who live with the weight of all this accumulated history on their backs day in and day out, year in and year out.

This is the history that brought about the reality of today: occupation, fear, deprivation and indignity -- and this is the history that makes the future look like more of the same: distrust, unrest, crippling stalemate and painful cycles. The accumulated weight of history keeps us in the past, and forbids us from progressing into a future of justice and peace.

It's not all of history that's to blame! And there's hope there too. But we have to unearth it. We have to keep walking the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering, the way of weight -- until we find a way to redeem it. To reconcile it with the world I see around me. To bring this ancient history back to life and full communion with life as it is lived here, and free all those here burdened by its weight.


But that just got a lot more high-minded and rambly than it probably deserved to be. (And confusing because history means so many different things) This is as much a personal process as it is a hypothetically region-wide or possibly global one. I'm sorting through these histories, finding this weight, trying to reconcile all that I see and all that I know and all that I believe. I'm trying to find Jesus here.

But once I say that it seems pretty silly.

All I really need to do is look up. Those people aren't just watching me as I meander my way across Jesus' historic steps through the Old City and up to what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the rock of Golgotha. They're walking it too, and they've been walking it since before I was born.