Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land

by Ruth Everhart

  Stephen’s voice brings me back to the present. He’s talking about the cemetery. “You can be buried here today, but it’ll cost you $10,000.” I don’t intend to pay $10,000 for a plot, not today, and not when my time comes. I look again for the sparrows in the olive tree. Birds of the air don’t have that kind of money, either.

  “Notice the small stones atop the graves. These are tokens of respect placed by visitors, like flowers. A stone is the first fruit of the desert.” When I digest this fact, the graves no longer look littered, but ornamented. Once again I’ve been given eyes to see what is before me.

  Someone points out a church with a gleaming golden dome and asks whether we’ll visit it. “The Church of Mary Magdalene, Russian Orthodox,” Stephen says. “It was built in 1888. Quite recent, really.” Back in the United States, the brick sanctuary in which I preach is 160 years old, and we fall all over ourselves calling it historic. To me it seems ancient. The furnace is ancient, anyway, and the roof —

  Four o’clock. A Muslim call to prayer peals from the minarets. The recorded sound is insistent, piercing the Holy City.

  Saint George’s Campus, Jerusalem

  CHAPTER 4

  Six Degrees

  They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

  HEBREWS 11:13-14

  BACK AT THE college, people head to their rooms for a rest. Mentally exhausted but physically restless, I wander into the small garden on the grounds. I recognize the head housekeeper, Khalil, a man in his fifties, and introduce myself and shake his hand.

  “Are there any olive trees around here?” I ask.

  Khalil stifles a smile. “No. But do you like fig trees?” He walks me through a maze of pathways. There are three different species of fig trees in the garden, and he insists on locating them all.

  “What are those?” I point to a fist-sized fruit hanging from a branch.

  Khalil plucks the yellow globe and hands it to me. “Pomegranate.”

  Of course! I want to say that I would have recognized the fruit better in its natural environment — grocery store bins — but doubt the joke would translate. I turn the pomegranate in my hands, realizing that I’ve only consumed this fruit as juice. How do I open it? It’s one more thing I don’t know about this land. Not-knowing is what makes me a pilgrim. No, that’s not right. Admitting that I’m not-knowing is what makes me a pilgrim.

  Khalil gestures for me to follow him. We tuck around the side of the dormitory and he holds aside a low-hanging branch to allow me to pass. Underneath a canopy of trees are two kitchen chairs with ripped vinyl seats. Between them is a rickety table holding a full ashtray. He offers me a seat, which I accept, and a cigarette, which I decline. I roll the smooth pomegranate between my palms. Khalil puts down his cigarette, pulls out a pocketknife, and deftly slices the fruit open. Like a patient uncle, he pantomimes how I should scoop the seeds.

  Our cast-off chairs are on the edge of Saint George’s property, inside a cast-iron fence. We sit two feet higher than the sidewalk, behind a screen of trees. We can watch passersby, but they aren’t likely to notice us.

  “Do you live nearby?” I ask.

  “My family lives in Bethany. You Christians know it. You know Mary and Martha and Lazarus.”

  The pomegranate seeds are messy and pungent. Scooping them feels awkward, but I like crushing them between my teeth. “Have you lived there all your life?” I ask.

  “For eight generations,” he says.

  I can’t help but stare as Khalil blows a long stream of smoke. I have no idea what it’s like to be so connected to a particular place. My family has been in America for a mere three generations, and I could not tell you, without looking it up first, which cities in the Netherlands they originate from. I personally have lived in eight states, at more addresses than I can remember. As the smoke disappears, Khalil speaks into the air. “Bethany means ‘house.’ My house.”

  Armed men appear on the sidewalk below us. I let the tart seeds mash between my teeth. The silence stretches. I reach for a standard getting-acquainted question from my part of the world: “Is Bethany to Jerusalem a long commute?”

  “Commute?”

  “A distance to travel to work every day.”

  Khalil closes his eyes. “My family lives in Bethany. But I don’t always go home.”

  “Why?” I ask, knowing it sounds naïve.

  His eyes close again, as if to shut out the question. “Because of the Wall.”

  My knowledge of Middle East politics had been embarrassingly sketchy before this pilgrimage, so I had done some reading to catch up. I read about 1948 and the U.N. Resolution that made Israel a sovereign nation; about the Six-Day War in 1967, which changed boundaries; about the Oslo Peace process; and the Camp David Accords. I read about the wall that Israel is building around the Occupied Territories. Now I worry about how to phrase a question. Finally I just ask, “Isn’t there a place to get through?”

  Khalil talks rapidly now — about checkpoints and work permits and how they expire and how he has to go around. I’m confused. He has a good job, and what does “go around” mean? But he is talking about a different subject now — about the wedding they’re planning for his daughter next year. His smile is big and open. It will be a three-day celebration, and all of Bethany will come.

  “You and your family are invited, too,” he says, expansively.

  I imagine the scene, the flute music, the tables of food, skirts lifting as women dance.

  Khalil interrupts my daydream with a question. “Why did you come to Jerusalem?”

  “I’ve always wanted to come here,” I say, although it isn’t exactly true. I used to be scared of coming here, of the heat and dust and threat of violence. I amend my answer: “I had the opportunity to come, and I didn’t want to miss it.”

  “You flew here on a plane?” I nod.

  “Without your husband?” I nod again.

  “But you have a husband.” He barely waits for the nod before he continues. “Then why did he not come with you?”

  “Because of his job. He’s a teacher. September is busy. And it costs a lot to travel. This opportunity was just for me, because I’m a minister.”

  “You are a minister? A religious leader?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You lead the prayers?”

  An old, feminist instinct flares up inside me. “I lead the prayers. I preach from the Bible. I visit people in the hospital. Everything.”

  “And your husband permits this?”

  I try to tamp down my anger. We come from different worlds. How could I describe mine to him? Can I tell him how I’ve been wounded because I’m a woman, and how those wounds can still ache? How in the conservative church where I grew up, women were not allowed to be ordained to the ministry, and the denomination fought over “the woman problem”? How the life I live now was unimaginable to my childhood self? How I had to leave behind and start again, which wasn’t easy? How I had to shake off certain beliefs and expectations and adopt others? I can barely explain that journey to my relatives. How can I explain it to a Muslim man whose family has been in Bethany for eight generations?

  “My husband understands,” I say.

  Khalil seems to relax. He asks, “Do you have children?”

  “Two daughters.” I feel absurdly proud as I say it, feeling the urge to add that they’re beautiful (as if that is the most important adjective!).

  “Who’s taking care of them?”

  “Well, one’s in college, and the other one is home with her dad.”

  “Her dad?” Khalil sounds puzzled.

  “Her father.”

  “Don’t you have a mother? Or sisters? Why is the father caring for children?” His words hang in the air like judgment.

  “My sisters live far away,” I say. It’s easier than explaining that my husband is fully capable of caring for our daughter.

&
nbsp; “And your mother — she is old?”

  I take the easy way out and nod in agreement, silently begging forgiveness from my mother, who is a young seventy-seven.

  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 n
ations 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.

  ACTS 17:26-27

  MORNING 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.”