Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  I took a few more steps and rounded the last corner of the alley. To the right was the back wall of the chapel, about twenty feet high. Directly across the walkway was a rounded stone wall about ten feet high that looked as if it were made of peanut brittle. Sprouting from the top was an enormous, fountaining bush. The plant was about six feet tall, with large, dangling branches like a weeping willow that sprouted from the center like a cheap wig. A white cat with a brown splotch around one eye was perched at the base of the bush, and off to the side was a slightly out-of-date fire extinguisher. A fire extinguisher? At first I thought it was an eyesore, but then I realized the unintended humor. Was this in case the burning bush caught on fire?

  I sat on a stone bench just below the bush. There was no light in sight, except for the sky, which was indigo, the color of deep ocean. I stayed on the bench for a long time, the bush to my left, the church to my right. After a while I began to feel a certain pressure from the buildings and I realized that the chapel had been constructed on an angle, so that the back wall sloped away from the building and leaned slightly in the direction of the bush, which in turn leaned toward the chapel. It was as if they were trying to touch, like figures from the Sistine Chapel. The stars were twinkling now, and without warning, a light came on at the end of the walkway, illuminating, in perfect silhouette, a wooden cross about a foot high. There was nothing remotely contemporary about this scene—the stones, the chapel, the sky, the cross. It reminded me of one of those medieval paintings where the perspective is all wrong.

  And kept getting wronger. The chapel would lean a bit more, the cross would grow a bit taller, the round fence would bulge at the seam, and the bush would fountain higher, fuller, until everything else would have to adjust. It went on like this for a while—lean, step, push, collapse, lean, push, jump, reach, until all the pieces were moving at once, compressing into one another, pushing back and forth in time and place, and creating, somehow, out of the combustion, a warmth that filled the courtyard. The result was a feeling I had sensed before on this trip, a feeling that the physical components of the environment—the stones, the buildings, the space in between—were somehow transforming into a spiritual entity that almost seemed to reach up, tugging at something inside me. I was just noticing a heat inside my jacket and reached up to touch my cheeks—was this feeling coming from me or from the place, or were we somehow bringing it out in each other?—when suddenly the white cat with the splotch around one eye leapt from the wall with a screech, landed at my feet, and sent me scurrying back to bed.

  By the time I arrived in the chapel it was just after 4:30, and the morning service was under way. The basilica was still dark, except for some candles above a lectern, where a monk in thick, black robes was chanting a prayer in Byzantine Greek, a mix of Slavic harsh consonants and Mandarin singsongy vowels. I slipped into a wooden chair along the outer wall, and even though Father Paulo had invited me to the service the previous evening, I still felt a bit like a voyeur. In the first few minutes, several monks began making their way around the room lighting the dozens of brass lamps that hung from the ceiling. Several of the lamps began to swirl as the monks raised them, lowered them, spun them, stopped them. Gradually with the glow of the light, like liquid apricot, the dimensions of the room became apparent.

  The basilica, built between 542 and 551 C.E., is small, designed for the monks, not for the masses. The granite walls and pillars are original, as are the cypress doors and ceiling. The expansive mosaic above the apse depicting the Transfiguration of Jesus, flanked by Moses and Elijah, is one of only three surviving Byzantine mosaics in the world. The highlight and by far the dominant architectural feature of the room is a lavish floor-to-ceiling wooden iconostasis, built in the seventeenth century, that’s basically a wall-sized picture frame decorated with images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and a number of saints. It divides the nave from the altar. Altogether, with the scarlet robes on the icons, the green on the ceiling, and the gold on the iconostasis, the chapel looks like a walk-in version of one of those gilded medieval triptychs that fill European museums: one part pedagogical tool, one part inspirational message, one part awesome display of wealth.

  The service moved at a measured tempo. A monk would step forward to a lectern, located in the middle of the nave, turn up the flame on an oil lamp, and read a few passages from the text. He would back away and another monk would step forward. Occasionally there would be a call and response, with one monk chanting a passage from an enormous, leather-bound prayer book, and the other monks echoing their responses as they strolled around the chapel or sat in dark wooden chairs in front of the twelve columns in the nave. Holy! Holy! Holy! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! There was not a wasted gesture. As one lectern was temporarily rolled away, another was pulled forward. As one book closed, another opened. The pace was steady, rhythmic, mesmerizing. In a way, the service reminded me of the pyramids in that it was perfectly balanced, reassuring in its proportions, and completely devoid of time. A “living tradition,” as the monks like to say.

  After about an hour another monk came through the door, kissed a painting of the feet of baby Jesus, and hugged one of his brothers. No monk spoke to another during the liturgy; most seemed lost in private thought. A few remained seated; the majority roamed quietly about, bowing occasionally to an icon, nodding to themselves. If anything, in the darkness, and with the monks dressed head to toe in black, the only way to sense the presence of the others was by heat, or by the sound of their habits brushing against the stone floor. At one point, a particularly tall father encircled the entire basilica waving a brass lantern with incense burning on coals. A sweet, pungent aroma, like singed flowers, filled the hall.

  And still the service continued, chanting, praying, pleading. In time, the sheer power of the tempo—and the dedication of those who carried it—began to feel almost overwhelming. How many religious ceremonies had I attended in my life? How many rites and rituals and prayers and benedictions. This was one of the most powerful displays of faith I had ever seen, yet also the least ostentatious. I did a small calculation. Along with this service, which is actually two services in one, there were three others every day, at midday, in the afternoon, and in the evening. Extended back in an unbroken line to the sixth century, this sanctuary had hosted almost three million services—all in the same place, in the same language, in the same manner. A living tradition, indeed.

  By 6:15, almost two hours after I arrived, one of the monks unfurled a small carpet on the marble floor and began what would be the most tranquil part of the service, a series of slow, sonorous chants that echoed off every stone. A monk sitting in front of me appeared to drift into sleep and started swaying in his seat. I was struck that like so much of religion, this service was profoundly solitary in nature, yet also deeply communal. There was almost no interaction, but an effortless sense of fraternity. By now the light had begun to change and one of the fathers began to extinguish the brass lamps. Another rolled up the small carpet. On special days, the monks open the iconostasis and allow sunlight from a stained-glass window in the middle of the mosaic to shine into the sanctuary. But on this morning the light had to seep through the window and gradually filter into the room. The faces of the monks were still hidden in shadow, even as the sky was becoming illuminated.

  At the end of the service the monks shuffled out as quietly as they had come in, turning to genuflect one last time. Still no one spoke. The last monk out extinguished the final candle and locked the door. Outside, standing now on the stairs I had been afraid to descend the previous evening, one of the monks invited me upstairs and offered a cup of Earl Grey tea and a piece of coconut cake. The sun was just peeking over the mountain. The bells would soon ring seven.

  By the time Avner arrived at nine, I had managed to take a shower and find some additional food, and we set out to explore the monastery. In addition to visiting many of the often sheltered sites that make this monastery so important to the story of the Bible in the M
iddle East, I also hoped to begin exploring the question of why so many monasteries like this exist in the first place. Why is it that long after religious freedom and political stability made living in the desert unnecessary, so many people, for so many generations, have continued to shuck their fineries and comforts and flee to the barren wilderness?

  In the light, the compound was less spooky than the night before, though no less jumbled: a testament to the failures of ecclesiastical urban planning. One reason for all the confusion is that Saint Catherine’s is something of an exposed tel. Each generation built on top of the old, though without waiting for the previous layer to be destroyed. It’s a house of cards, where the cards never fall. Like so many sites around the Middle East, Saint Catherine’s was founded in the fourth century C.E., when Empress Helena took advantage of her son Constantine’s hegemonic control over the region to identify places associated with the Bible. Building on a tradition that said the burning bush was located in the valley below Jebel Musa, Helena erected a small church and a tower at the site to protect monks who were already flocking to the area to pray. Helena dedicated the facility to Mary, because church elders believed the burning bush symbolized the Annunciation: Just as the bush was filled with fire, but remained unburned, so Mary conceived the savior, but remained a virgin. Emperor Justinian expanded the facility in the sixth century, surrounded it with granite walls sixty feet high and nine feet thick, and built the basilica. The monks claim the basilica’s doors are the oldest functioning ones in the world, and that they lead to the world’s oldest continually operating church.

  The Monastery of the Burning Bush, as it was called, existed for close to six hundred years but didn’t thrive until 1000 C.E., when it became associated with another prominent woman in the region, Saint Catherine. Born to a high-ranking official in Alexandria in the third century C.E., Catherine (née Dorothea) was a woman of exceptional intelligence and beauty. Numerous suitors sought to marry her, but Catherine wanted someone with unchallenged qualities of wisdom and virtue. Her mother, secretly Christian before the religion was accepted in the region, introduced her to an ascetic, who said, “I am acquainted with a unique man who incomparably transcends all those attributes you have mentioned and countless others.” Through prayers and visions, Catherine met and mystically married Christ. One of her suitors, Emperor Maximinus, tried to persuade her to renounce the marriage, and when she refused, he ordered her killed. She was attached to four wheels studded with steel blades and sharp spikes that were supposed to mutilate her, though on the day of the execution an angel released her from the device, which spun out of control, mutilating bystanding pagans. Catherine would become the patron saint of clockmakers, carnival ride attendants, automakers, and anyone who works with wheels.

  Eventually, Maximinus was able to behead Catherine, whose remains were secretly deposited on a mountain in the Sinai. According to tradition, Catherine’s body came to rest not on Jebel Musa, but on nearby Jebel Katarina, the tallest on the peninsula. In 1025, a monk went to visit the remains and while pouring an offering of oil inadvertently broke off three of her fingers, which he then carried to Europe and which miraculously began to heal the sick. The spirit of Saint Catherine ministered to Joan of Arc, among others, and churches in her honor were built in London, Paris, and Venice. Soon a growing number of pilgrims began flocking to the Sinai to see her remains, and the monks, to protect her and to ensure their share of the income that pilgrims would bring, moved her body to a golden casket in the basilica and renamed their abbey the Monastery of Saint Catherine.

  For all its elaborate history and geopolitical prestidigitation—the monastery managed to curry support at various times from Mohammed, Queen Isabella, Ivan the Terrible, and Napoleon—Saint Catherine’s boasts another direct link to the Bible and to generations of readers who have tried to draw closer to the stories by returning to the spiritual terrain of the desert. The idea of the wilderness as a place of transformation has deep roots in the Bible. Moses first met God after separating himself from Egyptian society. Jesus also passed time in desert quarantine and would recall the lessons of Exodus in fighting back the devil. “Human beings live not on bread alone,” he says in Matthew, quoting a line Moses used in Deuteronomy, “but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Even Mohammed, a devotee of the Bible and the son of a merchant, retreated for weeks at a time to a desert cave near Mecca, where he eventually heard the word of God.

  In the early years of the Christian church, a new breed of devotion sprang up in which followers of Jesus heeded his admonition to sell their worldly possessions and seek salvation in nature. The disciples, called hermits, from the Greek word eremites, “he who lives in the desert,” became spiritual celebrities around the Mediterranean and redefined the architecture of faith in the Judeo-Christian world. They also reshaped the way many people read the Bible.

  For the hermits, the best way to express their allegiance to the Bible was by experiencing many of its hardships for themselves. Particularly in Egypt and Palestine, where the movement first gained popularity in the fourth century C.E., the hermits hoped to replace the profanities of urban life with a society based on “wisdom, love, and experience.” As Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century theologian, has written:“What the desert fathers sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. And in order to do this, they had to reject completely the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion in ‘the world.’ ”

  The experiences of the hermits were in no way unified. A few were completely isolated. Others formed loose-knit communities, or lauras. Still more joined early monasteries. As a practical matter, the existence of so many different kinds of religious outposts across the Near East created a physical superstructure along the routes of the Bible. The word laura, for instance, means lane, from the lines that connected the hermits’ outposts with the central church. But the lauras, the monasteries, and the churches did something even more long-lasting: They created a series of lanes across the region that served to bring not only the hermits but also the rest of the world closer to the Bible. In many ways, my trip, 1,500 years later and motivated by different impulses, was made possible by the hermits, who created the notion that the Bible was not merely a book to be read but also a book to be experienced. Perhaps equally important, the monks also left behind actual places—monasteries, monuments, chapels—which people like me could visit.

  Avner and I spent the next few hours exploring the monastery. Our first stop was the small spring near the entrance of the compound known as the fountain of Moses, or Jethro’s well. According to legend, this is the place where Moses, still a fugitive from Egypt, met Zipporah. The small stone well, square with an old-fashioned iron hand pump, is one of five wells inside the monastery and testifies to the facility’s one ample resource, water. This water feeds the garden, which brims with almonds, peaches, poplars, and olives. The olives produce just enough oil to light the several dozen lamps in the church, which hang down from the ceiling on fifteen- or twenty-foot chains. The oil is considered such a delicacy to rodents that each chain is adorned with a whole ostrich-egg shell designed to prevent rats from climbing down for a quick toddy.

  Despite its plentiful supply of water, the monastery was otherwise deeply vulnerable, mostly to attack from the numerous invading armies in the Sinai. To protect themselves, the monks sealed off the outside doors and for most of the monastery’s history, the only way to enter or exit the compound was in a wicker basket that was lowered sixty feet to the ground, then lifted back up. Avner called it “the first passenger elevator in the world.” Since hostile armies could still potentially break through the entrance, the monks built a funnel above the old door, through which they could pour boiling oil—made from their own olives, of course.

  By far the monastery’s chief curiosity is its so-called burning bush, easily the most famous shrub in the Sinai, and probably the Middle East. According to the monks, the plant alongside the chapel is unique and has been
growing in virtually the same spot since the time of Moses. Evidence suggests that the first claim, at least, may have some truth to it. The bush belongs to the species Rubus sanctus, which grows in the mountainous areas of Central Asia but is rare in the desert. Avner says he knows of only five other specimens in the Sinai. Beyond its rarity, the reason this bush was identified as the burning bush is unclear. Many have suggested the shrub’s red berries contributed to the connection by simulating the appearance of flames, but the monastery’s specimen doesn’t fruit. As for location, the bush was originally situated across the alley from its present site in an outdoor chapel. When monks needed to expand the church in the tenth century, they opted to enclose the outdoor chapel and relocate the bush across the alley. Some monks claim that the root system remained the same, and that the bush merely sprouted up in the new location; most concede that the bush was actually replanted.

  One thing everyone agrees on: The bush grows quickly, that bramble in the backyard you can never quite contain. The monks have been known to prune it and give the clippings to visiting pilgrims to take home, which means there may be thousands of baby burning bushes in leftover jelly jars filled with water on sink counters around the world. In 1984, the bush grew so big that it looked “long and sickly,” according to geographer Joseph Hobbs, who wrote a book about the area. The monks held an anxious meeting in which they elected to crop the plant close to the roots. On the day of the event, there were more remains than the assembled visitors could cart home, so the monks did what any pious congregation would do to the assembled pile of clippings: They set it on fire. As one wry monk who witnessed the event reported, “Yes, it did burn.”