A monk opens the gate. Mahdi asks in Arabic if we may see the monastery. The monk asks where we are from. The monk then takes up a metal bar, which he clangs within a cast-iron triangle.
Waiting in the courtyard below is another monk. He greets us in English. Obviously four bangs, or however many, on the contraption upstairs summons English. The monk’s accent is American. He, too, asks where I am from. He is from St. Louis.
We are first shown the main church. The church is dark, complexly vaulted, vividly painted. We are told something of the life of Saint Saba, or Sabas, the founder of the monastery. Saba died in AD 532. “He is here,” the monk then says, ushering us to a glass case in a dark alcove, where the saint lies in repose. “The remains are uncorrupted.”
The monk carries a pocket flashlight that he shines on the corpse of the saint. The thin beam of light travels up and down the body; the movement of the light suggests sanctification by censing. The figure is small, leathern, clothed in vestments. This showing takes place slowly, silently—as someone would show you something of great importance in a dream.
We ask about another case, the one filled with skulls. They are the skulls of monks killed by Persians in AD 614. One has the impression the young monk considers himself to be brother to these skulls, that they remain a part of the community of Mar Saba, though no longer in the flesh. One has the impression grievance endures.
The monk next leads us to the visitors’ parlor. No women are allowed in the monastery. In this room the masculine sensibility of the place has unconsciously re-created a mother’s kitchen. The monk disappears into a galley; he returns with a repast that might have been dreamed up by ravens: tall glasses of lemonade, small glasses of ouzo, a plate of chocolates. The lemonade is very cool, and we ask how this can be without electricity. Butane, the monk answers. For cooking and refrigeration.
The monk’s patience is for the time when we will leave. Until this: “What has brought you to the Holy Land?”
I have come to write about the desert religions, I reply. I am interested in the fact that three great monotheistic religions were experienced within this ecology.
“Desert religions, desert religions,” the monk repeats. Then he says: “You must be very careful when you use such an expression. It seems to equate these religions.”
I do mean to imply a common link through the desert.
“Islam is a perversion,” he says.
A few minutes later, the monk once more escorts us through the courtyard to the stone steps. He shakes my hand and says what I remember as conciliatory, though it may not have been: “The desert creates warriors.”
• • •
Haim makes his living conducting tours of the desert. He is, as well, a student and an instructor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where we stop briefly to exchange vehicles.
Haim invites me into his house; he must get some things. Haim’s wife is also a graduate student at the university. There are some pleasant drawings of dancers on the walls. The curtains are closed against the desert. Mrs. Berger returns while I am waiting. She is attractive, blond, pregnant, calm. “You turned on the air-conditioning,” she says to Haim—not accusatorily but as a statement of (I assume unusual) fact. “I have to gather some things,” he replies. I ask if I may see the photograph of the mountain.
“Ah, Haim’s mountain.” Mrs. Berger conveys affection, indulgence.
Haim goes to his computer, pulls up the images: the mountain from the distance. Closer. Closer. The suggestion of a rectangular shape. I hesitate to say the shape of tablets; nevertheless, that is how it appears. It is difficult to ascertain the scale. Yes, I can see—along the top and side of the rectangular shape there are what appear to be flames.
Haim carries several filled grocery bags out to the Jeep. We leave Mrs. Berger standing in the dark kitchen. Goodbye.
• • •
Stephen Pfann looks to be in his forties. His hair is white; he wears a beard. He has large pale eyes of the sort one sees in Victorian photographs. It is because of his resemblance, in my imagination, to a Victorian photograph that I attribute to him the broad spirit of Victorian inquiry. Stephen’s discourse has a dense thread count, weaving archaeology, geology, history, theology, also botany and biology. Stephen’s teenage children seem adept at reining him in when he is kiting too high. He and his wife, Claire, administer the University of the Holy Land, a postgraduate biblical institute in Jerusalem. Stephen says he would be willing to take me to Qumran. He suggests an early morning expedition and promises, as well, an Essene liturgy at sunrise.
My imagination runs away: prayers within a cave. Clay lamps, shadows. Some esotericism in the liturgy and a sun like the sound of a gong.
On the appointed morning, Stephen picks me up at my hotel. As it is already bone-light, I presume we have missed the sunrise. But, in fact, we are reciting psalms on a level plain beneath Cave 1 as the sun comes up over Arabia, over Jordan, over the Dead Sea. The light is diffuse, though golden enough. The texts remark the immensity of creation. (I am thinking about a movie I saw. An old man—Omar Sharif—whispers as he dies: “I am going to join . . . the immensity.”)
We have been joined here by several others, two Pfann children and a forensic pathologist connected with the University of the Holy Land.
Stephen mentions “the umbilicus,” by which term he means the concentration of God’s intention on this patch of earth. Underfoot is a large anthill—a megalopolis—then a satellite colony, then another, then another, the pattern extending across the desert floor.
The old woman bends forward to kiss the pale stone.
We begin our climb to Cave 1. The air has warmed. Stephen Pfann, in his stride, points at minute flora; his daughter nods and photographs them. He and his children are as nimble as goats. “Is everyone all right?” Pfann calls downward.
I am not all right. I am relegated at several junctures to using both hands and feet. The good-natured pathologist climbing ahead of me is watchful and discreet with his helping hand, all the while recounting the religious conversion that brought him to the Holy Land.
The cave is not cool, by the way. A smell of bat dung. I hear Stephen saying something about the rapidity of the transfer of heat molecules from one substance to another. (The dryness of the cave preserved the scrolls.) I am perspiring. I am making toe marks in the dust.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, water receded from this cave. Two thousand years ago, an Essene—probably an Essene—filled a basket with grating clay jars and climbed to this cave to hide the holy scrolls against some intimation of destruction. Sixty years ago, a Bedouin goatherd, muttering goat curses—an old man now if he survives—came upon five clay vats spilling revelation.
The community of Qumran was destroyed by Roman legions in AD 68.
• • •
Dogma strives to resemble the desert: It is dry; it is immovable. Truth does not change. Is there something in the revelation of God that retains—because it has passed through—properties of desert or maleness or Semitic tongue? Does the desert, in short, make warriors? That is the question I bring to the desert from the twenty-first century.
The Semitic God is the God who enters history. Humans examine every event that pertains to us for meaning. The motive of God who has penetrated time tempts us to imperfect conjecture. When armies are victorious, when armies are trodden in the dust, when crops fail, when volcanoes erupt, when seas drink multitudes, it must mean God intends it so. What did we do to deserve this? King David psalmed for the vanquishing of his enemies, did he not? There is something in the leveling jealousy of the desert God that summons a possessive response in us. We are His people becomes He is our God. The blasphemy that attaches to monotheism is the blasphemy of certainty. If God is on our side, we must be right. We are right because we believe in God. We must defend God against the godless. Certitude clears a way for violence. And so
the monk’s dictum—the desert creates warriors—can represent centuries of holy war and sordid prayer and an umbilicus that whips like a whirlwind.
In Afghanistan’s central plateau there were two mountain-high Buddhas. For centuries, caravans traveling the Silk Route would mark them from miles away. The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001; their faces are now anvils, erasures. An inscription from the Koran was painted beside the alcove of the larger Buddha: The just replaces the unjust. Just so do men destroy what belief has built, and they do it in the name of God, the God who revealed Himself in the desert, the desert that cherishes no monuments, wants none. There is no God but God.
On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear weapon was tested in the American desert. The ape in our hearts stood still. Wow.
The desert creates warriors, by which construction Saint Sabas meant (for it was his construction) that the monk discerns his true nature in the desert—his true nature in relation to God—and the discernment entails learning to confront and to overcome the temptations of human nature. In that sense, a warrior.
The desert creates lovers. Saint Sabas desired the taste of an apple. The craving was sweeter to him than the thought of God. From that moment Sabas foreswore apples. The desire for apples was the taste of God.
• • •
Desert is the fossil of water. (Haim has been at great pains to point this out—striations in mesas and the caverns water has bored through mountains of salt, and salt is itself a memory of water.) Is dogma a fossil of the living God—the shell of God’s passage—but God is otherwise or opposite? Perhaps it is that the Semitic tongues are themselves deserts—dry records of some ancient fluency, of something feminine that has withdrawn. The Semitic tongues descend from Shem, son of Noah, survivor of the Flood. Abraham was of Shem’s line. Perhaps the Semitic tongues, inflected in the throat, recall water.
• • •
I have often heard it observed by critics of the desert religions that monotheism would have encouraged in humankind a more tender relationship to nature if the Abrahamic God had revealed Himself from within a cloak of green. The desert encourages a sense of rebuff and contest with the natural world. Jesus cursed the recalcitrant fig tree right down to firewood.
The desert’s uninhabitability convinces Jew and Christian and Muslim that we are meant for another place. Within the deserts of the Bible and the Koran, descriptions of Eden, descriptions of the Promised Land, resemble oases. For Jews, Eden was pre-desert. For Christians and Muslims, paradise—reconciliation with God—is post-desert.
In the Koran, paradise is likened to gardens underneath which rivers flow. For Christians, paradise is an urban idea, a communion, the city of God. The commendation of the body in the ancient rite of Christian burial prays that angels may come to lead the soul of the departed to the gates of the holy city Jerusalem.
I purchase for five shekels a postcard scene of Jerusalem in the snow—black-and-white—the sky is dark but Jerusalem shines swan, a royal city. I will show you the photograph.
I follow Haim a quarter of a mile to a grove of untrimmed date palm trees. I have seen their like only in ancient mosaics, the muted colors, the golden dust. In their undressed exuberance these palms resemble fountains. But they are dry; they prick and rattle as we thread our way among them. We could just as easily have walked around, couldn’t we? I suspect Haim of concocting an oasis experience. But his glance is upward, into the branches of some taller trees. Haim is hoping for what he calls a lucky day. If it is Haim’s lucky day, we will see a leopard. Recently, a leopard entered the town of Beersheba. Haim suspects the creature may be lurking here.
But it is not Haim’s lucky day. We continue up an incline, alongside a muddy riverbed. Winged insects bedevil my ears. We walk around a screen of acacia trees, at which Haim steps aside to reveal . . . a waterfall, a crater filled with green water! There are several Israeli teenagers swimming, screaming with delight as they splash one another. A tall African youth stands poised at the edge of the pool.
This Ethiopian Jew (we later learn) has come to this desert from another. He has come because the Abrahamic faith traveled like particles of desert over mountains and seas, blew under the gates of ancient cities, and caught in the leaves of books. Laughter, as spontaneous as that of his ancestress Sarah, echoes through the canyon as the boy plunges into the stone bowl of water. Displaced water leaps like a javelin.
I am standing in the Negev desert. I am wet.
• • •
John the Baptist wrapped himself in camel hide. He wandered the desert and ate the desert—honey and locusts and Haim’s gray leaves. John preached hellfire and he performed dunking ceremonies in the river Jordan. People came from far and wide to be addressed by the interesting wild man as “Brood of Vipers.” When watery Jesus approached flaming John and asked for baptism, John recognized Jesus as greater than he. It was as though the desert bowed to the sea. But, in fact, their meeting was an inversion of elements. John said: I baptize only with water. The one who comes after me will baptize with Spirit and fire.
• • •
Desert is, literally, emptiness—its synonyms “desolation,” “wasteland.” To travel to the desert “in order to see it,” in order to experience it, is paradoxical. The desert remains an absence. The desert is this empty place I stand multiplied by infinite numbers—not this place particularly. So I come away each night convinced I have been to the holy desert (and have been humiliated by it) and that I have not been to the desert at all.
Just beyond the ravine is a kibbutz, a banana plantation, a university, a nuclear power plant. But, you see, I wouldn’t know that. The lonely paths Haim knows are not roads. They are scrapings of the earth. Perhaps they are tracks that Abraham knew, or Jesus. Some boulders have been removed and laid aside. From the air-conditioned van or from the tossing Jeep or through binoculars, I see the desert in every direction. The colors of the desert are white, fawn, tawny gold, rust, rust-red, blue. When the ignition is turned off and the Jeep rolls to a stop, I pull the cord that replaces the door handle; the furnace opens; my foot finds the desert floor. But the desert is distance. Nothing touches me.
Yet many nights I return to my hotel with the desert on my shoes. There is a burnt, mineral scent in my clothing. The scent is difficult to wash out in the bathroom basin, as is the stain of the desert, an umber stain.
Standing, scrubbing my T-shirt, is the closest I get to the desert. The water turns yellow.
• • •
I tell myself I am not looking for God. I am looking for an elision that is, nevertheless, a contour. The last great emptiness in Jerusalem is the first. What remains to be venerated is the Western Wall, the ancient restraining wall of the destroyed Second Temple.
After the Six-Day War, the Israeli government bulldozed an Arab neighborhood to create Western Wall Plaza, an emptiness to facilitate devotion within emptiness—a desert that is also a well.
I stand at the edge of the plaza with Magen Broshi, a distinguished archaeologist. Magen is a man made entirely of Jerusalem. You can’t tell him anything. Last night at dinner in the hotel garden, I tried out a few assertions I thought dazzling, only to be met with Magen’s peremptory Of course.
Piety, ache, jubilation, many, many classes of ardor pass us by. Magen says he is not a believer. I tell Magen about my recent cancer. If I asked him, would he pray for me here, even though he does not believe? Of course.
Western Wall Plaza levels sorrow, ecstasy, cancer, belief. Here emptiness rises to proclaim its unlikeness to God, who allows for no comparison. Emptiness does not resemble. It is all that remains.
“No writing! You cannot write here.” A woman standing nearby has noticed I carry a notebook. I have a pen in my hand. The woman means on the Sabbath, I think. Or can one never write here? It is the Sabbath.
“He is not writing anything,” Magen mutters irritably, waving the wom
an away.
three
The True Cross
A little water and the desert breaks into flower, bowers of cool shade spring up in the midst of dust and glare, radiant stretches of soft colour gleam in that grey expanse. Your heart leaps as you pass through the gateway in the mud wall; so sharp is the contrast, that you may stand with one foot in an arid wilderness and the other in a shadowy, flowery paradise.
—Gertrude Bell, Persian Pictures
A sixty-nine-year-old body is still beautiful. It refuses any covering. A nurse is standing by the bed when we walk in. The nurse attempts to drape the genitals of the man on the bed with the edge of the sheet. But the hand of the man on the bed plucks the sheet away.
I’m afraid modesty is out the window, the nurse says.
There are two large windows.
There are three chairs for visitors, comfortable chairs; there is a foldout sofa for a spouse—that would be Peter, Luther’s partner of thirty years, more than thirty years. Peter called two days ago. He said it was time.
So Jimmy and I drove to Las Vegas on Holy Thursday. Luther has been Jimmy’s friend for more than forty years. They met when they were both shoe-leather messengers at a law firm in San Francisco; that was before FedEx, before fax, before e-mail. In those days the windows of the nineteenth floor of the Standard Oil Building could be opened to the hum of traffic below; “Proud Mary,” KFRC-AM Top Forty toiled through the speaker of a transistor radio on the windowsill behind the dispatcher’s desk.
Peter hasn’t slept properly for weeks. He tells me he shoves the couch against the bed at night so he can hold on to Luther’s hand.
One time, when Luther had to go home to South Carolina on family business, Jimmy went with him. They walked through the woods behind the house where Luther had grown up. Luther pointed to a branch distended over a brown creek. The old people used to tell us Jesus’s cross was made of yonder tree. Every Easter, the tree puts out white blossoms by way of apology.
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