Pilgrimage Reflection - Katrina Hamilton

September 10, 2023

When I came home from my pilgrimage trip and people asked me how it was, I often just answered, “it was a lot.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.  Every single day I spent on pilgrimage could be its own sermon, and most days three or four sermons. But in light of the readings from Ezekiel and Matthew urging us to be honest with each other no matter how difficult honesty may be, I decided to choose the topic that would be most difficult to write, most difficult to say, and possibly the most difficult to hear.

My time on pilgrimage was guided by two parallel stories: an ancient religious one and a modern political one. Our guides even warned us about the emotional whiplash we might experience as early as Day Two, when we went straight from a modern refugee camp, to Bethlehem - where every day is Christmas. I feel like the only way to tell these two stories is with the same whiplash.

Before I left for my trip, the story I told myself about touring religious sites of variable authenticity was this: even if I didn’t think something was THE spot some specific religious event had occurred, it was still an interesting spot to visit for the cultural significance. After all, millions of people have honored these places for centuries.

Before I left for my trip, the story I told myself about the conflict in Israel-Palestine was that it was too complicated for me to have an opinion on. I didn’t live there, I didn’t understand it, it wasn’t my place to insert my western ideas onto a foreign land and people. I didn’t even know what to call the area I was planning to visit. I usually told people I was visiting “the Holy Land”, and when they wanted more clarification I struggled. Was it Israel? Palestine? Was there another name to use? Now that I know so much more about the land and the conflict, I find myself struggling even more. I still don’t know what to call the place I went. My bleeding heart and my cynicism disagree.

We touched a lot of famous rocks on our trip. Some rocks, like Golgotha where Jesus was crucified, have a good amount of archeological, biblical, and cultural evidence to back up their claims. Other sites, like the place where Mary was visited by the Angel Gabriel, have been a part of Christian tradition since the 4^th century or earlier, even though we might not be able to point to any particular evidence that such an event happened in that spot. And others, like the church honoring the Sermon on the Mount, are strictly commemorative. A place to honor something important that we believe happened, though we will never be able to pinpoint exactly where it was.

The first day of our program we walked from St. George’s College into the old city to visit the Holy Sepulchre, a place with many famous rocks, as it is believed to be the site of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. Near the end of our visit, several of us found ourselves waiting with the Dean of St. George’s College for a few others of our group to finish touching the Golgotha rock upstairs. We were standing just to the side of the Stone of Unction, a large, flat stone that religious tradition holds is the place where Jesus’s body was anointed for burial. Visiting christians will bring bags of things to place on it - souvenirs for home, wedding clothes, their own intended burial garments, anything to anoint with the holy oil that is regularly added to the stone. I watched as several women, having finished rubbing their treasured items on the stone, lay their foreheads down on it, prostrate before the Lord, in prayer. The Dean was behind me, whispering with some of my fellow pilgrims about the weeks ahead of us and I overheard him say, “The thing I tell people on pilgrimage is to remember: this was where it happened.” I looked over at the women and I heard a voice in my head say, “This is where it is happening, right now.”

The stretch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has had many residents and many occupiers over the centuries. Our guide at the Dome of the Rock called Jerusalem the “Cemetery of Empires”. Early human records show Canaanite city states. For a while control was split between the Kingdoms of Israel, Judah, and the Philistines. The Assyrians conquered the region, then Babylon. The Persians, Alexander the Great, and by the first century, the time of Jesus, control of Palestine was in the hands of Rome. By the 4^th Century the area was generally under Christian control, which is when many of the early traditional sites were established. Then the muslims conquered the area, then the crusaders, then the Egyptians and eventually the Ottoman Empire.

The British took control of the land from the Ottomans after World War One, and controlled it until the end of World War Two, when the victorious allied forces were figuring out how to properly divvy up the various lands that represented the spoils of war. The decision, made in 1948, was to draw a line, known as the Green Line, down the middle of the region. It would give the area west of Jerusalem to the Jewish people to form the State of Israel, a sanctuary for those who had been persecuted for so long. This would have been in keeping with the promise of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when Britain declared its aim to establish such a nation home for the Jewish people. The other side of the Green Line, the area East of Jerusalem, was for the Palestinians who were, of course, already living there. Jerusalem herself was split between the two. The area controlled by the Palestinians includes the whole Western side of the Jordan River right up to the river bank, and is therefore referred to as the West Bank.

Our first visit to the West Bank was on Day Two. What should have been a short drive was made longer when we discovered that our intended checkpoint had been arbitrarily closed, and we would have to drive around. We finally got out of the bus and began our walk along the wall. Euphemistically referred to as the “separation barrier”, it is an imposing, 30 foot tall concrete wall erected by Israeli military forces in the early 2000s, under the guise of preventing terrorism. However many see the wall as nothing more than a land grab, as 85% of the wall is well into the Palestinian side of the Green Line. The wall separated farmers from their land, split communities, and it means that no one, not Israelis, not Palestinians, not buses full of Christian tourists, can pass freely between areas that are technically Palestinian territory. And certainly not between Palestine and Israel, though the distinction is fuzzy, as Israel has occupied all of Jerusalem and the West Bank since they took control after the six-day war in 1967.

But this was part of the story I didn’t fully understand that first day in the West Bank. I had just arrived and was still trying to process the firehose of information. I just knew it was a wall, and I knew the Palestinians didn’t like it. And by the end of our 30 minute walk, I knew I didn’t like it either. I can’t tell you what it was exactly. Maybe the tragic symbols of Palestinian resistance painted on the concrete. Maybe the loops of barbed wire. Maybe the uncomfortable proximity to the nearby buildings. But there was a visceral feeling I got standing there. Unmistakable and unrelenting. Devoid of any real political understanding or nuance, and absolutely irrefutable. This was wrong. It made me angry, and it felt…stupid. Something in my gut told me that no amount of context could make this feel anything other than ludicrous. I couldn’t say why then, and I still can’t now. It just was.

The story we tell ourselves about the birth of Jesus is that it took place in Bethlehem. Years ago, I read the book Jesus for the Non-Religious by Bishop John Shelby Spong that calls that narrative into question, suggesting that Jesus was almost certainly born in Nazareth, where he was raised. The book, while still fundamentally Christian and rooted in the resurrection, suggests that many of the events depicted in the gospels should be seen through the lens of Jewish storytelling tradition, and not historical fact. Ever since then I’ve generally seen the nativity stories as evocative, not literal. This isn’t an issue in my daily life as a Christian, but it made things pretty awkward in Bethlehem.

Normally pilgrims can wait 30 or 40 minutes for the chance to touch the stone on which Jesus was said to be born. Because we went outside of the high season, we had almost no wait, and I was able to go back and touch it again two more times. The first time I touched it I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at or what I was touching. Most of the famous spots around famous rocks were turned into churches long ago, and so they don’t look much like you imagine. The birth stone is tucked inside a hole in the wall, in a cave below the church, and it is covered by a decorative piece of marble and metal so that only a small spot in the middle of the stone is able to be reached. The first time I went to touch the rock I didn’t even realize I could reach my hand down into it. The second time I did, and felt the clear and smooth indentation at the center, caused by centuries of faithful fingers reaching for a connection with the divine. I was struck once again by how we are constantly putting our faith into a thing that is unseen, and yet here I was seeing the very real human actions that result from that faith. When I went to touch the stone the third time I placed my hand right down into the depression in the rock and I found myself saying a strange prayer to God, “Even if you are not real, this is.”

I don’t think I felt quite as ignorant at any point in the trip as I did the day we walked into the Dome of the Rock and I found out there was an actual rock inside. I always thought the name was honoring some Islamic religious idea, like a church being called the Church of the Resurrection. But in fact the majority of the space inside the Dome of the Rock is filled with a large, uneven boulder. The story our guide Aouni told us was that this was the rock from which Muhammad ascended into heaven. He also told us that every inch of the surrounding grounds, the Haram al-Sharif, is holy ground. Islamic tradition holds that either the prophet Mohammed or an Angel of God walked over the entire compound. “You pray inside the building, you pray outside, it doesn’t matter. It is all holy.” Aouni told us we couldn’t linger in the adjacent Al-Asqa mosque for long, as it is routinely attacked by Jewish extremists. He pointed to the holes in the windows from the various attacks, told us how Israeli building codes wouldn’t allow them to fix any of it. He said he got fined when he tried to paint his own office.

The story Jewish history tells us is that the exact same 37 acres in the middle of Jerusalem is the Temple Mount, the place where Solomon built his first temple. Inside the first temple would have been the Jewish Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary that held the Ark of the Covenant, the vessel containing the Ten Commandments. While the exact spot of the Holy of Holies was is unknown, it is unquestioningly understood to be, inconveniently, located somewhere inside the modern Dome of the Rock mosque. It is well-known that there is a subset of extremists that would happily tear the mosque down and rebuild the Jewish temple, if only they had their chance.

Aouni kept insisting that it was wrong-headed to focus on the specific buildings or spots. “This is the holy land, not the holy stones or buildings or domes. So the building is just a building. Beautiful, but it’s just a building.” When I asked him later what makes the land holy, he explained that you know it is holy because of the way people have flocked to it for thousands of years. You can see that it is holy because millions of people have seen it as holy. 

On the fourth day of our trip we went out to the Judean wilderness, where Jesus was tempted by the devil. We were encouraged to walk out into the area and find a spot to think, meditate, and pray. The Judean wilderness is a captivating landscape, with steep rolling hills stretching out far into the horizon. In the blistering sun and sweltering heat, I was hoping to find even the smallest amount of shade to rest in. Eventually I found a rock big enough that if I sat on the ground right next to it, it just barely shaded my torso, but it wasn’t enough to shade my shoulders, head, or legs. “A person would die so quickly out here,” I thought. The ground was littered with dried up brown bushes. There was no soil, just bedrock and sand. I was overcome by the inhospitable harshness all around me. I got out my journal and wrote, “Is this the land that is so holy? Is this the place worth dying for? There is beauty, yes, but death. Or more truly, the absence of life. How could this possibly be where God would want his chosen people? How could this land be holy? The breeze is nice, but the bushes are dead.”

In the West Bank town of Nablus, we got the chance to celebrate Eucharist with the Anglican Christians there. Many of the Christians currently living in Israel and Palestine represent an unbroken line of the faithful since the time of Jesus. Arab people are so closely associated with Islam it’s important to remember that Arab Christians are older than Arab Muslims. Still, Arab Christians are often asked when they converted to Christianity. “About 2000 years ago,” they jokingly say. Many of the Christians in the Holy Land are the direct descendants of the first apostles.

I had the honor of sitting next to their priest at lunch that day, and I got to hear about how he had barely gotten to see his newborn baby since it had been born. As a Palestinian, he is not able to get the paperwork needed to stay very long in the Israeli town where his wife lives. And as an Arab, she risks losing her Israeli citizenship, and that of her newborn baby, if she stays too long with him in the West Bank. Despite being born in Israel, her citizenship there is conditional.

We almost weren’t able to go to Nablus at all. The first night of our trip, there was an Israeli attack on the refugee camp in Jenin, the worst in over a decade. But most of the Palestinian fighters the Israelis were looking for escaped. Thinking they may have retreated to Nablus, the story we heard from the Christians there was that some 100 Israeli soldiers had been in the town looking for the fighters, and they killed two people before leaving just ahead of our visit. The story the Israeli Military tells you is that they are fighting terrorists.

“To them, I am a terrorist,” Father Jamel told me. I asked him why. “Because I’m an Arab living in the West Bank. That is enough.”

I felt more and more disconnected from God as the days wore on. We’d been on pilgrimage for one week, and we’d seen so many sites. Some I felt sure were authentic, and some I felt certain were myth. As we were driving toward the Church of Jacob’s Well our guide told us that the nice thing about wells is that they never move. The story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman takes place at Jacob’s Well. And we know exactly which well that is, as such things don’t change, even after 2000 years. But at this point my mind was spinning with so much doubt and contradiction. What made my religion any more true than the Islam of the refugees, or the Judaism of the soldiers? This was Jacob’s Well for certain, but what proof did I have that the story of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman was even true? There were only two people there, after all. So which one told the story to others? And how faithful was the retelling in those early days, before such things were scripture? Did any of this really happen, or is it all just stories?

The Church of Jacob’s Well is beautiful, one of my favorites from the trip. We all gathered around the well and took turns drawing the bucket up from the depths, drinking the clean, metallic water. As the others were touring the church, I went back to the well, kneeled down, placed my hand on the stone, and prayed. “Jesus, be with me here,” I said. Over and Over. “Jesus, be with me here.” I tried to imagine Jesus and the woman sitting there next to me, occupying the very same space, absorbed in their conversation. For a moment I thought I felt their presence, but it was fleeting. I was reaching for something that refused to appear.

There were so many flowers blooming in the desert. I hadn’t expected it. Bright colors, alive in the sun, all over the city of Jerusalem. I was late meeting up with the group after our visit to the Pool of Bethesda because I had very literally stopped to smell the roses. And the lavender. And the rosemary. I took many pictures, but I shared very few online. I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure what I even thought anymore. Our chaplain said that according to the Talmud, God gave ten measures of beauty to the world. Nine to Jerusalem, and one for the rest. But he’s also heard it said that God gave ten measures of suffering to the world, nine to Jerusalem and the rest of us sharing just one.

We spent three days in Galilee, exploring Jesus’ ministry there. The day we left Nazareth we met with Father Na’el, the priest at the Anglican church there. When I asked him if they as Christians are ever seen as a neutral third party to the Jewish and Muslim conflict, he quickly corrected me. “It’s not a religious conflict,” he said. “This is not Muslims versus Jews. It is Israelis versus Palestinians.”

He explained how he himself identifies as an Arab Palestinian Christian Israeli, though the combination may seem impossible to some. But Arab is his cultural ethnicity, Palestinian his nationality, Christian his vocation, and Israeli is his citizenship. His parents lived in Nazareth at the birth of the modern State of Israel. Yet he is treated like a second-class citizen. Still, there is a brightness in how he speaks about the situation. “Israel will one day, I hope, be equal to all its citizens,” he tells us. That is the story he is holding on to.

My trip notes show my downward spiral. “I feel safe when I see a Palestinian flag.” I wrote, “But the flag of Israel makes me nervous.”

On another day I write, “This is supposed to be a safe place for the Jewish people. But this is not a safe place for anyone.”

The day of our boat ride on the Galilee I wrote, “The only thing that could save Palestine is an act of God, but I’m not even sure that would work. I’m not sure anyone is prepared to listen to God at this point.”

By the time we visited Mount Tabor, the site of the Transfiguration, I was feeling numb. I listened to the reflections, I took my photos, but God was absent. I found a patio that overlooked the stretching landscape. There was no one else there - I was alone. Blue skies, green squares of farmlands, clusters of buildings that made up the towns, and a bright white military aircraft sitting on a distant airstrip. I stood up on the foundations of the safety railing to get a better look. I stood there for some time, staring out onto the land. And I realized I had never believed in God less than I did in that moment. I was disconnected completely. I was listening for a voice, looking for a sign, and there was nothing answering back.

I got back on the bus and wrote in my journal, “There is an evil that has infected the Holy Land. No one can hear God here.”

I spent the rest of the drive back to Jerusalem trying to shake the feeling. We still had three days to go.

The next day was the start of our study of Holy Week. We walked down the Mount of Olives, following a path Jesus might have taken towards the temple. We stopped at four churches, the final one being at the Garden of Gethsemane. The church there was my favorite of any we visited, because the inside is made to look like the night sky under which Jesus would have prayed. Even the stained glass is all blues, purples, and reds. And in the center, in front of the altar, is a large, famous rock - the rock where Jesus prayed. Gethsemane has always been one of my favorite parts of the Jesus story. It is a moment when Jesus’ humanity shines through. The night before his crucifixion, he has doubts, he wonders if he really has to die. He takes a moment away from the other disciples to have a private conversation with God where he can show his fear. I was feeling even more attached to this part of the story than usual, still grasping to find any way to reconnect with the divine. I was in my own Gethsemane, wondering why on earth God would bring me to the Holy Land only to feel like an atheist. 

The rock where Jesus is said to have prayed is several feet across, and dozens of visitors were filing in and out of the altar area to touch it. I went up to the rock, kneeled down on the floor, and put my hand on the cold stone. I closed my eyes and I started to pray.

This is a place of Holy Doubt.

This is a place of Holy Questioning.

This is a place of Holy Anger.

And it was when I heard the word anger behind my eyes that I started to cry. Sobbing quietly but uncontrollably over everything I had seen and heard and felt. Surrounded by tourists, on my knees, touching yet another famous rock. Weeping for Jerusalem. Poor Jerusalem, whom God gave nine measures of suffering.

My whole life I have rooted my faith not in the facts of Jesus, but the story of him. I believe so strongly in the power of stories. They are so much more than facts could ever be. In hindsight I shouldn’t have been surprised that being put face-to-face with constant arguments over the authenticity of the Jesus story would try my faith. There was beauty and meaning in walking on the same steps that Jesus walked on, but somehow, the past feels like a distraction. This was where it happened? No. This is where it is happening right now. A story of suffering and loss. Of power, territory, and claim. Of those who have been oppressed now turning to oppression. All of us watching the last stages of a game where the winner is already decided, but the rules tell us to play it out anyway. And when you try to go back to the very beginning, to see who had the original claim and why, you begin to run into stories. Stories of burning bushes and Promised Lands. This land has been promised so many times.

I am kept going by small bits of hope. The pro-democracy protest some of our pilgrims attended before leaving Israel that shows there are citizens who want to change the direction their government is going. Many of them, in fact. Memories of breaking bread on the shores of Galilee, of humming quiet hymns to myself in giant old churches and hearing the sound bounce back at me. 

I wish I could give you a satisfying conclusion to my journey, but I am still waiting for it myself. I am still waiting for God to speak to me with the clarity I once knew. There is so much noise left over from my trip, so many voices and stories all talking at once. And I hear more every time I try to explain my experience to someone else, and they give me a new insight, a new way to consider the situation. I realize that my comments about how no one is listening to God in the Holy Land were as much about me as anyone else. What I saw was so painful, my anger pushed God away. That anger is still inside me, and it is my task to unravel it. I had a therapist once tell me that we feel anger when we need action. My pilgrimage is not over. There is more work to be done, both inside me and in the world. And it is only through that work that I will regain the connection to God I once had. That is the trial I am being asked to face. That is the story I am now called to tell.