Holy Land, Holy People

Thank God for my wife! The invitation arrived in midsummer. Would I take part in a seven-day conservative study group in Israel put on by the Herzl Institute? We would tour strategically, politically, and religiously important places in Israel while having meetings with scholars, journalists, educators, politicians, and religious figures—Jewish and Christian.

The Holy Land! The place known as “the fifth Gospel.” A no-brainer, yet…I hesitated. It was complicated. The dates matched the second week of classes at my university. Accepting would mean rearranging my academic schedule, getting backed up on administrative work, and complicating our already crazy family schedule. It would mean long flights, navigating airports and borders, and adjusting to an eight-hour time-zone differential.

Reader, I have made two decisions in my life about which I have no regrets. One was entering the Catholic Church. The other was marrying my wife. What happened next demonstrates why the second is true after twenty-five years.

Despite the burden it would place on her, Cathy was adamant: “You have to take this! It’s the trip of a lifetime.”

I took it. It was.

Were the complications I imagined about this trip merely, well, imaginary? No, sadly real. The second leg of my trip, from Chicago to Krakow, Poland, kept getting delayed, prompting increasingly frantic messages to the travel agent. By the time I navigated passport control in Poland, I realized the connection gate was at the end of the terminal. I dashed madly, but I made it. Murphy’s Law is harsh, but Divine Providence is good.

Upon arrival at David Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, I was tired but ready for action. Upon making it through passport control without a hitch, I got a call from the driver who would take me to Jerusalem. I had been told Israelis dress casually, so the older man in shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops who greeted me at the meet-up site amused but did not surprise me.

Though it was past sunset, the sky over the Mediterranean was a gorgeous kaleidoscope of colors. Just as with the Gulf Coast sky in East Texas, my mind instantly went to Psalm 19: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” Like East Texas yet again, Tel Aviv is stuffy, but my driver’s preference for open windows heightened the effect. Spirit, like its Greek (pneuma) and Hebrew (ruach) forms, is literally breath or wind. If the sky was telling God’s glory, I wanted to be open to the Holy Spirit in the Holy Land.

At the Hotel Dan, I connected with most of my fellow travelers for a drink and some nourishment before bed. Fr. Benedict Kiely, the president of Nasarean.org, a charity for persecuted Christians (especially in the Middle East), whom I had met before, said for the first of several times that what he desired for all of us was openness to what God wanted out of us on that trip.

One of the other travelers, a distinguished journalist and policy scholar, observed that he wasn’t sure how ready he was for it. As in our ordinary lives, none of us are. Taking on the mind of Christ, with its readiness to say in all circumstances, “Not my will, but thine,” is the work of a lifetime.

The political and cultural side of the trip—the meetings and lectures—was an education in full. History, law, technology, Israeli diplomacy, education, and economics were all covered in vivid detail by extraordinarily interesting speakers. Yet, for all the this-worldly aspects, to which our group of Catholic journalists, academics, and think tankers were deeply attentive and for which we were grateful, most of us still considered the trip (and often talked about it thus) as a “pilgrimage” first and foremost.

We were walking where Salvation History was accomplished.

Our first tour stop was the Mount of Olives overlooking the city of Jerusalem. This was the place to which King David first fled when his son Absalom was attempting to dethrone his father. This was where Our Lord went, “as was his custom,” as Luke tells us, to pray and to teach. It is where He went before drawing away into the Garden of Gethsemane at its base. It is there that He wept over Jerusalem. It is there, Matthew tells us in chapters 24 and 25, that He preached to the Disciples about the coming persecutions, the signs of the end of the age, the astonishing sign of the Son of Man, and the judgment of all the nations.

Our Lord’s apocalyptic sermon there was certainly no accident. The Prophet Zechariah foretold God’s standing on that mount to fight the nations and was believed to have predicted that the Resurrection of the Dead would begin there. Hence the thousands of Jewish graves we saw as we looked down toward the valley between us and the City of David: they read the prophets.

If, as T. S. Eliot says, “In my end is my beginning,” a first stop at the Mount of Olives was perfectly appropriate. We began where the end of this world begins.

In “The City of David,” we saw the Pool of Siloam, in which the man blind from birth washed after Jesus healed him. We also saw the location that many archaeologists believe to be David’s palace. While still disputed, recent archeological discoveries of 10^th-century B.C. goods and decorations support the thesis. As our tour guide, the irrepressible Cuti Ben David, said, modern denials of biblical history keep running into problems as the very stones cry out: “The Bible keeps standing up to say, ‘I’m real.’”

So, too, with ancient Shiloh, the capital of the people of Israel for 369 years before David established Jerusalem. Recent discoveries support the biblical account and identify the likely location of the Tabernacle, where the priest Eli heard childless Hannah’s distraught prayer and Samuel, the son she bore, heard the call of God.

It was on yet another hill that many heard the comfort and call to unhindered service of God that Hannah and Samuel received. The traditional spot of the Mount of the Beatitudes was a place of calm and beauty. A few boats were on the Sea of Galilee when we visited. They were quiet enough that one could imagine Simon Peter and Andrew fishing in them.

Down the shore a little bit, in Matthew the Evangelist’s hometown, Capernaum, we saw the house believed to be Peter’s and ruins of a synagogue that perhaps dates to the fourth century A.D. Beneath the latter is evidence of an older synagogue, perhaps the one in which Jesus taught and exorcised a demon-possessed man. Though Capernaum was described as our Lord’s “own city” in Matthew’s Gospel and became His center of operations after leaving Nazareth, it was also the place he condemned for its lack of faith—along with nearby Chorazin and Bethsaida. A potent warning.

Perhaps the most moving places in the Holy Land were the underground ones. Mass close to where Christ was born in a subterranean chapel underneath the Church of the Nativity complex brought to mind Chesterton’s chapter in The Everlasting Man, “The God in the Cave.” He wrote that “in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.”

As it was in the beginning of His earthly life, so too in the end. In the riddle of Jerusalem, life seemed buried beneath death. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, believed since the fourth century to be the correct location of the events of the Atonement, one climbs the stairs to the place believed to be Calvary. Lower and in another part of the complex is Christ’s tomb. Last year, archeologist Francesca Stasolla led an excavation finding significant evidence that this location is likely the right one—Catholic traditions often stand up to say, “I’m biblical and historical.”

Kneeling in the tomb with my hands on the cold stone slab on which Life Himself somehow experienced Death, I found myself both overwhelmed by what was present and thinking of Fr. Benedict’s words about letting God lead me. Can I, as our Lord did, say, “Thy will be done” in my own life?

Walking where Jesus walked, seeing the sky He saw, and touching the very stones He saw was an unbelievable experience. Those unsurpassable events in “the land called holy” achieved the redemption of the world. Yet, even if I cannot be there all the time, I can know Jesus in the Church through the Scriptures, in which He speaks, and the Eucharist, in which He touches me directly and gives me His very life.

Wherever we live, we are called to be holy people doing works of love that make visible Christ’s redemption. If only I let God’s will be done in my life, if only I accept my cross, and die to self in the hope of Christ’s resurrection, my own land can be called holy, too.

(Editor’s note: This essay is reprinted with the kind permission of The Catholic Spirit.)