OPINION (AN COLÚN): I dream one day of visiting the Holy Land

I DREAM one day of visiting the Holy Land. It's a dream which many Christians harbour, to visit the place where Christ walked, where so many momentous things happened.
Before she died our good friend Rev Irene Morrow gifted us a book about the Holy Land. It's called “In the steps of the Master” and was written by the English journalist Henry Vollam Morton. The book is a masterpiece. Its beautiful, evocative text captures the reader and fills you with a strong desire to visit the many places which he describes.
Morton became famous in 1923 when he covered the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun for the Daily Express. He wrote “In the steps of the Master” in 1934 and it sold over half a million copies. In the opening chapter of the book he describes a visit to Jerusalem. Armed with a street map he explores the ancient, venerated city. He's searching for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Navigating the winding lanes of the old city, people approach him offering to be his guide (something which continues to be very common in Middle Eastern cities and towns). “I was surrounded by eager, whispering men, wearing European suits and the red tarbush which used to be the sign of Turkish citizenship. 'You come with me to the Holy Sepulchre!' they whispered. 'I show you everything'!” Like most tourists since time immemorial Morton tries to ignore them and shake them off. But, as so often, they remain dogged: “They followed me like figures in a nightmare, whispering, and once even daring to pull me by the sleeve. I had to make it very clear that I disliked them before they disappeared from sight.” Having shaken off the gadflies he gazes upon ancient buildings which perhaps were also viewed by Christ himself. At some of the sites there's the usual hubbub and commotion of a Middle Eastern crowd. At Herod's great tower, Phasael, there's a huge crowd “which seemed to me, so newly from the West, to be a perfect microcosm of the East, and I looked at it with the delight of a child at a Christmas circus.” In other words, the magic of the East, which is one of the great draws for visitors from the West.
Among the crowds he notices Bedouin Arabs who although they are walking in rags, they are moving like “Kings of the Earth. The Bedouin is a man of ancestry and freedom, of flocks and herds, and tents which he calls 'houses of hair'. In him Abraham lives on into the modern world.”
The Jerusalem of the 1930s is similar to the city now in the sense it's a great melting pot of many different people of different backgrounds. Morton can see Arabs in European clothes and tarbushes, Armenians, Franciscan Friars, and white Dominicans, Greek priests (square-bearded like Assyrian kings), Ashkenazim Jews (wearing gabardines and large, fur-rimmed hats), and Sephardic Jews (wearing low, wide-rimmed black felt hats).
He points out that the people in Middle Eastern towns are often giving vent to emotion or have succumbed to a state of lassitude. Perhaps both moods are caused by the hot climate: “Arabs sat dreamily under the awning of a cafe, sucking at hookahs; others, strung up to a high pitch of excitement, expended in the purchase of a handful of dates, or a lettuce, more passion than a Westerner expends in a month.”
Then, as now, the visitor hears countless languages being spoken around him – French, German, Italian, English, Arabic, Yiddish, Hebrew, etc. Then, as now, a popular time to visit Jerusalem is Holy Week. The hubbub and excitement is extraordinary. Morton witnesses it in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He rises at 5am to see the Greek ceremony of the Washing of the Feet, in the courtyard of the Holy Sepulchre. He has to wait three hours for the ceremony to begin “but the crowd is so varied and so interesting that the time passes swiftly.” The courtyard and the adjoining roofs are jam-packed with people; nonetheless more people are pressing into the throng. There are many different types of Christians in the crowd, including “excitable Copts from Egypt, Christian Arabs who dress and look exactly like the Moslems; Christian fellahin (farmers / agricultural labourers); Greeks, Armenians, Syrians and, here and there, a dark-skinned Ethiopian; Catholic monks, bands of pilgrims from England, Italy and sometimes Spain, and crowds of Europeans and Americans. A gathering more oddly representative of the international character of Christianity could be seen nowhere else.”
On another day during Holy Week he attends a ceremony in the Armenian Gallery in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: “The approaches to the church were full of excited people, and it was with some difficulty that I struggled through the crowds who had been waiting inside the church all night...From the Coptic chapel came a tuneless Eastern chanting, and from the crowd came wild songs sung by Arabs mounted on the shoulders of their friends. These leaders, swaying perilously over the heads of the crowd, beat time with their hands or with sticks, and chanted in Arabic such verses as: 'The Fire has shone and we have feasted, / We have visited the Sepulchre of our Lord, Our Lord is Jesus Christ'.”
To be a traveller like Morton is to see that humanity’s diversity is beautiful and should be celebrated. To be a Jew, for example, is to be a member of a frequently marvellous race of people who have endowed humanity with many celebrated things of genius; at their apex, one of their geniuses, is Jesus Christ himself.
To be a Muslim is to be a devotee of one of the spiritual masterpieces of the world, the Koran, (a book which emphasises again and again compassion and forgiveness); it is to be part of a civilisation which is incredibly colourful, vibrant and cultured; a civilisation which has produced outstanding leaders, thinkers, scientists, mathematicians, artists; a civilisation which has given us the mystic heights of Sufism and Whirling Dervishes.
To be a Christian is to bear a close affinity, a close relationship to Judaism and Islam, because all three religions emerged from the Middle East and all three religions are monotheistic. Being Christians we also have much to be proud of in our heritage and our culture. But perhaps Christianity's greatest gift to humanity is its repeated focus on love and forgiveness, on the acknowledgement that we are all sinners and life is hard, that to be truly civilised is to be gentle with one another.