This time last year, I was in Israel. I was staying at the Ecce Homo pilgrim house on the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. This was not just a tourist or bucket-list destination for my friend and I, but a chapter in a story of faith. The Holy Land is a place both real and imagined, a place to map out the sacred sites so formatively embedded in our religious consciousness. I wanted to know where Jesus of Nazareth preached and prayed, wined and dined, suffered and died; to feel the pull of landscape and history. We wandered and wondered joyfully, finally seeing for ourselves the places that have been archived in our hearts since we first learned the catechism by heart.
I have set my heart on places that are holy to me; places that tell me who I am; places that feel like home. I have walked by the Sea of Galilee, seen the room reputed to be that of the Last Supper and prayed in any number of churches. I bobbed like a cork in the Dead Sea and bought trinkets in the Suq El-Attarin. I walked where Herod the Great built a fortress and Jewish patriots refused to surrender to the Romans in 73 CE at the siege of Masada. We visited Barabbas’ prison cave and wandered through the Roman ruins at the site of the Bethesda pool. At the Saint Anne Monastery, we heard the marvellous echo effect of voices singing and we gazed in awe from the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley to see the resplendent Dome of the Rock.
We queued at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and were bemused by clambering down from Station 9 on the rooftop through the small Ethiopian chapel to get to the proper entrance. We stopped at Station 5 intersecting with the busy El Wad Street where Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus to carry the cross. We passed through Jaffa Gate to wander through David’s Citadel and learn more about the history of this city, home to the three great Abrahamic faiths.
We were invited to Mass in the ambient serenity of the Ecce Homo basilica by fellow pilgrims from the Diocese of Sale who had been on a study tour. We walked the stepped streets and sampled deliciously chewy glacé fruit from market-place spice stores. In the cool of Bassem’s