Defining holiness

Sun, Jan 31, 2010
Jerusalem

What makes a place holy? Is it a series of events or are some places just inherently more holy than others? Jerusalem is “the Holy City” in “the Holy Land” and yet the very stones and air are permeated with hostility and suspicion, anger and sorrow. If this is the Dwelling Place of God, “The Holy of Holies,” I cannot imagine the turmoil God must feel all the time. To be in the room as your children kill one another must be incredibly painful. To know that your children hate each other and to listen to them argue over who has the greater claim to you – it must fill God with grief. Do parents love some children more than others? I suppose it’s possible. What do you, as a parent say? How do you react when you hear your children saying to one another “Mom/Dad loves me more than you!” Do you take sides? Or do you weep?

I have tried to feel the spirit of God in this place. There have been moments when it has broken through. Moments when someone has extended themselves in some small act of kindness. But more often than not, I have felt the accumulated pain and sorrow and hostility of thousands of years of fighting over this little strip of land. If it were possible, as some say, to drive God from a place, I would think that God would have packed up and moved on years ago. Shrugged his shoulders, washed her hands, kicked the dirt from those heavenly sandals… whatever. Just walked away and leave the inhabitants to either work it out or kill themselves.

I know that seems harsh, but the tension here is so palpable. There is such a sense that everyone is guarding their territory and nobody can give an inch or they’ll lose an inch of space that has been paid for by hundreds of lives. It makes the entire city feel unyielding. Nobody offers anything without asking for something. Ask for directions, you’ll be expected to buy a trinket. Hesitate a fraction of a second at a stop light and the horns will be blaring.

I commented to Jeff how traffic in Jerusalem and traffic in Vietnam seems to be such an apt metaphor for the differences in their cultures. In Jerusalem, traffic is constantly at a standstill with every intersection gridlocked, and drivers glaring at each other and literally trying to defy the laws of physics by putting their car in the same space occupied by another car. It’s the polar opposite of Vietnam, where traffic flowed non-stop and millions (and I’m not exaggerating) of motorbikes and cars pass through the streets every day, with nary a traffic jam to be seen. The key, though, to keeping that volume of traffic moving is cooperation and a willingness to yield. The Asian sense of harmony contrasted with what? Obstinancy?

And so I have found myself wondering about how a place is made holy. I have been in so many places that have felt so much holier…Frijoles Canyon in Bandolier National Park, Nagasaki and Hiroshima Peace Parks, Halong Bay, St. Mark’s church in Tierra Nueva Dos, Guatemala, Visitation House in Port au Prince, Haiti, The cemetery in Guguletu, South Africa, Moeraki Beach in New Zealand, St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis. These are places that have seen their share of challenges and sorrow, but in the end, the response has been to face the difficulties with love. There is a sense of serenity in those places that I do not feel here.

Perhaps I am naïve to think that love equals serenity. But I am reminded of the Bible story about Moses standing on the mountainside looking for God in a mighty storm. The wind and the rain and the lighting lash all around him, but God is not in that powerful display. It is when the storm breaks and a gentle breeze touches his face that God is finally present to Moses.

So I hold on to my belief that God is found, not in the blustering, not in the violence, not in rigid adherence to rules, or inside or outside of some particular checkpoint. No. I think God is found in kindness, in a smile, in an acknowledgement of one another’s humanity and in respect for one another’s dignity. The rest of it, I think, is simply bullshit.

Rita