Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land (2 page)

I feel strangely bereft. Everyone else seems to have gotten what they came for and moved on. What have I come for?

Someone bumps into my suitcase, and I scooch it out of the way. As people file into the pews in the center section of the nave, I realize Mass is about to begin, and I appear committed to it. Well, why not? I trundle my luggage ahead of me down the aisle and, without meaning to, join an extended family, all of them dressed in crisp cotton clothes. I purposely turn into the pew a row behind them to give them some space, but they fill in my pew, as well as the one behind me. My suitcase and I have been absorbed by this large family. I think of the films from science class where an amoeba sends out arms to engulf little bits, to enlarge its mass. At this moment I have become part of something larger than myself.

The priest's voice reverberates in the stone surroundings. I can't understand his words, but when the people answer, “And also with you,” I join in before the phrase is done. The woman beside me thunks our kneeler onto the stone floor, and I jump. I feel guilty, caught being a Protestant in a Catholic space. The woman settles herself onto the kneeler.

In front of me the family patriarch is lowering himself slowly onto his knees. His plaid shirt has a Western-style yoke that pulls across his shoulder blades. Beside him, a middle-aged woman whispers in Spanish, her expression tender. When the old man is settled, she cranes around to count her family members. I have the urge to duck so I won't get caught up in her inventory by mistake. But she catches my eye and smiles.

The priest is praying — in English, I suppose — though I can't understand him. I gaze around like a child, counting the pews in their sections, the statues in their niches, the pillars in their rows. Everything is tidy and contained. My eyes travel to the nearest stained-glass window. Instead of trying to decipher the image, I simply stare without blinking until my eyes go milky and the image blurs into shapes and colors. It's hard to do this, not because it bothers my eyes, but because I was trained to approach sacred things in a scholarly way. These bits of stained glass aren't meant to construct a phantasm, but an image that represents a particular biblical text, interpreted through a certain
lens at a discrete moment in church history — all of which I must understand. As my veiled eyes let the bits of color revolve into a kaleidoscope, I have a moment of clarity. Maybe my usual approach isn't really the scholar's way. Maybe it's simply a game I play, not to learn something new about the Bible, or faith, or theology, but to feel validated for what I already know. I want to let go of those pretensions as I become a pilgrim. I want everything I think I know to seep away so that faith can become mystery again.

The problem is that I don't know how to do this. Faith has been at the center of my life for so long that it's no more mysterious than, say, my mother's hands, or the steering wheel of my car, or the brown paper sacks I use to pack my daughters' lunches. Faith is part of who I am, used every ordinary day to manage the pieces of my life. What would it be like to step away from everything I know about faith? I've never
not
believed in God, never
not
prayed at a meal, never
not
felt guilty when I did wrong. Isn't that what faith is?

I look around again at this sacred space, so entirely different from the church where I grew up, which was a count-the-cinderblocks box with not a lick of ornamentation. The minister had a broad Midwestern accent even though we were in New Jersey, and his words went on forever — flat and predictable. I'm hearing that voice in my memory when the sanctuary livens with sound. People are saying the Our Father, and I hear my own voice join in. They say “trespasses” while I've finished the quicker “debts.” Is it their Spanish accent that makes the voices around me sound more pious than the ones in my memory, or have I encountered a more authentic faith?

I've learned to love worshiping beside strangers, especially when we don't speak the same language. People call that a language barrier, but to me language itself can be a barrier, and silence can be a bridge. Worship without language feels like a way to traverse the division that words can create. Maybe I've been in ministry too long, but I know the limits of words. I'm a Presbyterian, and we're creedal. We are unified by faith in God,
yes, but we also subscribe to certain creeds, words people have written about God over the centuries. In fact, we've been known to spend whole centuries arguing over some of those words.

The truth is that, after a lifetime of doctrine, I'm getting tired of words about God. Maybe that's the deeper reason for going on this pilgrimage. I want to find a different way to believe. I want to embody my faith, not just think it. I rest my hands beside me on the pew, palms up — to offer and to receive. Almost immediately I feel a powerful surge of my own unworthiness. It's a familiar feeling, and on its heels comes gratitude for the grace of Jesus Christ. Do I feel these things because of my doctrine, or because I really am unworthy? Whichever it is, I recognize this one-two punch — unworthiness and grace — as the presence of God, which feels sweet, but passes the instant I name it. For an instant I'm angry at my grasping self. If I hadn't tried to put words around it, would the divine presence have lingered?

People are leaving their pews and filing down the center aisle. The priest has moved to floor level and holds a small silver bowl. I know the difference in our theologies of this sacrament, about how Christ is present, and who is allowed to partake of which element, but right now those labels seem like a barrier made of words. Rules. Restrictions. Righteousness. All of which would exclude me. I'm not a Catholic, let alone one in good standing. I'm a woman who has been ordained to administer the Reformed version of this same sacrament — surely that is sacrilege to someone in this cathedral. But might the more important thing be that I'm open to a new experience of this sacrament?

The family around me stands to go forward, and I find myself swept along with them. All right. We're one in Christ, aren't we? This pilgrimage is about hearing the whisper of the Spirit, and the Spirit says
“Come.”
Yes, the pilgrimage has begun. I'm leaving home. I'm asking new questions. And God has provided me with the perfect entrance rite, this sacrament of communion with a Spanish-speaking escort.

We surge toward the front. The others open their mouths to receive the sacrament; I hold out my cupped hands. I look
around for the cup to dip into, and see none. I slip the flat circle into my mouth and feel it dissolve. I miss chewing a bit of bread, miss tasting the words of Jesus: “I am the bread of life.” On the other hand, without the chalice I'm spared the need of pondering blood atonement, a notion that, quite frankly, has been causing me problems lately.

We return down the side aisle. Hovering outside our pews, the family members embrace each other in the Paz de Cristo. I hug the kneeler-thumping woman, then slide into the pew. The old man in front of me sits down laboriously. I squeeze his plaid shoulders from behind. A girl beside him carefully nests a pink vinyl purse in her lap and smiles up at me.

I take my journal from the side pocket of my suitcase and write a prayer:

I seek with all my heart to be open to the leading of the Spirit on this pilgrimage. May my heart and soul bear fruit. May I be good soil for the work of the Spirit. May my life change direction, if need be. May I be willing to bend like a willow in the wind of the Spirit. Change me. Bend me. Break me, if need be. Uproot me. I am yours. Amen.

St. Bart's Episcopal Church, New York City

CHAPTER 2

Time like Sand

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.

H
EBREWS 11:8

W
HEN
I
ANNOUNCED
to my congregation in suburban Washington, D.C., that I'd been selected to be in a documentary called “Pilgrimage Project,” people were excited for me, but also concerned. Was this some sort of TV reality show? Would I get voted off the island, so to speak, kicked out of the Holy Land? It was a reasonable thing to wonder. I couldn't tell them much about the project, not for any sworn-to-secrecy reasons, but because I didn't know much. The filmmaker, Brian Ide, struck me as a person of integrity, and I was drawn to the documentary's twin goals: to lift up the value of pilgrimage, which he described as “faith-based travel,” and to follow an intentionally ecumenical group of Christian clergy from different denominations.

Besides those worthy goals, the project appealed to my adventurous side, a side that had been dormant for far too long. Oh, it's an adventure to get married, to get through seminary, to give birth to two daughters, to pastor a church, to raise a family. It's just not the kind of adventure that makes a person update her passport or imagine the smell of olive trees in Palestine.

One member of my congregation asked, apparently in all seriousness, whether I would bring a gun. Another asked, “Isn't
it terrifying to think you could lose your life?” I assured everyone that I'd be safe. I didn't say but I did wonder: Is it more dangerous to be a tourist in Israel than to live within striking distance of our nation's capital? Yet the truth was — and still is — that part of me was terrified to take this trip because I
could
lose my life. Not because of bombs or bullets, but because of questions.

There are spiritual questions that I've never gotten around to answering. Not as I grew up in the womb of the conservative Reformed tradition, where everything about faith was warm and safe and reassuring. Not as I studied religion in college, where every question was neatly pegged with an appropriate doctrinal answer. Not as I attended seminary, where the sheer volume of reading material made faith questions easy to ignore. Not as I preached hundreds of times in decades of ministry, where the Sundays marched along relentlessly, each one needing a fifteen-minute sermon void filled.

That backlog of unanswered questions might crowd in on me during this pilgrimage, and what if I can't find the answers to them? What if I misplace my faith? What if I lose it? That is my deepest fear. A preacher without faith is what? The punch line is, of course: Unemployed! But not even that bad joke expresses how I feel. My faith is more than my livelihood. My faith is my life. To lose my faith would be to lose my life.

Let me name a theological problem I've danced around for years, one that starts with the name of the place I'm going to: Holy Land. Why not call it what it is — Land of Holy War? There have been religious wars on this land for millennia, from the ancient stories of the conquest of Canaan, to the Crusades with their forcible conversions, to the warring Israelis and Palestinians today.

Why all the bloodshed? Perhaps the reason is simple. Perhaps it's the other side of the same lesson we teach in Sunday school: God chose a people and gave them a land. That sounds so good if you align yourself with the chosen people. But doesn't this mean that there were others God didn't choose, that there were others who didn't get a land? That makes my brain grind to a standstill.
How can this be true if we call God our Father? I'm not just fussing over gender language here — that's a separate issue. My problem is with this parent language. What parent hands one child a prime toy and ignores the others? Here, have a land! Make it the choice cut, the Chosen Land! What happens to the other children? Wouldn't the Lord of the universe know that choosing one child over another creates sibling rivalry? Parenting 101. No wonder the fighting began. Yes, from the beginning, God created the conditions that forced a breach between brothers: Cain and Abel. Ishmael and Isaac. Esau and Jacob. Joseph and his brothers. If we take these stories at face value, a question seems obvious. Wasn't there a better way to create civilization than pitting family members against each other?

Framed like that, the question terrifies me. I've been taught not to question God, or the words of God in Scripture. I can't imagine the consequences of doing so. My childhood's safe Christianity is worlds away from the Holy Land, a distance you can't measure in miles or time zones. Maybe that's why I'm going on this pilgrimage. It's time to grow up. If I'm going to lose my faith, maybe it's time I just lost it. I picture my parents' faces and feel the prick of tears. They wouldn't understand. But who would? My congregation assumes I have faith figured out. They have no idea what's at stake.

We pilgrims are meeting at Saint Bart's Episcopal Church and are supposed to find the filmmaker before we talk to each other. Brian wants to film our initial meeting. The stone steps of the church are broad, forming a plaza that, on this humid day, is spotted with people smoking, or sweating, or speaking intensely into the air — seemingly crazy-person monologues until they turn out to be Bluetooth conversations.