5: Transfiguration of the pilgrim
A Holy Land pilgrimage is a transforming experience. This is not necessarily evident externally, but few pilgrims come home without having their perspective on life and faith altered. The transfiguration of Christ provides a suitable metaphor for this, and the splendid Barluzzi-designed chapel atop Mount Tabor, which overlooks the Jezreel (or Esdraelon) plains, serves as a reminder of the pilgrim’s own spiritual recalibration.
Our group had Mass there, celebrated by Fr Owen Wilcock of East London, who had joined the group as a pilgrim. Fr Wilcock described Jesus’ transfiguration as a preview of what would come, a way of sustaining the faith of his Apostles after the crucifixion; a good way of putting it.
Some scholars dispute that the transfiguration might have taken place on Mt Hermon, which is in the vicinity of Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus had been previously. Disregarding the fact that Mt Hermon is high and for much of the year snow-covered, early Christian documents are quite clear about the location of the transfiguration: on Mt Tabor. On the other hand, some archaelogists suggest that in Jesus’ time the top of Mt Tabor was settled, a proposition that might swing things back to Mt Hermon.
While the search for the historical Jesus is always tempting, pilgrims are best advised to treat their travels as a journey of faith, not one of fact. What matters on Mt Tabor is not its geographical authenticity, but Jesus’ transfiguration and the reaction of Peter, John and James (including Peter’s curious notion of campsite management).
Pilgrims visiting Mt Tabor usually pass by the little village of Naïn, where Jesus raised the son of the widow (Lk 7:11-17). Indeed, there is not much to see in this village at the foot of the mount. The local church, however, is a stark symbol of the drain of Christians from the Holy Land, for it is deserted, looked after by a Muslim family which opens it for the very occasional visitors.
As in many places in the Holy Land, in Naïn there no longer is a Catholic community which might use the 19th century church. Indeed, outside the urban areas–Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth–the unbroken Christian presence in the Holy Land is inexorably fading away.
And on this sad note, we left the Galilee, moving towards Jerusalem along the Jordan river, as Jesus might have done (though he probably walked much of the way on the eastern bank of the river, so as to avoid the Samaritans, who were on unfriendly terms with Jews).
Crossing the politically highly-charged West Bank, we arrived in Jericho, a city which for four years was closed to tourism. Indeed, Jericho was so isolated that the new, ostentatious casino built there for Israeli Jews (Palestinians were barred entry) now stands empty. Both events have had a devastating effect on the local welfare.
Here in Jericho, our excellent guide Iyad Qumri described the past four years – the time since the intifadah (or uprising) erupted – as the worst of his life, as the tourism industry virtually shut down. Our driver, Kamal abu La’al, agreed. Some days, he said over lunch, there was no food on the table for his Catholic family in their East Jerusalem home. There were no prospects of another driving job until July, added Kamal, a most kindly soul who quickly won the hearts of our group.
Wherever we went, people thanked us for our presence. Now that a measure of political stability has returned, the nightmare of the last four years for those in the tourism industry seems to be over. It will take longer still for things to return to normal.
The nightmare for most Palestinians goes on. The Israeli “security barrier”, which we would see up close the following day in Bethlehem, cuts through communities and ancestral land. Ostensibly, the barrier is being built to keep suicide bombers out. In reality, the barrier–barbed wire fences and high concrete walls–disempowers Palestinians economically and socially; facilitates the appropriation of land that does not belong to Israel; entrenches illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. If the wall really was a means to provide security, to keep out the “suiciders”, why does Israel not build it along the demarcated borders with the West Bank?
And so Palestinians have no freedom of movement even within their own areas. Farmers are cut off from their land, employees from their place of work. At Israeli checkpoints, Palestinians are prone to be turned back at random. And the world is doing nothing.
Pilgrims of old would enter Jerusalem by crossing the hills that surround the city. The pilgrim Felix Fabri in 1487 described the moment he set his eyes on the holy city in terms that surely have echoed through the ages: “We came by the stone walls of an orchard when suddenly before us, like a ray of light, appeared the city whose name was on everybody’s lips: Jerusalem.”
Four centuries later, in 1869, Mark Twain recalled a similar experience. “At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bits of wall and crumbling arches began to line the way. We toiled up one more hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat on high! Jerusalem! Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together and hooped with high grey walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun…”
Even if this writer was capable of simulating Twain’s prose, he would be hard pressed to replicate such outbursts of joy in his narration of a tourbus entering a new tunnel outside Jerusalem, and emerging into the afternoon rush hour of Jerusalem, 2005.
Twain mused about Jerusalem suggesting “poetry, sublimity, and more than all, dignity”. Our group may well have mused how this congested city could hold any spiritual rewards. But these would come, in buckets.
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