The Mandelbaum Gate (31 page)

Presently,
they were up in the Greek Choir where two Masses, one Orthodox, one Latin, were
in progress, assisted by two congregations haphazardly thronged, kneeling or
standing on the bare pavements before each altar, only a few feet from each
other. The Greek Orthodox service at the main altar of Calvary that stood above
a round earth-hole, the traditional site of the Cross, was mainly attended by
an English mass-pilgrimage numbering about sixty and an American group of about
twenty-five, mostly women with a few ageing men, and several clergymen, who
were evidently leading the pilgrimages. Among them were also some individual
pilgrims of unguessable nationalities and numerous local Arab worshippers, the
fruits of the missions to Palestine from generation to generation. Only two
Arab women over in the Greek congregation were veiled and dressed as Barbara
was, but she was thankful even for them, for in fact at the Roman Catholic
altar where she now stood with Suzi she was the only veiled woman.

And in
fact, the three Franciscans who stood aside throughout the Mass, custodians of
their altar, sent each other a communal glance at the sight of Barbara. The
glance was a familiar question: when would these Arab convert-women throw off
their old traditions and understand that Catholic Arabs were not obliged to
cover their faces but only their heads? — they were as bad, in their way, as
the young tourist girls who came, not only to visit the holy places, but to the
Mass, without any covering on their heads at all, and with dresses without
sleeves.

But the
venerable brothers had more than Barbara to bother them that day. It was a
memorable Sunday that lasted them all their old age, one of the worst oft the
increasingly bad memorable Sundays when the modem foreign priests, chiefly
English and American, came to the Holy Sepulchre with their pilgrimages to say
a Mass at the Altar of the Nailing of the Cross. That would have been very
good, but instead of saying their Mass and going away, these upstart clergy
very often insisted on giving a sermon. Sermons were not encouraged, as the
demand on the use of the famous altar by visitant priests and their pilgrims
was heavy on Sunday mornings, and even a short sermon held up the next Mass on
the list.

But it
was not so much the fact of the sermon on this particular Sunday, but its
substance that made the occasion a prototype, for the three honest custodians
on duty, of things to be deplored during times of recreation; and thus it
contributed to bind together their staunch years to come.

The
visiting priest of that hour was an Englishman in his middle thirties. He was
one of the priests accompanying a pilgrimage of about forty English Catholics;
they now mingled with the local congregation and with the other foreign
pilgrims among whom was a close-knit body of Japanese nuns. As the nuns somewhat
established the variegated quality of the scene, Suzi had worked Barbara
through the crowd to a point near them, whose long black robes provided a
protective colouring for her outfit. The eyes of the Franciscans had
automatically moved to the young priest on the altar, and they kept a special
watch on the assisting acolyte, a local Arab boy; for it was their duty, to
which they devoted extreme diligence, to see that the ritual was correctly
observed at this Altar of the Nailing of the Cross. At the other altar in the
chapel the Greek rite proceeded under the equally jealous eyes of its
custodians, and the chanting murmur of the Orthodox responses droned busily
about the ears of the Latin persuasion, so that the blessed mutter of the Roman
Mass could scarcely be heard by the faithful; the Franciscans were accustomed to
this and were aware that nothing could be done about it. It was true that from
time to time feelings came to a boil, and a quarrel would take place between
the subordinate brothers of either communion, not to mention the words that
had been known to arise when the Copts, Syrians, or even the Gregorian
Armenians overstepped the mark on the sacred site of the death, burial, and
resurrection of the Saviour. Doctrinal arguments, these simple servants of the
Orders left to their superiors; but the question of who had the privilege of
sweeping whose paving stone was their province; not many years since, it had
come to a fist-fight at Bethlehem on a Feast of the Nativity because a young
novice brother of the Orthodox had presumed to clean a certain painted-glass
window, this task being properly within the province of a newly arrived Franciscan
brother, who, simple peasant boy as he was, nevertheless perceived that the
prestige of the One True Church was upon his shoulders, and started a fight.

Sometimes
there had been errors of protocol on the Franciscan side, as they humbly
conceded amongst themselves. Not long ago, when the Archbishop of Canterbury
visited the Holy Land, a few good Franciscans, carried away by the event, had
kissed his ring on his arrival at the great Sepulchre. On being told later by
their superior that they ought not to have done so, their spokesman offered the
reason: ‘We thought it might move Her Majesty to do something for us.’ It was
indeed difficult to realize that the British Mandate was at an end.

The
English priest at present saying Mass on the altar had nearly reached the
moment for his sermon; he had no right to give a sermon, no matter how many
English pilgrims he had brought, when time was pressing for the next Mass on
the list. As if to aid and abet him, the Orthodox Mass had only a few seconds
before come to a quiet end. He had not even asked permission; had merely said
as he brushed from the vestry, ‘I’m going to say a few words to the pilgrims,
very few.’ The friars’ eyes were upon him as he concluded the Ordinary of the
Mass and turned to the congregations.

‘I will
say a few words,’ he said, ‘on the text of St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews,
chapter 13, verse 14: “We have an everlasting city, but not here; our goal is
the city that is one day to be.”

‘In the
Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Most of us have come a long
way to Jerusalem. It has been the instinct of Christians since the time of the
Early Church to see Jerusalem before they died. Jerusalem was a place of
pilgrimage for the Jews, centuries before the time of Christ. The act of
pilgrimage is an instinct of mankind. It is an act of devotion which, like a
work of art, is meaning enough in itself. The questions, ‘What useful purpose
does a pilgrimage serve? What good does it do?” are by the way. People put
themselves out to visit places sacred to their religion, or the graves of poets
and statesmen, or of their ancestors, or the house they themselves were born
in. Why? Because that is what people do.

We
usually expect to receive for our trouble the experience of a strong emotion.
We expect to be moved, when we reach our destination, by awe or nostalgia; or
we hope for a shade of sadness or in some way to be spiritually exalted. But so
far as feelings are concerned, our feelings when we get to the place are
usually a matter of good or bad fortune, as the case may be. A lot may depend
on the weather. And this is more particularly the case where a pilgrimage of
religion is concerned. A religious pilgrimage has always been associated with
difficulty, danger, heat and bother and general human wear and tear. We who
have come by air from the West have so far had an easier journey than the
devout Moslems do, who surge in their thousands to Mecca by cheap transport,
any transport, to pray at the shrine of Mohammed. We have it easier than Mary
and Joseph did when they came up to Jerusalem for the feast and, in the course
of all the jostle and bother and commerce of the pilgrimage, lost their child
and only missed him when they were on the way home, so that they had to trail
all the way back, a day’s journey. I say that we —The friars had already summed
up their man and they conveyed their verdict to each other by the flicker of a
glance. One of the new upstarts; comparing the Moslems to good Catholics in the
same breath…. So far, so bad. They discerned that worse was to come.

We had
a streamlined journey to Jerusalem,’ went on this firebrand. ‘But we have come
in the hottest and least comfortable season because it’s the only time we could
manage to come at all. Otherwise, quite rightly, we would have chosen to come
in the spring or autumn. However, we know that Our Lord Jesus Christ was here
in the summer time, when life was less comfortable than it is today, when the
smells were smellier and the sick and the poor were more numerous and less
hopeful of cure. Don’t let yourselves be bothered by the commercialism that
goes on around the sacred places. There was commercialism in the courts of the
Temple in the time of Christ. Don’t be put off because the shrines that
commemorate what was once the simple life of Jesus are overwhelmed with
glittering ornaments, silver lamps, jewelled inlays and the like. They are
nothing like the Temple was that Our Lord frequented himself, healing the
ordinary sick among all the grandeur. And we have come to be reminded of Our
Lord. It does not count what feelings are, if our feelings can be conditioned
by the weather or the artistic tastes of the people around us. A good
disposition is more precious to God than fine feelings. In Jerusalem. our
Blessed Lord suffered, died, and rose again to life. It is enough that we are
here.

‘So it
seems to me that you shouldn’t expect to feel exalted by awe and reverence on
days like, for instance, today, among the crowds in the narrow streets and the
temperature rising. In the next few weeks don’t wear yourselves out rushing
round the shrines just for the sake of having said a “Hail Mary” and touched
every altar with your rosary, like a child who invents for himself a sense of
impending doom unless he steps over every crack in the pavement There is no
need to visit every shrine in the place. There are far too many shrines. Some
of them are sheer fake, others are doubtful. That’s not to say that the
important sites that mark the life of Jesus, such as the spot we stand on at
this moment, are not sacred places. They have been sanctified by centuries of the
great Dead who have come —’ The three friars gazed at the priest as with one
gaze. They had known it. The incipient défroqué was undermining the Holy Land,
and as he went on to enumerate for practical purposes the shrines which his
pilgrimage might well skip and the dubiety of their origins, their thoughts
went to their brethren, the custodians of the Holy Land to whom these places
were their whole heart and life; tears came to the eyes of the eldest friar as
he thought of the venerable Franciscan, well past ninety, who kept the house
where Our Lady was conceived by St Joachim and St Anne, and who had wanted
nothing for himself all his life but to show it to the pilgrims and pray with
them as they came, and collect alms for the poor of the place, and die there on
that spot. Now this enemy of the Faith on the altar was openly preaching what
other young foreign priests had only so far hinted. Moreover, he was saying
more than a few words, he was preaching at length, and he should not be
preaching at all. The youngest friar, a lay-brother, murmured fiercely that he
would tell this priest after the Mass that he had transgressed by setting back
the time of the next Mass. Already a fresh batch of pilgrims was waiting at the
entrance. But the aged friar made a gesture of restraint towards the young
brother. The other friar, also an old man, then whispered his support of the
young brother, but he too was silenced by the elder one: ‘Observe meekness,’ he
said softly, ‘it is our calling. Moreover —’ He paused to give full ear to the
voice from the altar, to hear what next outrage was being uttered. When he had
heard enough he continued. ‘Let us not provoke this man lest the bishop should
say to us, “You have knelt to kiss the ring of the Schismatic of Canterbury,
but one of our own good Fathers you have treated with reproof.”‘ At this they
folded their hands and waited to hear what the Judas and intellectual standing
at the Altar of the Nailing of the Cross would say next.

He was
saying, ‘It is not absolutely certain, for instance, that the Holy Sepulchre
stands on the site of Golgotha. There are strong arguments of archaeology in
favour of this place where we stand being the place of the Crucifixion, and for
a Catholic these arguments are strengthened above all by the fact that this
place was traditionally revered as Golgotha before the Emperor Constantine, in
the fourth century, built the original church on this site. Archaeology is
continually enriching our knowledge of the holy places. Where doubts of
historic authenticity exist, they are as thrilling in their potentialities for
quest and discovery as a certainty would be. The weight of probability leads
most of the experts to believe that this is the site of Calvary. But other
learned people have argued against it. Whether true or not, our religion does
not depend on it. We know for a certainty that Our Lord was crucified, that he
died and was buried, and rose again from the dead, at a place outside the walls
of Jerusalem; if not at the spot where we stand, then at some other spot near
by. If you are looking for physical exactitude in Jerusalem it is a good
quest, but it belongs to archaeology, not faith. In the time of Christ the
people built up the tombs of the Prophets, as he reminded them with a bit of
irony. I am sure some were authentic, some doubtful. Jerusalem has been in many
hands. Then, as now, soldiers patrolled the Holy Land. Jerusalem has been
destroyed, rebuilt, fought over, conquered, and now is divided again. The
historical evidence of our faith is scattered about under the ground; nothing
is neat. And what would be the point of our professing faith if it were? There’s
no need for faith if everything is plain to the eye. We cannot know anything
perfectly, because we ourselves are not perfect. When we have come to
perfection in time, then faith, like time, will be done away. “We have an
everlasting city,” St Paul has said, “but not here; our goal is the city that
is one day to be.” For there is a supernatural process going on under the
surface and within the substance of all things. In the Jerusalem of history we see
the type and shadow of that Jerusalem of Heaven that St John of Patmos tells of
in the Apocalypse. “I, John,” he says, “saw in my vision that holy city which
is the new Jerusalem, being sent down by God from Heaven, like a bride who has
adorned herself to meet her husband.” This is the spiritual city that is
involved eternally with the historical one. It is the city of David, the city
of God’s people in exile: “If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave
to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” It is
the city of Jesus, not only of his death, but of his rising again alive. It is
the New Jerusalem which we seek with our faith, and which is the goal of our
pilgrimage to this old Jerusalem of history. “What is faith?” said St Paul. “It
is that which gives substance to our hopes, which convinces us of things we
cannot see.”‘