Saturday: Of Pilgrimage, Civil War Re-Enactors, and Church Architecture

The "period rush" is the Holy Graal of Civil War re-enactors. It occurs when the simulated heat of pseudo-battle transports a participant to the real thing. For that blindingly brief moment, he finds himself truly "there" - Gettysburg, Marie's Heights, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville. Of course, as soon as you realize you have it you've stepped outside of it and thus lost it, but it was there.

The "period rush" of the Holy Land has avoided me so far. After five days in Israel and what seems like non-stop touring of sacred sights I remain disappointingly (perhaps disturbingly?) frisson-free. It isn't that hard to figure. "The Moving Finger writes," laments Omar Khayyam, "and, having writ/Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit/Shall lure it back." The Sea of Galilee lies much lower than in Jesus' day because more people now drink the water. You can stand on the Mount of Olives and gaze back toward the city but the wall you see was built by Suleiman the Magnificent, an Ottoman sheik, not Solomon the Wise, a Hebrew king. You can't walk the Via Dolorosa because it lies under twenty centuries of accumulated building.

But maybe that factual historicity isn't what matters.

For instance, yesterday we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Helen the Mother of Constantine over the traditional sight of Mount Calvary and Jesus' tomb. Now, the smart betting says this wasn't The Place. Gibbets sat outside the city walls for reasons of ritual purity and, given where archaeologists think the original barricades sat, the wall would have had to do some serious yoga to avoid this spot. Then, too, you can't do much in the way of a period rush when everything drips with ikons and reeks of incense and glitters with mosaic tile. Finally, I realize I will never preach in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher: First of all, Baptists are not among the eight Christian communions that have divvied up the joint, and even if someone dealt us in, I doubt the assignment would fall to me. Secondly, it isn't built for preaching: No pulpit, no pews, the constant murmur of pilgrim prayers and shouts and cries, and the lighting is so dim you couldn't see the red lettering on your King James Bible if you held it right in front of your eyes.

But maybe preaching isn't what matters here.

Pilgrims enter the church, climb a staircase (you're ascending Calvary), and arrive at an altar (Christ nailed to the cross). Then they move left and kneel at a rock beneath an altar surmounted by a life-sized gilt crucifix (Christ raised on the cross). Left again to another altar (Christ removed from the cross), then down a second set of stairs (descending the hill) to a slab of stone with eight thuribles swinging above it - eight communions share the church, remember? (Christ's body prepared for burial.) A short walk through the shadows reaches a building-within-the-building (the sight of the tomb itself).

Get it? You don't HEAR ABOUT the crucifixion; you ENTER it. You don't need blazing halogen wattage so you can see "your" Bible; you need shadows so that you can enter the mystery of "the" Bible. You don't go back in time to examine the "real" crucifixion and resurrection; you open present time to experience "true" crucifixion and resurrection.

I'm still very Baptist: I like sermons and I don't like incense. The Reformation was right to give us back our Bibles. Still, I think we should remember that, as G. K. Chesterton once said, while "progress" means leaving things behind us, "growth" means keeping things inside of us. Could it be that our drive to master information works only as it wraps itself around an older and deeper desire to be mastered by mystery?

I don't think it matters that, as I moved through the second-oldest church building in the faith (the Church of the Nativity predates it), my eyes remained un-misted, my flesh stubbornly un-goosed. I think what matters was the trip up, across, and down Calvary and straight into the tomb.

I look forward, in a day or so, to seeing Gordon's Calvary and the Garden Tomb because they have good historical and archaeological claims and because, at any rate, they will help me get a better idea of what it was all like. But (Chesterton again), to say that one thing is "like" another is to admit that it is not, in fact, that other. I would welcome a period rush; I want to know what it was like. But I'd rather know - in the mystery of unknowing - what it is.