I don't have much of a brain for religion. It just doesn't really register with me. So a couple years ago when my wife and I were wandering around Jerusalem and we happened to go into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre it did not really register with me that it was Easter.
After wandering through the church, we got to the main rotunda and almost immediately it began filling with people. Soon a choir began to sing and then we were swept into a group that was walking in circles around the aedicule which supposedly contains the tomb of Jesus.
The three different sects that have rights to the church were represented--Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and Armenian Apostolic--as well as Coptic Orthodox and others. Each had a different ritual, there were women ululating and prayers could be heard in a dozen languages.
As we circled under the rotunda each of these languages and rituals blurred together. A handsome young priest approached my wife and started to speak to her in Italian. She speaks half a dozen languages and is Catholic and so felt more at home in this cultural blender.
To me it was all like a kind of fever dream. I felt like a space alien or a time traveler who had landed somewhere where I understood nothing that was going on, each activity or ritual being more remote from my life experience than the next.
But there was something very moving about it. As I said, I have a tin ear for the religious, rituals make me deeply uncomfortable. But there was this kind of shared hope among all these people. You could feel some of the rivalry between the sects. But also the connection.
They all wanted to be close to a miracle, close to what seemed an escape hatch for the temporal trap in which we live. And I found that very moving. It wasn't the supernatural that got to me, but the raw humanity of it.
Afterwards as we continued to walk through the old city, amid olive trees and flowering bushes, I had the clear sense that over time, every spring, regardless of religion or location, this is what people did, they expressed their post-winter hopes, their desire to start afresh.
That resonates with me now on this post-pandemic Easter/Passover, this Sunday a.m. when it is warming a little & their are buds & blossoms on the trees lining our street here in New York. So happy hope, everybody. Take some joy in the fact one thing we all share is aspiration.
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