Two friends, one Palestinian, one Israeli, who run a restaurant together, remarked of their common home, –
“It is more than 20 years since we both left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place you conduct your daily life or constantly return to. In fact, Jerusalem is our home almost against our wills. It is our home because it defines us whether we like it or not.
“… a city with 4000 years of history, that has changed hands endlessly and that now stands as the center of three massive faiths and is occupied by residents of such utter diversity it puts the old tower of Babylon to shame.”
(Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi. Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. 2012. 9.)
Where is your Jerusalem? Where is that place in your heart that lives as home whether you are there or not, or whether you have ever been there or not?
Is it California? Is it Tucson? Is it imaginary or real? In their hearts many people have yearned for Jerusalem. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” says the psalmist. And Jesus, gazing upon the city itself, calls “O Jerusalem Jerusalem how often have I longed…” We long for a place we do not know… or perhaps we do. A city that we have never visited, as the poet Auden said, that has awaited our arrival for years. (Hymn #463)
But the real Jerusalem, like the real Belfast, or the real Tucson, has its woes and troubles as well as its ecstatic charms and mysteries. In 2015 on a pilgrimage into the Holy Land I found myself looking through a window, and through the arms of a cross, out across the Kidron Valley to the Old City of so many longings.
On the Mount of Olives, once we walked down from the churches at the top, through the graveyards of so many, we came to the church of Dominus Flevit, which means “the Lord wept”. It was from this vantage point, sitting in the front row of the congregation, that I found myself with that view. Through the arms of the Cross across the Valley to the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, the Haram … and beyond it the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
It is well to be reminded that that church has another name: the church of the Resurrection. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. It is not Good Friday yet, not to mention Holy Saturday, or –
Recently I was reminded of something I had carelessly forgotten: this is the weekend just before the feast of Saint Patrick, apostle bishop of Ireland. Patrick had no city to remember, none to yearn for: there were not many in his time and he did not hope for Rome. Instead he went to the edge of the world, to the land where he had once tended sheep as a slave, to bring the good news they had to hear: the news of Jesus. The same news we know: and are not likely to forget.
Maybe that is the city we need to remember. Not the earthly city at all but the “new” Jerusalem envisioned by the Apocalyptic saint John. A city not made by human hands, but where all humanity in all our flavors are to be welcomed.
I mention Belfast because it is a city under contention. 27 years after the end of the Troubles, their euphemism for civil war, so many pieces, so much damage, is yet to be healed and resolved. This past week I got to hear again from the Rev. Dr. Gary Mason, a Methodist minister of that city, who was talking about what divides people and what can be done about it.
He told us that the Good Friday agreement was one of the peak achievements of American diplomacy of the last fifty years. That was a peace facilitated by George Mitchell and Bill Clinton. Indeed I remember when we were in the western islands of Galway our innkeeper made a point of telling us how grateful the people of Ireland were for this agreement and the American help to reach it.
We did not send guns or bombs. The coins and currency in glass jars on bars throughout the United States, that went for such things, did not help at all. What helped? Two people who helped them see what was dividing them and what could be done about it.
There is much there to discover. One thing I recall is that once people once divided began to see each other as people rather than adversaries, their eyes began to change. One man, once a partisan, said, if I had been born 300 yards away I would have grown up supporting the other side. It was just that. A human moment. It helped him imagine and acknowledge the humanity of a stranger, indeed an adversary.
In Jerusalem today the same Gary Mason sometimes visits and compares notes, shares what he and his compatriots have learned, as the peoples of that holy land seek to reconcile with one another and find a way to peace. This is the real Jerusalem. And you know what? It is not that far from that imaginary - or prophetic - holy new Jerusalem in the sky.
Because the distance from one to the other is the distance across a human heart. The distance, also, from one heart to another. The distance that closes when we begin to see each other in aspiration, that is, as the holy spirit conceives us to be in our best selves. And that best self, in each of us, is shaped by that spirit as we are brought closer to the perfection that is only ours as it is a gift of that savior and a work of that spirit that came to the Mount of Olives years ago, and called across the valley, “O Jerusalem Jerusalem, how often have I longed…”
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