A Song of Ascent

my photo

we pilgrimage and we practice,
sweat beading our foreheads like an anointing
we laugh beneath the shade of the fig tree
we break the bread, we pass the wine
we ask questions:
of each other, of ourselves 

we walk and we wonder,
rolling on our tongues the strange sweetness
of this unity, sweeter than date honey,
rarer than a summer stream
we ask questions:
of the hills, of the city 

we research and we rest,
cradled by the confines of Shabbat
like the birds in the palm trees,
we teach our souls to sing a new song
we ask questions:
of the ruins, of the future 

outside the temple gates
we wait and while
we wait, we feast
on salt and stories
together, we turn
our faces to the east
and sing:
David the king is alive
דוד מלך ישראל חי חי וקיים

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This is a repost from my old blog. I’m sharing it now because there are so many words and thoughts and passions about what’s going on right now and I suppose I feel the best thing I can offer is the story of what I experienced.

I wrote it last spring when I spent six weeks in Israel for a fellowship on Jewish-Christian relations. The culmination of the program was a three-day pilgrimage to Jerusalem, starting from Emmaus and retracing the steps the disciples in Luke 24 might have walked. It finished on Palm Sunday, which means it started when Passover did. It was also one of those years when Ramadan overlapped with the Christian and Jewish holy weeks. Everything felt so sharp and real, all veils stripped away. All our religious rituals—Christian, Jewish, Muslim—were laid next to each other, so similar and so different, breathing the same air one moment and exploding the next at the slightest jostle.

Our pilgrimage group consisted of a few Americans Christians, Jewish Israelis, and Palestinian Christians from the West Bank, from Catholic nuns to Baptist laymen. We couldn’t post pictures where everyone’s faces were visible because of security concerns for various reasons, for people from various groups. Mid-way through the journey, we spent Saturday at a convent, resting so our Jewish friends could observe Shabbat. We introduced each other to songs of our faith. We read Psalms and different people gave talks about the Scriptures or the meaning of pilgrimage or why this land matters so much to so many. We spotted wormwood growing on the side of the path, walked through olive groves, snagged pictures by old Roman road-markers.

It was a crevice in the cliff of reality, sheltered from millennia of bitterness and the undeniable points of contention between our beliefs and our histories. It was a portal to eternity, a glimpse of what may be. None of us were so naive to think three days of walking and talking would fix our own relationships, much less the world. But to see what might be possible—to train our moral imaginations—to remember what we are seeking, stumbling toward, praying for—and to have relationships with real faces, real people, to bring to mind in moments of deep pain and division like now—it was a good thing.

It makes me think of what Whittaker Chambers, American Communist spy who defected and became a double agent, says in his autobiography, Witness:

[World War 1] stirred a grimness in me, a will to end it, not so that kindness and compassion might reign on earth—we are not children—but that the possibility of kindness and compassion might survive at all… 

I don't think experiences like my pilgrimage are going to fix everything, or even fix much at all. But I think they do matter and do have power. And I think there's a tension as a Christian between praying bold, earth-shaking prayers for peace, for wars to end, for innocent lives everywhere to be spared—because all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Jesus Christ—and between recognizing the grip of evil powers on this world and testifying that the tiniest overtures to unity, to forgiveness, to sacrificial love are great works of God and maybe all we can hope to see in this life.

Oh, and the title is from a collection of psalms (120-134) often labeled “songs of ascent” because they were sung on the yearly journey to Jerusalem which sits amidst the Judean mountains.

More thoughts on my trip to Israel on my old blog: Stranger in a Strange Land. For thoughtful news and commentary on all things related to Israel and Palestine, I recommend checking out the Philos Project, which supported the program I went with.

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In Other Words…

No new book or movies reviews today, alas. I lost my reading glasses this week (it’s quite tragic really) so reading, writing, and watching might be taking a backseat until I get them replaced (also why do I sound like such a grandma?!). But I’m grateful for podcasts, audiobooks, and the capacity to write this!

Happy November, friends.

~ Aberdeen