by Guy Stagg
Meanwhile 111 wives watched from the shore, applauding as each one went under.
A gift shop the size of a small hangar opened out near the entrance. Inside I found a remarkable selection of souvenirs. There were bottles of eau de toilette with Biblical names – King David, King Solomon, and the Lion of Judah – on sale for $45. And there were bottles of pomegranate wine – dry, sparkling, and premium port, this last for $85. And olivewood bookrests shaped like praying hands, on sale for $76.50. And a Cana Wine Holy Communion set, on sale for $55. A Dead Sea gourmet salt set for $39.50. A Jerusalem tote bag with black, white, yellow and gold lettering for $29.50. A sterling silver Code of Moses amulet for $136.30. A glow-in-the-dark rosary wall hanging for $15.30. A glass cross filled with Jordan River water and adorned with crystals for $47.60. And a book promising to teach the reader Hebrew in just ten minutes a day, originally priced at $42, but now discounted to $37.50.
Photographs covered the entrance hall with smiles from the many, many celebrities who had visited Yardenit. Alas, I forgot to note down their names.
By this point I was sick of pilgrim shrines, but there was one more site to see. So I hiked west from the River Jordan in the direction of Nazareth, and after a day and a half I reached the lonely summit of Mt Tabor. A walled monastery occupied the heights, with medieval fortifications embedded into the hillsides. I spent an hour circling the ramparts, eventually arriving at a grand set of gates. Beyond the gates an avenue of cypresses led to the Church of the Transfiguration. Although built in 1924, it was styled like something older, with triangular gables, rectangular windows, and a stocky arch framing the entrance – robust as a Romanesque basilica. But, coming closer, I noticed delicate patterns chiselled into the capitals, cornices, pediments and eaves.
Inside, twin arches separated the aisles from the nave, while the nave was also divided, the front half leading to the crypt chapel and the sanctuary elevated above. Above that was a domed apse decorated with a mosaic of Christ in blinding robes, floating on a flat gold sky. Moses hung to his right, Elijah to his left, watching the scene from a polite pair of clouds.
A group of American priests were gathering near the crypt. Their guide explained that, although the Bible never names the site where Christ met the Old Testament prophets, tradition places the event on Mt Tabor. Surrounded by the level farmland of the Jezreel Valley, its peak could be seen from all over Galilee. According to one medieval source, the Empress Helena founded the first chapel on Mt Tabor when touring the Holy Land in the fourth century. No other record of that chapel exists, but towards the end of the century St Jerome wrote of visiting the tabernacle here. By the year 570, according to the anonymous Piacenza pilgrim, three churches occupied the site, and a century later the German bishop Arculf recorded a monastery and several cells.
St Helena, St Jerome, Bishop Arculf and the Piacenza pilgrim – these were some of the earliest Christian travellers in the region. The accounts of their journeys give the impression that, even in Antiquity, the basic pilgrim infrastructure was in place: monasteries, guesthouses and guided tours. But it was not until the Middle Ages that travel to holy sites was widely encouraged as a path to salvation.
To understand why, we need to meet another pilgrim from this period. He did not set out for Galilee or Jerusalem, but to find the Garden of Eden.
His name was Brendan the Bold.
Brendan was born on the west coast of Ireland in the last decades of the fifth century. As a young man he established monasteries in Wales, Brittany and Scotland. Then, aged seventy, he left Ireland with seventeen monks to sail in search of Paradise.
The pilgrims spent the next seven years drifting between improbable islands on a boat made from leather. During this time they exorcized an Ethiopian devil, dined on a sea monster and met an elderly hermit who ate nothing but fish, fed to him by a friendly otter. Landing on one island, the crew lit a fire, causing the ground to shake – too late they noticed that they were parked on the shoulder of a whale. Passing another island, this one a stub of rock, they spotted a figure crouching on top while the waves flayed the flesh from his body. It turned out to be Judas, on holiday from hell.
Eventually the boat reached an island where the sun never set. A glowing young man greeted the monks and explained the true purpose of their pilgrimage: not to find Paradise, but to discover the secrets of the ocean. Then he sent Brendan home again, for soon the abbot would die.
Brendan’s journey entered Irish folklore. During the ninth century these legends were collected in a manuscript called the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. The story was so popular it was still being read during the Age of Exploration, when scholars assumed that Brendan had made it across the ocean. Unlikely though it sounds, the islands visited by the saint correspond loosely with those that crown the North Atlantic. On one island the rivers flowed with molten gold, rather like an Icelandic volcano. Another was called the Isle of Sheep, which is the meaning of the word faroe. We know that Irish hermits travelled at least this far because Norse settlers in Iceland and the Faroe Islands found the bells and crosiers they left behind. Keep sailing north and the ‘crystal pillars’ described in the Navigatio look a lot like icebergs, while the veil of cloud concealing the final island might be the fog zone off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Whether or not Brendan made it to America, his journey was only one of many long-distance pilgrimages performed by Celtic clerics in the Early Middle Ages. As the saint was sailing west, Irish bishops were travelling south in the direction of Rome – the first pilgrims on the Via Francigena. By the seventh century a monk named Cathaldus had arrived in Jerusalem.
At the time Ireland, not Italy, was the continent’s Christian heartland.
Chart the first five hundred years of Christianity on a map and the religion will begin in Palestine, disperse across the Levant, establish a colony in Rome, migrate through the Roman Empire, and eventually reach its far Celtic fringe. But in Late Antiquity that map was turned inside out. Rome was sacked twice in the fifth century, and then fought over by Germanic tribes. Jerusalem was lost to both Sassanid and Arab armies. Once the Roman legions retreated from their northern provinces, only Ireland – which had never been under imperial rule – remained Christian.
Ireland’s monastic communities were modelled on Egypt’s Desert Fathers. However, Irish monks sought their deserts overseas, establishing hermit cells on the islands and edgelands of the Anglo-Celtic archipelago. From the mid-sixth century they also discovered a wilderness in the ruins of the Roman Empire.
The most famous was St Columbanus, who sailed from County Down in the last years of the sixth century to evangelize the Merovingian Empire. Columbanus founded monasteries in the Frankish and Lombard kingdoms that have survived to the present day, while his companions took Celtic Christianity from Sweden to southern Italy, a handful even making it to Kiev. They were known as peregrini pro Christo, exiles for Christ. The term was derived from the Roman word for foreigner – peregrinus – and our modern word pilgrim preserves this sense of being a visitor in a distant land. Although the New Testament contains no teaching on pilgrimage, the word peregrini was used in St Jerome’s Vulgate Bible to describe the holy men and women who lived before Jesus: strangers and pilgrims on this earth. In other words, they were exiles in a fallen world, their true home in the company of Christ.
But, to get a sense of what moved St Brendan, St Columbanus and the armies of peregrini, it’s best to look at the Cambrai Homily – the first example of extended prose in Old Irish. The homily describes three states of martyrdom. A red martyr is one who has been killed for his faith. A white martyr is one who gives up his life for God, perhaps leaving his family to withdraw from the world. A green martyr is one who experiences death without dying, spending the night on a bed of nettles, say, or sleeping next to a corpse.
Unlike the first Christians, who were persecuted for their beliefs, the Irish Church had no blood martyrs. Yet, the homily argued, inner martyrdom was possible
through pilgrimage and penitent works. Departing your monastery to explore pagan Europe was a sacrifice of the self.
In eighth-century Ireland this argument became canon law. Pilgrimage was given as penance for the most grievous sins: incest, bestiality and sacrilege. Cain – the first born, the first to kill – was banished by God to live always in exile, and thus St Columbanus’s penitential handbook condemned a murderer to be ‘like Cain a wanderer and fugitive on the face of the earth.’
If you killed a stranger, you were forbidden any fixed abode for seven years. Kill a family member and the punishment was everlasting exile.
So the idea that each sin carried a specific tariff of penance and that sacred travel could atone for the worst sins – this was a creation of Celtic Christianity. Even though wandering is threaded through the Bible – the Exodus from Egypt and the long march to the Promised Land; Christ roaming round Judea and his apostles crisscrossing the Roman Empire – it was the peregrini who turned it into a penitential practice. They were the ones who saw sin as suffering and pilgrimage as a path to salvation, providing the foundation for the whole edifice of sacred travel, from networks of monasteries to flagellant armies, from crusader campaigns to Roman Jubilees. Nearing the end of my journey, I felt close to those exiles, walking alone through an unknown world. And I was not surprised to learn that, when the first English pilgrim travelled to Jerusalem – St Willibald, who left Wessex in the year 722 – it was in imitation of the Irish monks. On reaching the Holy Land, Willibald visited Bethlehem, Nazareth and Galilee, even stopping for a night at the monastery on Mt Tabor.
September became October. I stayed a day in Nazareth and then crossed the Mt Carmel Range, the ridgeline dividing Galilee from the Mediterranean coast. By now the rucksack’s frame had snapped, its broken edge jabbing at the base of my spine. Meanwhile the sun lowered and the light thinned – autumn almost here. As I walked I counted down the stops until Jerusalem: Netanya, Tel Aviv, and then the slow climb into the Judean Hills. Although I was confident about reaching the city, I was unsure if finishing the journey would make anything better. Yet I took comfort in the idea that there was no distance which patience could not endure, and sometimes thought of extending my route – south to Eilat, east into Egypt, and south once more to Mt Sinai. At other times I thought of England, and the misted colours that mark the turning season. But most of the time my mind was empty.
On Saturday I was back by the sea, and for the next three days I tramped on the beach, all the way to Tel Aviv. That afternoon the wind was up and the horizon tainted with storms. I shuffled over the loose sand, past shacks made from weather-worn boards. One contained a rack of plastic canoes, another was cluttered with holiday tat – buckets, spades, and towels blown loose from their hangings. Two fishermen sat in the last shack, their faces ancient, their hands too, their limbs like knotted twine. After that came beachside apartments with salt-chapped skin and sandy hillocks topped with bleached tufts of grass. Rubbish lay stranded on the foreshore – mostly picnic castoffs and punctured pieces of netting. Out at sea a truck tyre wheeled in the current and two kite surfers wrestled with the clouds.
At teatime I heard thudding up ahead. To begin with I could not tell if it was an orbiting helicopter or some industrial machinery, but then I realized it was bass being pumped from a speaker. As I rounded a crag in the coastline, I found a hundred people in a huddle of bluffs. There were children splashing on the shore, teenagers drinking on the heights, and a large group in their late twenties, early thirties, dancing on the sand. Most wore swimming costumes with rainbow scarves tied to their necks and luminous handprints slapped on their skin. They were tanned and fit and shining with sweat.
A woman stood at the edge, smelling of suncream and spirits. When I asked what was happening, she told me it was a birthday party, a secret party.
Then she said: ‘I lived in New York, Berlin, San Francisco, but I never found parties like this.’
Then she danced off into the sea.
On the far side of the crowd, beyond the makeshift bar and the portable decks, a pair of Ethiopian men sat on the back of a horse, wearing pink shorts and matching pink polo shirts. A ruined aqueduct rose from the sand behind them, running down the beach for a kilometre or so. Three more men – these ones dressed in pirate outfits – were leaning against its base, peeing on the pitted yellow stone.
The following afternoon I reached Netanya, and that evening stayed in a village on the outskirts of the city, in a bungalow with timber walls and lino floors. My host was from South Africa originally, but emigrated to Israel in her twenties. She had a round face and round eyes, with a lingering look of bemusement. Her name was Channi.
We sat in the kitchen drinking milky cups of coffee. The room was clean, but as Channi spoke she wiped invisible stains from the sideboard and rearranged the uncluttered shelves. At first she seemed timid, until I mentioned this afternoon’s beach party and she began to beam, telling me about the hippies who used to live at the bottom of her garden. They were part of a collective she met in the Negev Desert and invited to camp in the field beside the bungalow. Channi hoped they would farm the land, but instead they sat in their tents getting stoned. ‘One time there were twenty-six people here – Buddhists and spiritualists and crystal healers. Every day I came home from work I would find another person doing walking meditation or silent retreat. Some of them stayed for years.’
I wondered why Channi had left South Africa, but when I asked the reason she started talking about her husband. Bernard ran the veterinary clinic next door, she explained, and if the garden wasn’t draped in hippies, it housed a menagerie of animals instead.
‘Every animal you can think of – even alligators. There was an alligator farm near here and we helped look after the babies. A few years ago Bernie had to perform surgery on one of the males, until halfway through the operation it stopped breathing. So then he gave it mouth-to-mouth with a straw.’ She looked up, her expression flushed with pride. ‘It was on the news – in all the newspapers – Man gives kiss of life to a croc.’
At nine o’clock Bernard came in from the clinic. He was very short, very wide, with stubby fingers and a stringy beard. When he moved, his shoulders swayed from side to side, as if warming up for a fight.
Channi prepared three plates of avocado, toast and cottage cheese, and then we ate together in the kitchen. During the meal Bernard discussed the kibbutz reunion he had attended last weekend, for those like him who moved to Israel in the 1960s. Since then the group had scattered, the majority emigrating to Britain, America and Canada. They either grew disillusioned with community life, or else felt betrayed by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Bernard called this the dilemma.
‘During the dinner I made a joke. It was about religious fundamentalists – Orthodox, haredi, the hats, the wigs – I don’t remember what it was about. But I remember the response. People were shocked. They were offended. Nobody laughed. Nobody found it funny. One person told me to apologize. Apologize! For a joke! It has been a terrible lesson. A terrible lesson. Other people have lived their lives. I can’t know what they think. I can’t know what they’ve experienced. I can never know what they will find offensive. I have learnt a terrible lesson.’
The more he spoke, the louder his voice. He never shouted; it simply swelled from inside his chest.
On the last day of the reunion Bernard went round each guest asking why they left Israel. Most people mentioned the dilemma. ‘I told them: you’ve lost sight! You’ve lost sight of the bigger picture! For thousands of years the Jews have been persecuted. For thousands of years we were treated like dirt, massacred at the slightest excuse. Not just the twentieth century – right through the Middle Ages. When the crusaders marched to Jerusalem, they massacred every Jew they could get their hands on. Every one! And all that time, all those thousands of years, the Jews waited. They waited and prayed: won’t it be great when we have a state of our own. When we can live in safety. When we can worship how we
like. Thousands of years! I was born in 1948. I was given the best birthday present ever. I was born in that tiny window of time when the Jews had a homeland. There was never any doubt in my mind where I would live. Never any question. Thousands of years of suffering and finally we have a state where we’re the majority. Finally we have a home. We’re not going to give that up. Sometimes the EU, the UN, they can’t understand. Sometimes they criticize us. That’s the dilemma we have to live with every day. Sure it’s hard. Sure you get let down. But I feel sorry for those people who left, because they don’t know the joy of living here. They don’t know the joy of living in this miracle of history.’
Bernard kept talking. He talked about the 1967 war and the 1973 war, about the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. While he spoke, Channi circled the room with impatient movements, now cleaning the sideboard, now restacking the shelves. Then she washed the food from our plates and announced that she was off to bed. But her husband paid no attention, going on and on about Obama and Netanyahu, about Saudi Arabia and Iran.
By the end of the evening his face was purple, his lips flecked with spit.
‘Everyone has tried to conquer this land. The Persians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans, the French, the British – every empire wants Jerusalem for its own. But we will never give up the State of Israel. We will destroy Iran if we have to. If we have to, we will be the only country to stand up for freedom, for democracy, the only country to stand up against terrorism. Because they want one thing: to drive us into the sea. They will stop at nothing until they have driven us into the sea.’ He was heaving now like a boxer midway through a bout. ‘We will destroy the world before we give up the State of Israel, understand? We will destroy the world before we give up our home.’
Perhaps my host talked himself tired that night, because at breakfast next morning he was subdued. We sat in the kitchen again, Bernard wearing striped pyjama trousers and a stained vest, sipping his coffee in silence. Then the telephone rang, an anxious voice at the other end. A friend’s dogs had just eaten a packet of rat poison.