The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  I wondered about James’s time in Jerusalem and the confusion he must have faced here. I wondered whether the city’s indifference had punctured his sense of purpose, or encouraged his lonely mission. However, when I asked what was hardest about his life, he told me it was travelling in America.

  ‘Surely America’s much more religious than Europe?’

  ‘Ordinary folks, maybe, but the media treat religion like it’s dangerous. Not just the Muslims – Christians too. Either they make fun of you, else they think you want money, else they think you’re crazy. There was one city I spent time in – lot of unemployment – lot of crime – where I made a big impact. But the media just wanted to know about my family, my childhood. They just want to make religion look bad.’

  ‘If you dressed in jeans, nobody would notice,’ I said. ‘If you were a parish priest, nobody would care.’

  James paused, plucking his cheeks into a joyless grin. ‘You know, living how I do, some priests think I’m challenging them. There were churches in the States where I wasn’t allowed to preach. Schools too. I want to be friends with bishops, priests, all kinds of clergy – I’m one hundred per cent Catholic – but this way I can touch more people’s lives.’ He paused again, grinned again. ‘Besides, truly following Jesus’ example means being an outsider.’

  He had no plans for the future, but would go wherever the Good Lord sent him. He had no ambitions either, but hoped somehow to meet the Pope.

  All day the Old City was crowded, but after dark it cleared. The shops and stalls and temporary cafes closed for the night, while the souks became strip-lit corridors of bolted doors and drawn shutters, every display of fresh fruit and coloured fabric packed away. The scale of the place also shifted, as if leaning back, breathing out. Its passageways were empty now except for the blue air, the bleeding streetlight. No clouds in the sky, no breeze on the ground, and the shadow-cloaked buildings were cool to touch. I was reminded of Istanbul at midnight, that second week of June, and the reeling streets of Thessaloniki, that lonely weekend in May. Of a Good Friday procession in the ruins of the Colosseum, and a circle of shrines at the childhood home of Benoît-Joseph Labre. How far I had come. How many cities I had seen. All waiting for this final journey.

  By eleven o’clock the streets were deserted. That was when I began to walk.

  I was walking the Via Crucis, the half-kilometre path from the Jaffa Gate to the Holy Sepulchre, following Christ’s route to the crucifixion. It was lined with chapels and numbered plaques, counting out the fourteen stations.

  The first station was a madrassa, its walled courtyard occupying the space where Herod’s Palace once stood. I set off from here, past the Chapel of the Condemnation, where Christ was judged, and the Chapel of the Flagellation, where he was scourged. Inside this church, the second station, a mosaic roof was pieced in a pattern of thorns, crowning the building with barbed branches. But that night the gates were locked.

  A doorway opened onto the third station, where a sculpture of Christ knelt to the floor, falling for the first time. The crypt chapel beyond was a dim, sheltered space, bare except for the tabernacle behind the altar. Its ornate case contained a chalice of brassy gold, and beneath the chalice a nun bowed in prayer.

  The gate to the fourth station had a lintel carved with an image of Christ meeting his mother; the wall of the fifth was imprinted with a hand, where a thousand thousand pilgrims had touched; the sixth occupied an underground chamber with an icon of Jesus copied from the Veil of Veronica, for this was the place where she cleaned the blood from his brow. Then I came to the seventh station, where Christ fell for the second time. A black double door with red and gold tracery. The eighth station, where he met the women of Jerusalem. Told them, Weep not for me but for yourselves. A sheet of coarse stone with the letters IC XC NIKA embossed on the one smooth slab. The ninth station. Where he fell for the third time. A corner of the Coptic Patriarchate and a wooden cross left leaning in the shadows. Left there as if forgotten.

  At the end of the Via Crucis a locked door led to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the five remaining stations were arranged. A crowd of pilgrims stood outside the door – most of them elderly Russian ladies in ankle-length puffa jackets. They were waiting to join the all-night vigil in the basilica.

  Around twelve the door opened and the crowd filed into the forecourt. Despite the darkness, I could just make out a grand bell tower rising to one side, but otherwise the architecture was basic, as if the original facade had been sheered away, leaving the base wall exposed.

  Stepping into the basilica, the pilgrims started crossing themselves: blotchy skin and blotchy hands and fingers whispering over synthetic jackets. Then they moved into the rotunda, a grand chamber ringed by a triple arcade, with columned ranks rising towards the dome. The pilgrims did not stop, however, moving on into the Orthodox chapel that formed the basilica nave. This was the Katholikon, a church within a church. Its iconostasis framed a pair of marble thrones, and a marble urn at the front marked the very centre of the world.

  On entering the Katholikon the pilgrims began kissing the icons, crossing themselves one two three times, one two three times. A group of nuns were kneeling near the sanctuary, their faces webbed with wrinkles, and a single priest stood at the lectern, reciting the liturgy. Yet I could not tell if the service had started, for the room never seemed to settle. Monks came; they went. The chanting thundered louder; it ebbed towards silence. From time to time an elderly Russian lady would approach the candle stand beside the entrance and balance a stick of wax in the sand. After a while one of the nuns would shuffle over and stub the candle out, collecting the wax in a fold of black cloth. Before long the elderly lady would be back, lighting more candles and setting them in the sand. Then the sister would return, snuffing the flames and gathering the stubs.

  This went on for an hour or more, their movements like clockwork, measuring out the night.

  At one o’clock the clash of bells interrupted the chanting. A deacon carried a censer from the sanctuary, dousing the Katholikon with incense. Next he marched round the ambulatory and doused the minor chapels too. The censer made a splashing sound as it circled the basilica, tying each room in tatters of scented smoke.

  I followed the deacon from the Katholikon and walked a circuit of the church. The layout was confusing, with chapels occupying different levels and a labyrinth of corridors between. And, in the night-time, the whole place looked derelict.

  During the next hour the air cooled, the service slowed, and the congregation swayed from one foot to another. Come two o’clock my legs had seized, so I walked a second circuit of the church and went down to the Chapel of St Helena, a pillared room with a domed roof. Oil lamps dangled from the ceiling and a coppery light tainted the air.

  More steps led to the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross, where the altar was just a table and the apse no more than a niche. Bare rock bulged from the wall, fringed with the faint residue of fresco.

  Sitting in the chapel, I kept telling myself that the pilgrimage was over. But I barely believed it, because I could not imagine a time after the journey. Though I left home in search of healing, only to realize the pilgrimage was hurting me, I never discovered a new reason to walk. Whatever insights I may have gained on the way, I could not summon them now. And, if I was waiting for some final epiphany, that chance was almost over. So instead I thought back to the start of the sickness.

  For much of my adolescence, I wanted to be unwell, as it seemed to excuse the sense that I was ill-fitted for this world. At first the drinking blurred this feeling, but over time it made the problem worse. Then, when my thoughts began to craze, it seemed like some deep part of myself set free. I was glad for those wasted days, lying in bed and turned from the window, because it meant that the future was suspended. In my mind death was a release from shame, an escape from regret, and suicide a form of salvation.

  As I began to get better, I was drawn towards religion, because it appeared to offer
another way of leaving this life. When I set off on pilgrimage, I was bewitched by the stories of surrender, of sacrifice. But in the course of my journey I was shown how sacrifice could mean something much smaller: the habit of kindness, or the discipline of humility, or the steady practice of patience. And looking back on the last ten months, it was not the solitude I remembered, but the charity of so many strangers.

  Throughout that time, the pilgrimage provided a sense of purpose. As well as the long march towards Jerusalem, it also knitted my life into the landscape. The months were replaced by the shifting seasons, while the weeks were measured out in rounds of worship. Staying in monasteries and convents, presbyteries and churches calmed what was restless within me, and during the regular services I noticed how the minutes slowed and the silence assembled, until the days were worth more than they had been before.

  This was not what I had expected. At the start of the journey, I thought I was walking into the wreckage of Christianity. My impression now was of how much remained, holding tight to its decayed inheritance. Despite the decline of religion in Europe, it was still possible to cross the continent like a medieval pilgrim: travelling on foot, stopping at shrines, and supported by charity. Still possible to find comfort in pilgrim rites, even if the belief was gone. So maybe decline was also evidence of endurance, and loss the price we pay for surviving.

  Sitting in the basilica that night, I wondered whether this was true for my own life too. Do we gather up mistakes like mementos, until they form the true texture of experience? And build ourselves stronger from the regrets collected year after year? Perhaps that was the lesson of the pilgrimage, for though I had hoped to heal myself by walking, any recovery came on the far side of collapse. In which case, I should not try to forget what had happened, but remember it. Remember a London bedroom with curtains closed and a rented flat stained with ash. Remember train tracks sunk in shadow and carriages screaming through the night. And that weightless moment when I rose still living from the ground.

  It was three o’clock. My legs were aching, my shoulders stiff. The pilgrims were leaving the Katholikon and climbing a narrow staircase near the entrance. There they entered a second, smaller chapel, its corners inky with shadow, its surfaces stained with age. More lamps hung from the ceiling, made of red glass or burnished brass, and lamplight played off the arch of streaked gold behind the altar, framing silver sculptures of Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and a painted figure of the crucified Christ. Beneath the arch was a gap in the floor where you could touch the bloodied rock on which the cross was raised.

  This was it. The twelfth station. Calvary.

  Another deacon stood in the centre of the room, wearing a tunic of golden mail. As he recited the liturgy in a trembling bass, his vestments glimmered. My attention was fading, so I do not remember if we stood, or knelt, or touched our foreheads to the cold stone floor. I do not remember if we held candles and watched our fingers flickering, or clenched our hands tight until the knuckles went white. But I remember the young monk who came over before the climax of the service and ordered me downstairs with polite murmurs of apology, citing complicated theological reasons why only Orthodox pilgrims could remain.

  I was too tired to protest, so I made my way back to the rotunda. Beneath the dome stood a boxy chapel caged in steel supports: the Edicule. It was a crude structure, the green-grey walls seeming to absorb the gloom. Candlesticks tall as columns flanked the entrance, their candles shedding no light, but when four o’clock chimed from somewhere in the building, the night softened to a mute blue.

  An Armenian service was going on inside the chapel. Outside, a fierce-looking Franciscan set up barriers for morning mass.

  Over the next hour some thirty or forty people arrived, mostly middle-aged women wearing black dresses, black jackets and mantillas of black lace. James was among them, a supermarket bag hanging from his left hand.

  Once the Armenian service was finished, the fierce-looking Franciscan counted half of us into the Edicule. The first room, the Chapel of the Angel, was panelled in folds of stone, reminding me of a mausoleum. A passage led through to the second chapel, the Room of the Tomb, its door just crouching height. I could see little of the space beyond the passage, except for the gleam of plush fabric and polished metal, like the inside of a jewellery box. And a priest conducting mass at a cracked marble slab.

  Although the priest was speaking Italian, I struggled to pay attention, his voice too quick and too quiet. Instead I stared at the eager, frightened faces beside me, some biting their lips, others clutching their throats, and one or two pressing their palms into their eyes. We were standing so close that our breathing fell into time, each intake of air rattling round the room, as if the tomb were a body, a corpse – dead no longer, gasping back to life. I kept reminding myself that this was the fourteenth station. Where he dropped into darkness. Where he rose to his feet. Where he stepped once more into the light. This was the end of my pilgrimage too, yet I experienced no sense of triumph, only a weary detachment pierced with regret. During the journey I had found some meaning in pacing slow along sacred paths, and in those lonely shrines where the world felt stilled. But, on reaching Jerusalem, I spent my time surrounded by believers, waiting for a sign that the journey was done. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place. If I wanted to finish the pilgrimage, I should start walking again.

  When the service was over, I followed James out of the tomb. It was not yet six, but more Catholics queued behind the barriers, while a large group of Protestants were gathering in Calvary. The basilica forecourt was empty, however, so we sat near the entrance, watching shadows recede over the flagstone floor.

  James asked how it was going, but I could not answer. I was aware only of the bewildered calm that comes after a night without rest.

  Eventually I said that, despite all the pilgrims, Jerusalem seemed a lonely place.

  ‘A lot of people visit this city,’ he replied. ‘Mostly they’re just passing through. Sometimes people from America will recognize me – they saw me preaching, saw me on the news – but it’s hard to build anything like that. And this way of life – I can’t have a spouse or anything—’

  He tried again: ‘Maybe if there was a community of like-minded people—’

  He stopped speaking.

  I tried to imagine a religious order founded in James’s image, picturing armies of pious young men roaming barefoot between the cities of the world. There was something endearing about this ambition, about its boundless vanity. It made his whole calling seem hopeful, human – like the charmed conviction of a child. So I asked James if he knew the story of Benoît-Joseph Labre, patron saint of pilgrims, and began describing the boy too weak for the monastery, who left his home to wander the shrines of Western Europe. I explained how he refused all offers of kindness and fled from those who might follow him. I mentioned his innocence, his pride, and the devotion that slowly destroyed him.

  ‘You think he was lonely?’ James asked.

  I wasn’t sure. Perhaps he wanted to prove himself, or punish himself, or wanted desperately to feel forgiven. Perhaps this was the relief he sought in faith: from a shame which can never be shed.

  James emptied sliced bread and sliced cheese from the supermarket bag and started to make sandwiches. When he offered me one, I shook my head, but he kept offering until I accepted. A man with no money sharing his breakfast with a stranger. Charity that gives before anything is asked and gives without hope of return. I wondered what hurt had driven James from home and carried him across continents. And if, over time, that hurt had become sympathy – for surely this was sacred. But I realized now that his motives did not matter. In the end, the kindness was all that mattered.

  He broke the bread and shared it between us. While we ate together, I felt the courtyard opening up, as if there was now more space in the night. Perhaps it was the residue of a dream, a stray figment from the place before waking, yet it seemed more than that. It seemed that the world was stretchi
ng wider, or my life uncentred now. I tried to hold onto the feeling, but it was nothing that I could grasp, and then the moment passed and the morning settled.

  Six o’clock. The dawn was drawing back, the buildings becoming solid. As the city surfaced from the night, I watched dust streaming off the basilica walls – grey and yellow and sparked with gold. And the sun pouring into the sky, making the courtyard to shine.

  My breakfast tasted of paper, of putty, but I swallowed the last few mouthfuls. Then I thanked James for his help and climbed off the floor. Finally I fastened my rucksack onto my back and stepped out into the risen light.

  Epilogue

  Next morning I wake early and walk from Jerusalem, moving south along Highway 60. The road from the city is lined with modern apartments, shapeless office buildings, and low-rise flats made from concrete boxes. At eleven o’clock an expanse of suburb spills out to my right: range after range of whitewashed neighbourhoods. Then I enter the dusty scenery of the Judean Hills. The far-off hills are cultivated – green strata of orchard and vine – but nearer the soil is spent. Roofless farm buildings cap the nearest hills, and olive trees so twisted they look tortured. Blue road signs point towards Bethlehem, but first I must enter the West Bank.

  Around midday I arrive at Rachel’s Crossing, the gate on the southern side of Jerusalem. Although the gate is shut to traffic, a hallway of turnstiles and metal detectors forms a passage through the wall. The hallway is empty except for a pair of Israeli soldiers standing guard. When they ask if I am walking to Bethlehem, I tell them I am going to see the desert.

  A caged corridor leads out of the checkpoint, chain-link fencing on one side and slabs of concrete on the other. Each slab rises six or seven metres, the lower half covered in graffiti – in flags and slogans and a cartoon image of God letting down a ladder from the clouds – with barbed wire trimming the top. All this I have seen before, in photographs and videos, documentaries and news reports, yet still I am surprised how the barrier splits the town, dividing streets and bordering houses. How close people live to the wall.