Fifteen minutes till departure on Father's Day for the Jerusalem museum. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the presence of Fransiscan and Greek Orthodox churches here.
First of all, copious, copious kudos to the Fransiscans and Greek Orthodox who bought up the land where holy sites are so many years ago. They have preserved them when they might otherwise have been destroyed. For this I am eternally grateful.
Now for venting. Given the mindset of these groups, they just have to built these churches on the sites. I suppose the reasoning is once a holy site always a holy site; once a church always a church. The result is that modernist Protestants like me, who want to see and get the feel for what it was really like, have to struggle to look around all the "stuff" the Catholics have piled on.
Of course I don't mind half of it. The church of the Beatitudes or where the 5000 were fed or where Jesus told John to feed his sheep are unlikely the real spots, despite good attempts by the early Christians to identify prominent rocks. Hey look, there's a good rock, let's build a church here. So I don't mind those. They give concreteness to important memories and have been some of the best places for meditation.
On the other hand, the Fransiscans just had to build this monstrous, spider like looking church on top of the site where Peter and Jesus may have lived. I want to see the real deal, not have to peer from afar under this big metal thing to see the site. It was better before they venerated the site, from pre 1990 pictures.
Frankly, hurray for the Old Testament sites and the Roman ruins. The church has left them alone so you can picture what things were really like without the monstrosities. Of course, they're not the sites I'm really interested in.
I close with the church of the nativity, although I hear the Holy Sepulchre will win the prize for competing churches. You know, Greek Orthodox squeezed next to Roman Catholic. Add the Armenians at the Sepulchre and we're ready to lose all site of reality.
Hurray for the imagination; laments for reality.
Ken Schenck, reporting from Jerusalem
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2 comments:
Dr. Schecnk,
Your sentiments echo mine when I was in Israel. The often opulant and ostentacious trappings so handily constructed by the Orthodox and Roman Catholics almost appeared gawdy to my post-modern eyes. While there is always a time and a place for a cathedral, perhaps these supposed sights are not the best place. However, if there is such a thing as "sacred space," would these sights not be the best contestants for such a competition? If this is the case, then perhaps I need to rethink this whole thing.
Yes, I haven't found enough reason to give up my biases yet, but I recognize that it is my valuation of what happened in history over the worship now that feeds my desire for them to leave it alone. And yet the cynic in me comes out every time the focal point of every church is this rock under the altar that may or may not have really had anything to do with anything.
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