I find no religion in churches. Temples leave me bemused at best, bored at worst. Mosques are nice to look at, but within their walls I feel no closer to God, divinity, spirituality, that great whatever-it-is in the sky. In the footsteps of poetic hoboes before me, I get my religion kicks from the echoes of a wadi, the grip of a Mediterranean tide, the shooting star that catches the eye in the Negev Desert night.
Yesterday, I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where according to Christian tradition, Jesus was crucified and buried. Six denominations share in the ownership and maintenance of this site, where their priests regularly get into fistfights over whether or not to move a two-hundred-year-old maintenance ladder. Undoubtedly, this place has power—worshippers prostrate themselves at the final four Stations of the Cross, and even at the Stone of Unction, which definitely wasn’t where Jesus was anointed since it was only added in 1810. For me, though, the most potent part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the underground cistern attached to the Queen Helen Coptic Orthodox Church (one of the aforementioned six sects).
You access the cistern via an unobtrusive door next to the main entrance; this door leads to a room with a staircase, leading to another room with another staircase, leading to the roof, leading to a room where a priest charges you five shekels to duck through a tiny crawlspace, down some slippery stairs into the dark. Here, where the Empress Helena was said to have found the True Cross—the one Jesus died on—the acoustics are mindblowing. To sing “Hallelujah” in such a place, to hear that word reverberate through the blackness, punctuated by the soft drip of water into the brackish pool below—that, to me, is holy.
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