Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land by Ruth Everhart Read Free Book Online

is always telling me to come to visit.”
    â€œAlexandria is only twenty or twenty-five miles from where I live,” I tell him. “You could come and see all the sights of Washington, D.C.”
    â€œAbraham Lincoln,” he says.
    â€œLincoln was a great man. His memorial is the best.”
    â€œMaybe I visit my brother and see this,” he says. “Someday.”
    Six degrees of separation, it is said, between every pair of humans on the planet. How many ways are Khalil and I connected? Maybe one of those connecting threads is an American hero wearing a stovepipe hat.
    Some of the other workers come out for a smoke break, laughing and talking rapidly in Arabic. They freeze when they see me.
    â€œThanks for the pomegranate, Khalil.” I stand up and acknowledge the other workers as I return to my room.

    Dinner is chicken and saffron rice in the crowded dining room. I sit with JoAnne and Kyle as they talk Anglican politics — bishops and appointments — things that Presbyterians ignore. I tune out their conversation and plan what I’ll say at my rooftop interview. I want to talk about the olive tree and the sparrows, but I’m afraid all my inchoate thoughts will be reduced to a sentimental sound bite: I walked today where Jesus walked. As Kyle dissects the implications of a certain bishop’s appointment, I silently rehearse: The Spirit came alive for me under an olive tree as I watched sparrows fly through the branches. That might work, especially if I quote the Scripture that came into my mind. But I don’t want to sound prosaic, or “bedside devotional.” The problem is that sound bites sound like sound bites.
    No, the real problem is that I’m not ready to articulate these thoughts. If this were a sermon in progress, I’d shelve it for a while and keep on reading and thinking, until the ideas could get some words on their bones, until the Spirit could do its work. What else, what more could I share about today? A Muslim man plucked a pomegranate for me and I glimpsed the sad face of Jesus? True, but did Khalil’s face remind me of Jesus simply because it was Middle Eastern and lined with suffering? Or was it that he, a stranger, fed me? I think of Mary Magdalene running into the risen Jesus outside the tomb and mistaking him for the gardener (John 20:14-16).
    Stephen’s comment — pilgrimage is like a well — seems right, and we’re here to look for Jesus everywhere, to search for that refracted glimpse of Love. Did I catch that likeness in my conversation with Khalil? We tried to enter each other’s worlds. We didn’t do it perfectly, but we made the effort. So, yes, in that sense, Jesus was present.
    For some people, my comment about seeing Jesus in the face of a Muslim man might seem like heresy. To others it might seem inconsequential, even boring. All roads lead to the mountaintop, they’ll say with a shrug. But where I come from there’s only one road, and nobody, especially a religious leader, should go around mixing Muslims with Jesus.
    An employee checks the food dishes on the buffet and sneaks a glance at me. He was one of the men surprised to see me talking to Khalil. JoAnne and Kyle are still talking church politics, and I use my knife to saw vigorously on a piece of chicken. I didn’t come to Jerusalem to rip apart my belief system. I came to follow the Spirit, to encounter Jesus in his land, amid his stories. I’m beginning to realize that I may have a pocket-sized version of Jesus, and being in Israel is enlarging that. Perhaps, at long last, I’m growing up.
    As I tear a round of pita bread in half, I consider questions about Muslims and Jesus that I’ve suppressed over the years. There’s the story of Isaac and Ishmael, the two sons of Abraham by different mothers. I was taught that God didn’t intend the rivalrybetween those brothers, that it began because of sin, specifically