“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.” - Aleister Crowley
This is a true story. Trust me—they have pictures.
Every year just after Christmas, the monks and priests of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem get together to clean it. The church, which allegedly stands over the location of Jesus’s birth, honestly feels like it could use a good cleaning. It lacks the grandeur of its equally famous counterparts—there are no soaring frescoed domes or shiny marble floors. The columns are discolored. The nondescript stone floor has holes that allow you to see down to the old mosaic below. Over a thousand years old, it is in the joint control of the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic denominations. All of them join in the cleaning.
But here’s the thing—apparently, to clean or repair a part of the church is to own it. I don’t know who thought up this idea, but I do have theories. Maintenance workers of the world unite?
On Dec. 28, 2011, during the annual cleaning, a fight broke out between the monks. Apparently it started when one got a little overeager with his sweeping territory. One hundred men in traditional black robes began beating at each other with brooms.
Again, there are pictures of this event. They’re everything you’d want them to be—action shots, slightly blurred, crowds of black-robed men broken up only by brooms in the air at all angles.
A lot of people think this is funny. I think this is funny.
I also think it’s kind of beautiful. How incredible would it be to be one of those monks, believing that with every push of your broom you were winning more square feet of the holiest place on Earth for the holiest people. Saving souls by pushing a broom. I wish I had that power.
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” - George Bernard Shaw
This story is funny, and it’s beautiful, and it’s also sad.
Obviously it’s sad because it’s the least subtle allegory in the world. Trade the square feet for square miles and the brooms for guns and you have the story of this country.
But that’s not really why it’s sad to me. I’m too far removed from that conflict for the analogy to really sting. This story only got sad to me three months later, when I myself was visiting Jerusalem on a school trip. A guide led our group to the Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. The shrine is a grand complex, with four great walls surrounding a dome in the middle. As is typical of Israel, everything is tan, ornate and old.
The dome is built to surround, and apparently protect, a single, rectangular spot on the floor. It looks like a picture frame on the ground, with the marble floor opening to reveal a rectangle of dirt beneath it. The man tells us with veneration that this is Jesus’s footprint.
How could you wonder at anything, I thought, if you allowed yourself to believe that two thousand year old dirt contained the footprint of Jesus? Why not assign convenient histories to every inch of space you saw, invent happy explanations for events that made you uncomfortable, immerse yourself in a world designed just how you wanted it and tell yourself that the fact that it felt better was actually the feeling of truth revealing itself to you, that the relief the invention brought was God speaking to its validity?
I exited the shrine. From this spot, high on the Mount of Olives, you could see most of thousand year-old, ornate, tan and gold, holy-to-the-inch Jerusalem. That was indeed the story of this place.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” - Albert Einstein
I looked out over the rows of tan tombs that surround the city—old Jews wanting to be as close as possible to the gates of Jerusalem for the rapture. I saw the church spires and mosque minarets and the golden Dome of the Rock.
And I just kept thinking: 6,000 years. The history conveyed in the Bible makes Earth 6,000 years old. 6,000 years old because we couldn’t imagine – who could imagine – 4.5 billion years. And we said that this tiny barren desert was the center of all the universe and then that this planet was the center of all the universe and then that the sun was the center of all the universe because we couldn’t imagine—really, who could imagine—100 billion galaxies, with 300 billion stars just in our own. And we told these stories, so many stories, about seven days and floods and gardens because we couldn’t imagine that one big explosion, that one single Let There Be Light, caused by who knows what that created all the ingredients for these 70 sextillion stars and for the love a human mother has for her child.
And I stand looking out at Jerusalem, thinking about those brawling monks, and suddenly it’s not a sitcom and not a poem and it’s just…sad.
How sad we humans are, I think, that our imaginations aren’t big enough to imagine how incredible the universe really is, and that our stubbornness is too big for us to change our minds once we’ve figured it out.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.