We left the hotel before it was light this morning to
walk to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. A sepulcher is a small room or
monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or
buried. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is where Jesus’s Tomb is. The outside
of the tomb is pictured below.
After praying here for a while, we moved to the Crucifixion
Chapel where Monsignor Al and Father Rich celebrated Mass. This experience has
been emotional every day, but something about experiencing the true sacrifice
Jesus made for us up close really hit me today, and I found myself weeping
throughout Mass. (I think poor Tony thought I was having a seizure at one
point!). Father Rich reassured me after Mass that something like this is
expected, and that he would be surprised if I just felt normal after taking all
of this in. After Mass, we were
permitted the rare privilege of going inside the Holy Sepulcher and seeing
Jesus’ actual tomb. There are no words to describe that moment.
We also saw the stone that marks the spot on which His
body was anointed with oil prior to His burial.
We also got to touch the Rock of Calvary (Golgotha)
where Jesus is believed to have died. Each of kneeled to touch the rock where
Jesus died for our redemption. Another moment that left me emotionally wrought
and speechless.
We also saw a cave that was of the type that families
used to bury their dead. It would have been the type of cave in which Jesus was
initially buried prior to his resurrection. I walked into the cave and realized
how small it was!
Because we were so physically and emotionally spent
after this experience, we came back to our guest house for some nourishment and
rest. One the way back, Tony and I noticed a store we had not seen before. You
can see the sign below, but if you know us, you also know we would come back to
it, and we did. We ventured back later in the afternoon and asked “How in the
world did you decide to open an Alabama store in Jerusalem?!” The young man in
the picture told us his dad earned his business degree at Bama, and he loves
the Tide. He showed us a Nick Saban picture autographed to his father, and he
was so hospitable to us. He even gave us free Bama ball caps! It was a
fantastic experience!
Later that afternoon, we had a meeting with Bishop
William Shomali, Latin Patriarchal Vicar of Jerusalem. He was especially
pleased that we had chosen to make a Lenten Pilgrimage to the Holy Land during
a time when so many are afraid to come. Since tourism is such a large source of
revenue to Christian Palestinians as well as the Holy Land at large, we have
heard this comment a lot.
Bishop Shomali said that he believes pilgrimages to the
Holy Land produce 4 fruits:
1. An
increase in faith: when we experience Christ’s life and sacrifice, it helps us
realize the human element of his suffering and the magnitude of God’s love for
us
2. Discovery
of the Word of God in Bible → Our faith is REAL!
3. We
enter into contact with brothers and sisters in Christ; we meet fellow
Christians who descend from communities that were founded by Jesus Christ
Himself!
4. It
helps reverse the decline in the percentage of Christians in the Holy Land. Not
too long ago, the percentage of Christians in the Holy Land (the land of
Christ) was 10%; and now it is 2%. Nevertheless, the numbers of Christians
continues to grow!
Bishop Shomali urged us to remind our friends and
family to visit and make a pilgrimage. He said: “The Holy Land without pilgrims is NOT the Holy but merely a museum.”
So true!
What are the challenges that Bishop Shomali sees in
the Holy Land?
1. Division:
There are political, cultural, economic, and social differences that make
finding peace a serious challenge among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
2. Declining
percentages of Catholics poses a problems for the Church, especially since the
Catholic Church is doing so much for all people (not just Catholics) in terms
of education, health care and social justice.
3. Meaningful
dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims: In most situations, religion
should be part of the process of peace, reconciliation and justice, but here in
the Holy Land, religion is a major part of the problem.
A. For
example, the Temple Mount is one of the most important Holy sites in the Holy
Land. Jewish and Christian traditions associate the site with the binding of Isaac
(where Abraham agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac to God). There is also
evidence that King Solomon’s Temple also stood on this site. Muslims view this
site as the place where Muhammad ascended into Heaven. There have been
increasing attacks at this site in recent months by Palestinian Muslims on both
Jews and Christians.
B. The
Cenacle (believed to the place where Jesus held the Last Supper) belonged the
Christians, then the Ottomans (Muslims) took and it became a Mosque. It is
currently owned by the State of Israel who has refused to cede ownership back
to the Vatican because there is strong belief that it belongs to the Jews since
it sits on the place where King David’s Tomb is. Catholics and many other
Christians, of course, believe it is the site where Jesus held the last
Passover meal (Last Supper) with the Apostles, where He washed the Apostles’
feet, where he reappeared to the Apostles upon his resurrection, where he
ascended into Heaven, and where the Holy Spirit descended to the Apostles at
Pentecost. Pope Francis donated an Olive Tree at this site at his most recent
visit, but the conflict has yet to be resolved.
4. The
Lack of Peace makes every day living very difficult.
A member of our group noted that many people back home
tend to demonize all Muslims as terrorists and asked what his perception of
Muslims here was. Bishop Shomali noted that Sunni Muslims (from where al-Qaeda
and subsequently ISIS have come) have tended to have the most violent members.
The Shia Muslins (who are in the minority worldwide) tend to be poor but
peaceful. He then mentioned Abdennour Bidar’s “Open Letter to the Muslim World”
as something that gives him hope. I have put it below.
Dear Muslim World,
I am one of your distant sons who observes you from the outside and from afar –
from this country, France, where so many of your children live today. I look at
you with the strict eyes of a philosopher nourished since childhood both by the
taçawwuf (Sufism) and by Western thought. I am observing you therefore
from – great image in the Koran - the isthmus between the two seas of
East and West!
And what do I see? What can I see
better than others, undoubtedly exactly because I am looking at you from far
off, with the advantage of more objective looking at you thanks to the
distance? I see you, you my dear Muslim world, in a miserable state of suffering
which causes me infinite sadness, but which renders my judgment as a
philosopher even more severe, more harsh! Why? You ask me why ? Because I see
you creating a monster which claims to call itself the Islamic State and which
some prefer to give the name of a demon: Daesh. And the worst is that I see you
losing – losing your time and your honour - in your refusal to recognize that
this monster is born of you, of your own errancy, of your own contradictions,
of your own discrepancy between the past and the present, and of your own
interminable incapacity in finding your own place in human global
civilization.
What in fact are you saying in the face of this monster? You are shouting :
“It’s not me!”, “It’s not Islam!”. You are denying that the crimes of this
monster are committed in your name (#NotInMyName). You rebel against the idea
that the monster has usurped your identity, and of course you are right in
doing so. It is essential that you thus proclaim, loud and clear, in the face
of the world that Islam denounces this barbarity, and that Islam as religion
and civilization must not be mixed up with “Islamism”. But all these
proclamations of innocence and difference are not enough! Far from it ! Because
you are taking refuge in reactionary self-defense without taking, above all,
the responsibility of self-criticism. You are satisfied merely to be
outraged, although this moment could have been an historical opportunity to
question yourself! The most crucial time for the deepest, hardest, self
examination! But instead of that, instead of taking your own responsibility,
you only accuse: “You, Westerners, and you, all the enemies of Islam, stop
associating us with this monster ! Terrorism is not Islam, not the real Islam,
not the good Islam that speaks not of War, but of Peace!”
I hear the cry of revolt which is rising in you, oh my dear Muslim World ! And
I do understand it, and I share it. Yes, of course you are right, like each one
of the other great sacred inspirations of the world, throughout its history,
Islam has created Beauty, Justice, great meanings, spiritual and ethical
virtues, and has brilliantly enlightened million human beings along the
mysterious path of existence… Here in the West, and in each of my books, I am
involved in a battle, so that this profound wisdom of Islam - and the profound
wisdom of all religions – be never lost, neither forgotten nor scorned ! But
from my distant position, I also see something which you do not see… And which
inspires to me a question – “the” great question: why has this monster
stolen your face? Why has this appalling monster chosen your face and
not that of another? It is because in reality, that behind this monster, there
is hidden an immense problem, which evidently you are not able to face, to
confront yourself. Yet you will end up to be able to find the courage to do
so...
This problem is that of the roots of evil. Where do the crimes of this
so-called “Islamic State” come from? I shall tell you , my friend. You will not
be pleased with what I have to say, but it is my work as a philosopher. The
roots of this evil which has stolen your face are within you yourself, the
monster has come from your own innards - and whence will appear many other
monsters, even worse than this one, as long as you will hesitate to admit that
it is caused by as your own illness and diseases, and as long as you
will delay to attack this internal roots of evil!
Even for the Western intellectuals – my colleagues – it is difficult to see !
For the most of them, they have so far forgotten what is the power of religion
– its great power for better or worse, its great power on life and death – that
they often tell to me : “No, the problem of the Muslim World is not Islam, it
is not religion, but politics, history, economics, etc.” They have no
recollection at all, of the fact that religion may be the heart of a human
civilization, its complex (creative and terrific) heart ! And they are also too
“secularized” to understand the new obviousness in this beginning of 21st
century, that the future of humanity will occur not only by the resolution of
the financial crisis, but essentially by the resolution of the spiritual
crisis without precedent which involves our humanity in its entirety. Will
we, from all over the planet, know to unite in order to confront this
fundamental challenge ? The spiritual nature of man has an horror of
emptiness, and if we, all humans together of all civilizations, are unable to
find anything new with which to be replenish this void, it will be
tomorrow replenish by religions more and more maladjusted to present times –
and these obsolete forms of spirituality will, like Islam today, begun to
produce monsters.
I see in you, oh my dear Muslim World, immense forces ready to rise and to
contribute to this worldwide effort to find a spiritual life for this open new century!
Despite the gravity of your illness, there is within you an extraordinary
multitude of women and men who are ready to reform Islam, to reinvent
its genius beyond its historical and outmoded forms, and thus to
participate in the total renewal of the rapport which humanity has maintained
until now with his gods ! In my works I address all these, both Muslims and non-Muslims,
who collectively dream of a spiritual revolution! To give them, with the
words of a philosopher, confidence in that which they see as a glimmer
of hope!
But there are not enough men and women of the Muslim faith who look to the
future, and their struggle for a new spiritual way of life has not yet enough
force. All of these, whose lucidity and courage I salute with admiration and
support, have rightly seen that it is the general state of the profound
sickness of the Muslim World which explains the birth of terrorist monsters
which have names like Al-Qaida, Jabhat Al-Nusra, Aqmi or so-called “Islamic
State”. They have well understood that these are only the more visible
symptoms of an immense sick body, of which the chronic illnesses are the
following : powerless in establishing lasting democracies which really and
definitely recognize the complete right of conscientious freedom towards the
religious dogmas ; chronic difficulties in improving the rights of women
concerning equality, responsibility and freedom ; the inability to sufficiently
separate political power from the controlling religious authority ; the
incapacity to institute respect, tolerance and a true recognition of religious
pluralism and of religious minorities.
Could all this be the fault of the West ? How much precious time are you still
going to waste, oh my dear Muslim World, by the use of this mediocre accusation
in which you yourself no longer believe, and behind which you hide by
continually lying to yourself?
Since the 18th century in particular, it has become time to confess that you
have been incapable to meet the challenge of the West. You either have taken
refuge in an infantile and mortifying fashion in the past, with the dark
regression of Wahhabism which continues to wreak devastation almost everywhere
within your frontiers – a Wahhabism that you spread from your holy places in
Saudi Arabia like a cancer which comes from your very heart itself ! Or you
have followed the worst elements of the West, in producing like it nationalisms
and a modernism which are caricatures of modernity – I am talking about consumer
society, inhuman jungle of free market economy, and also about this
technological development which has no coherence with its religious archaism
and which makes of your extremely wealthy “elite” of the Gulf a consenting
victim of the worldwide sickness which is the worship of this false God called
Money.
What is admirable in you today, my friend? What has remained in you that is
worthy to gain the respect of other people and other religions on Earth? Where
are your wise men, and have you any wisdom to offer the world ? Where are your
great men and women ? Who are your Mandelas, who are your Gandhis, who are your
Aung San Suu Kyi’s? The new Nobel prize Malala Yousafzaï is one of your
daughters but it is impossible for her to be accepted and to live in her own
country! Where are your great thinkers whose books were obligatory reading
throughout the entire world as during the ancient time when the Arab and
Persian mathematicians and philosophers made reference from India to Spain? In
reality you have become so weak behind the certitude which you display about
yourself… You do not know who you are anymore, nor where you are going, and
that in itself makes you not only wretched but also aggressive. . . You persist
in not listening to those who call to you to change by freeing yourself at last
from the domination that you have given religion over all aspects of life.
You have chosen to consider Mohammed as prophet and king. You have chosen to
define Islam as a political, social and moral religion, prevailing like a
tyrant not only over the state but also all over civilian, moral and social
life, as well on the street and in the house and even on the interior of every
consciousness. You have chosen to believe and to impose that Islam wants to say
submission whereas the Koran itself proclaims that “there are no
constraint in religion” (La ikrâha fi Dîn). You have made its call to
freedom into an Empire of Constraints! How can a civilization betray to this
extent his own sacred text? I say that the hour has come for the Islamic
civilization, to replace all the laws, invented by generations of theologians,
by instituting this spiritual freedom given by the Koran to each human
being – this spiritual freedom that is with no doubt the most sublime and the
most difficult of all kinds of freedom!
Large numbers of voices, which you do not want to hear, are raised today in the
Oumma, denouncing this taboo of an authoritative and indisputable religion… To
the extent that too many believers have so internalized a culture of submission
to tradition and to “masters of religion” (imams, muftis, chouyoukhs, etc.)
that they don’t understand someone who, like me or other free thinkers, other
free believers, speak to them of spiritual freedom, and when we speak to them
of their personal choice towards the “pillars” of Islam. All this
constitutes to them a “red line” so sacred that they dare not grant their own
conscience the right to question ! And there are so many families where this
confusion between spirituality and servitude is encrusted from a young age in
their minds and where spiritual education is so poor, that all that concerns
religion remains something that one does not talk about!
However, this, quite obviously is not imposed by the terrorism of some mad
fanatic troops embarked on by the so-called “Islamic State”. No, this problem
goes infinitely deeper! But who wants to listen? There is a silence across the
Muslim World, and in the western media one listens to specialists on terrorism
who daily aggravate the general short-sightedness! Oh my dear friend, do not
delude yourself into believing that when one is rid of the Islamic terrorism,
that Islam will have solved all its problems! Because all that I have just
called to mind – a tyrannical, dogmatic, literalist, male chauvinist,
conservative and regressive religion – is too often the ordinary Islam, the
every-day Islam, which suffers and causes the suffering of so many
consciousnesses, the Islam of an outdated past, the Islam deformed by all those
who abused it politically, the Islam who ends again and again by hushing up all
the “Arab Springs” and to hush up also the voices of its young who are asking
for something different. So when are you going to at long last make this
Revolution happen so that in societies and consciousnesses will definitely
associate spirituality and freedom?
In your immense territory there are of course islands of spiritual freedom: the
families who practice an Islam of tolerance, personal choice, in-depth
spirituality; places where Islam still gives the best of itself, a culture of
sharing, of honour, of knowledge seeking, and a spirituality in search of this
sacred/ultimate place where human being and the supreme reality, that Koran
calls Allâh, can meet. There is in the Muslim countries, and everywhere in
Muslim communities worldwide, strong and free consciousnesses. But they are
condemned to live their freedom without recognition of their true rights, at
their own risk and peril faced with community controls or even at times faced
by the religious police. Never, even for an instant, do they have the right
recognized by the “Official Islam” of the dignitaries, to say : “I choose my
own Islam”, “I have my own connection with Islam”. On the contrary,
“Official Islam” sternly lay down that “the doctrine of Islam is unique”
and that “strict obedience to the pillars of Islam is the only righteous
way” (sirâtou-l-moustaqîm).
This refusal of the right of freedom as regards to religion is one of the roots
of evil of which you suffer, oh my dear Muslim World! One of the dark
stomachs where for some years now, monsters with frightening faces grow that
are set free all over the world. Because this “Religion of Iron” imposes upon
all your societies an unbearable violence. It has enclosed too many of your
girls and boys in a cage of good and evil, of lawfulness (halâl) and of
unlawfulness (harâm) which no-one chooses but under which everyone
suffers. It imprisons willpower, it conditions minds, it impedes or hinders all
choice of personal life. In too many of your regions, you still associate
religion and violence – against women, against the “bad believers” /
“unbelievers”, against the Christian or other minorities, against thinkers
and all free spirits, against rebels, whereby this religion and this violence
ends up being confused, by the most unbalanced and the most fragile of your
sons, as the monstrosity of the jihad war!
Therefore please, no more pretending that you are surprised by the demons of
the so-called “Islamic State” which have taken on your face ! The demons and
the monsters only steal faces that are already deformed by too many grimaces!
And if you want to know how to stop giving birth to such monsters, I will tell
you. It is very simple and at the same time very difficult. You need to
start by the complete reform of all the education that you give your children,
in each one of your schools, each of your places of learning and power. Reform
them by leading them according to the universal principles (even if you are not
alone in their transgression or persisting in ignorance): freedom of
consciousnesses; democracy; tolerance and right of citizenship in your
countries for all the diversity of visions from all over the world and all
beliefs; equality of sexes and female emancipation of all masculine guardianship;
critical approach of religion in your universities, and the same right in
literature and the media. You can’t retract now, you can’t do less that all
that ! It is the only way for you to end giving birth to such monsters, and if
you don’t do it, you will soon be devastated by their power of destruction.
Dear Muslim World… I am only a philosopher, and as usual there are those who
say that a philosopher is a heretic. However, I seek only to let the light
shine anew – it is the name which you gave me that inspires me thus, Abdennour,
“Bearer or Herald of the Light”. I would not have been so severe in this
letter if I did not believe in you. As we say in French, “qui aime bien
châtie bien” = he who loves with all his heart, chastises with all his
heart. And on the contrary, all those who are not so severe towards you today –
who want to victimize you -, are not rendering you a real service ! I believe
in you, I believe in your contribution in making our planet of tomorrow a
universe more humane and at the same time more spiritual. Salâm, may
peace be with you.
Abdennour
Bidar
Philosopher specialist of contemporary evolution of Islam
************************************************************
I asked Bishop Shomali what we can do to help the
situation over here in the Holy Land. First and foremost, he stressed PRAYER!
Next, he urged us to continue to encourage other pilgrims to come and visit
like we have. I have to tell you that nothing can really prepare for you for a
visit, but you learn so much that you would not learn otherwise.
