Dreamers of the Day

Having done a grown man’s work from the time he was nine, Sergeant Thompson had no such compassion, and when we’d chatted the hours away, watching Winston paint, he’d counseled me to harden my heart. “If every traveler made it a rule never to give baksheesh, but only to pay for some service rendered, all this beggary would stop overnight.”

I could not give to everyone; neither could I could bring myself to refuse them all. When I’d asked his opinion during our long camel ride, Lawrence had first offered me an Arab proverb: “Too soft and you shall be squeezed. Too hard and you shall be broken.” He suggested a diplomatic compromise: that I prepare myself for each foray into public with three piastres to be given to the first three beggars I encountered and afterward, in good conscience, give no more.

Standing at the entry to Jerusalem, implored by so many for so little, I followed his advice. Remembering the Lord’s words, I gave to “the least of these”—three lepers who sat shrouded in the shadow near the gate. Not even Sergeant Thompson could have argued that they were unworthy; God knows none of them were fit to work.

With that, I felt ready to place my foot on the Via Dolorosa and begin my pilgrimage. It was a narrow street, roughly paved and in some places picturesque, with arches and quaint stone buildings that appeared convincingly ancient to someone from Ohio. It was lined with shops, but Jerusalem seemed to have only two things on sale: lamb meat and souvenirs. Most of the latter were carved from Holy Land olive wood: rosaries, Nativity scenes, heads of Christ, candlesticks. I walked past without much interest, resolutely ignoring the storekeepers’ children who tugged at my sleeves and reminded me that there was “No charge for looking, madams!”

Lawrence’s prediction was correct. At every Station of the Cross, a knot of English-speaking tourists listened raptly to their guides, each of whom shouted to be heard above the surrounding hubbub. “Here is the site of the Holy Steps trodden by the feet of Jesus on His way to Pilate’s Hall of Judgment,” cried the nearest. The staircase itself, it turned out, had long since been removed to Rome, but the place from which it had been taken was indicated with great authority.

A few steps farther along, a modern archway spa

“Here is the stone where the Savior sat and rested before taking up His cross,” I heard a few yards away. Craning my neck, I peeked between the shoulders of the paying customers. Sure enough, I saw a stone.

Descending next into a street that ran north-south and turning left, I worked my way around pilgrims who gazed in reverent contemplation at an impressively shattered granite column, which may well have belonged to some ancient temple. “This is the very spot where the fainting Savior first fell under the weight of His cross,” they were informed. “The heavy cross struck the column such a blow as Christ fell that it broke into pieces, and here they are, to this very day.”

A few steps farther, and my progress was blocked by several groups whose guides were engaged in a dispute. They agreed, in several accents, that this was the very house where Saint Veronica once lived. They agreed also that when the Savior passed by, Veronica had emerged full of womanly compassion, and she had wiped His weary sweating face with a handkerchief. They agreed as well that the handkerchief had miraculously preserved the imprint of the divine visage. The argument concerned the current location of the handkerchief. It was, according to the guides, now preserved in each of four cathedrals: one in Paris, another in Spain, and two in Italy.

That may have been when the tautened rope of my credulity began decisively to fray, but turning south, I tarried to watch pilgrim after pilgrim place a reverent hand on an indented stone that made up the corner of a building. “Here, the Lord stumbled, and this stone bears the mark of His shoulder,” their guide called out loudly.

Nearby, however, a similar indentation was presented for equal veneration to a different group. Of course, the Lord stumbled several times, I could imagine Lillian explaining. To quibble seemed impolite at best and impious at worst. I kept my peace, but somewhere in the crowd an American raised his tenor voice to protest this duplication. Without a moment’s hesitation, his guide amended, “That is the Lord’s shoulder, but here is the mark of His elbow.” At which the American grumbled to the sour-looking lady at his side, “One damn lie after another! Pay ’em enough, these carnies’ll tell the rubes anything they want to hear.”

In danger of achieving a similar state of disgruntled skepticism, I made a quick assessment. The sun was climbing. Time was ru

Nothing is very far from anything else inside the walls of Old Jerusalem, but I hurried to the Christian Quarter, hoping to change my mood by changing my surroundings. The Holy Sepulchre was easy to find. A domed and towered edifice, its austere exterior was severe enough to hush the voices of those who approached. “Here was where our Lord was carried after his sufferings,” Lillie wrote. “Here His body lay for three days. Here He revealed Himself to the women on that glorious spring morn.”

Many of those who’d greeted Jesus on Palm Sunday had expected the Messiah to be a warrior-king who would drive out the Romans and restore the kingdom of David and Solomon to earthly glory. Instead they had seen Jesus fall as helpless prey to the criminal justice system of an empire that had no prisons and few punishments to choose from between the extremes of a cash fine and death on the cross. I tried to imagine the shock—the stu

On the threshold of this sacred site, a group of sopranos sang Mrs. Alexander’s lovely hymn with voices as sweet as my sister’s.

There is a green hill far away, without a city wall,

Where the dear Lord was crucified, Who died to save us all.

Humming along, I thought of Scripture, and stumbled. Jesus, we are told in Hebrews, suffered outside the gate. He was taken out to a hill called Golgotha, and laid in a secret place in a garden near at hand. Well! The church is inside the city walls, and you have to walk down stairs to get to it. And then I remembered that the city that Jesus knew was utterly destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, and that Jerusalem was sacked repeatedly by Crusaders.

These were just the sort of nagging doubts that plagued me when I was a child. Of course the early Christians would have remembered where such sacred events took place, I told myself. When the city walls were erected sometime later, an effort would have been made to incorporate these holy places. And since Jerusalem was repeatedly rebuilt on ruins, the city had slowly risen higher than Golgotha, which was now below the level of the modern city.

You see, Agnes? I could imagine Lillie saying. There’s a logical explanation. That’s why you have to walk down to visit the true site of the Lord’s death and resurrection.