The road to Mar Saba
The monastery
The nuns praying outside the walls
The Kidron Valley, below Mar Saba
The door-monk coming out to chat with the nunsFull size pics
"Orthodox or Catholic?"
I blanked, never having been faced with the question in exactly that form. The black robed, black bearded monk stared at me for a moment, then went back to handing out paper icons to the nuns gathered outside the door of the monastery.
"You are Orthodox or Catholic?" He looked at me again, "or Protestant?" There was no clear right answer for me among those choices, so I picked the one most easy to defend if I was to be pressed.
"Protestant," I said and smiled pleasantly.
He looked away. "Closed. Today, monastery closed." He went back to handing out icons, and I simply stood by, in the middle of this crowd of chanting nuns, waiting for an opportune moment to explain that I had come a long way, and very much wanted to visit Mar Saba, this very important Orthodox monastery, home to many of orthodoxy's most famous saints. As I stood waiting, the monk shuffled off.
I was with two co-workers, a man and a woman, and we all just sort of stood by, listening to the not unpleasant chanting of the women, clustered about the small doorway. The monk came back, he probably thought it would be easier just to let us in.
"Ok, you come," he pointed at my male colleague and I. "You, stay," he said to the woman. I already knew that there were no woman allowed in Mar Saba, and none had been since the time of it's founding in the 6th century. Indeed, not that much else had changed in that particular corner of the arid Judean desert over the centuries; I guess that's kind of the point of Orthodoxy.
The Orthodox Church, the main form of Christianity practiced in Greece, Russia, and the Middle East, is the direct descendant of the Byzantine Church founded by the Roman emperor Constantinople in the fourth century when adopting Christianity as the official religion. It survived through the centuries, battling all the while against the myriad heretical groups that tried to fork off on the basis of some or other dogmatic dispute. The most notable of these splits was of course the Roman Catholic church.
From it's earliest years, the Orthodoxy has had in its ranks eremitical (hermit) adherents, rejecting the physical world for isolation, hoping to gain stature in the spiritual one. In ancient times, there were monks who walled themselves up in caves, eating only once a week. There were stylites, a type of hermit that climbed up on to the top of pillars, and never came down. And there were plain old monks who just lived out in monastaries in godforsaken places like the Judean desert.
There could hardly be a better setting for the giving up the world, than the Judean desert, since it hardly resembles the earth at all. Mar Saba is built into a canyon in the middle of the vast, dry wastelands that lie south of Jerusalem alongside the dead sea. I had driven there in a taxi from Bethlehem, and after the sprawl of Arab houses petered out, we passed through mile after mile of moonscape, over a road that crossed back and forth on an attempt to navigate hills and cliffs clearly not meant for hospitality. At one point the car got stuck; we got out to see obstacle, but there was none. We had just gotten stuck on the road itself.
We entered the monastery. We followed the monk down the stairs into a courtyard where another identical black robed, black bearded man was standing. We shook hands and met Father Lazarus, an American hippy who after losing himself in the 1960's San Francisco, re-found himself in Orthodoxy, "with the Russians, " as he put it. He has spent the last twenty years in Mar Saba, thus far upholding a vow never to set foot outside. He showed us St. Sabas's tomb, and then in an adjoining church his body, held in a glass display case. He took care to point out both the un-decomposed state of the body, as well as its sweet smell. I did not go close enough to verify either.
I came to Mar Saba in the footsteps of William Dalrymple, a favourite author of mine I've mentioned here before. Dalrymple spent a few months among the many sects of Christians still extant in the Middle East, and gave special attention to these monks, direct descendants as they are from a historically very important line. He passed through Mar Saba and stayed for a few days, enough to earn the place a chapter in his book.
I asked Fr. Lazarus if he knew Dalrymple. He did, but was dismissive. "I was not that impressed by him. He was trying to write a book, he was not interested in learning about the mysteries of Orthodoxy." Sensing that I was about to earn a lengthy lecture about these mysteries, and knowing that my co-worker was still waiting with the nuns outside, I beat a retreat, though not before accepting a glass of water from the spring which St. Saba had caused to appear 15 centuries earlier. It was quite nice.
In Dalrymple's book, there is a sense of fatalism surrounding these ancient communities. In Turkey, he recounts how the Armenian Christrians, having been more or less forced out of the country, they are now being systematically removed from history as well, as their churches and graveyards being torn down and buried. In Lebanon, he describes the once powerful Maronite Christian community as a group of short-sighted thugs, hellbent on taking the country down with them on their path to self-destruction. In Israel and Palestine, it's a simpler, perhaps sadder story of the Palestinian Christians taking advantage of their relative wealth to simple up and leave.
There are 15 monks in Mar Saba today, down from the thousands of antiquity, down from the 80 of Mark Twain's visit in the 1860's, and down from the 20 that Dalrymple saw ten years ago. Their decline is less stated than that of the majority of Palestine's Christians, the vast majority of which have moved away to less insane parts of the world. One often thinks of the Jews and Muslims at each other's necks in the Holy Land, but in this internecine battle it’s the Christians who have been hear the longest, and have suffered the worst: the population of Jerusalem was over 50% Christian at the time of Israel's independence, today it is less than 2%.
I blanked, never having been faced with the question in exactly that form. The black robed, black bearded monk stared at me for a moment, then went back to handing out paper icons to the nuns gathered outside the door of the monastery.
"You are Orthodox or Catholic?" He looked at me again, "or Protestant?" There was no clear right answer for me among those choices, so I picked the one most easy to defend if I was to be pressed.
"Protestant," I said and smiled pleasantly.
He looked away. "Closed. Today, monastery closed." He went back to handing out icons, and I simply stood by, in the middle of this crowd of chanting nuns, waiting for an opportune moment to explain that I had come a long way, and very much wanted to visit Mar Saba, this very important Orthodox monastery, home to many of orthodoxy's most famous saints. As I stood waiting, the monk shuffled off.
I was with two co-workers, a man and a woman, and we all just sort of stood by, listening to the not unpleasant chanting of the women, clustered about the small doorway. The monk came back, he probably thought it would be easier just to let us in.
"Ok, you come," he pointed at my male colleague and I. "You, stay," he said to the woman. I already knew that there were no woman allowed in Mar Saba, and none had been since the time of it's founding in the 6th century. Indeed, not that much else had changed in that particular corner of the arid Judean desert over the centuries; I guess that's kind of the point of Orthodoxy.
The Orthodox Church, the main form of Christianity practiced in Greece, Russia, and the Middle East, is the direct descendant of the Byzantine Church founded by the Roman emperor Constantinople in the fourth century when adopting Christianity as the official religion. It survived through the centuries, battling all the while against the myriad heretical groups that tried to fork off on the basis of some or other dogmatic dispute. The most notable of these splits was of course the Roman Catholic church.
From it's earliest years, the Orthodoxy has had in its ranks eremitical (hermit) adherents, rejecting the physical world for isolation, hoping to gain stature in the spiritual one. In ancient times, there were monks who walled themselves up in caves, eating only once a week. There were stylites, a type of hermit that climbed up on to the top of pillars, and never came down. And there were plain old monks who just lived out in monastaries in godforsaken places like the Judean desert.
There could hardly be a better setting for the giving up the world, than the Judean desert, since it hardly resembles the earth at all. Mar Saba is built into a canyon in the middle of the vast, dry wastelands that lie south of Jerusalem alongside the dead sea. I had driven there in a taxi from Bethlehem, and after the sprawl of Arab houses petered out, we passed through mile after mile of moonscape, over a road that crossed back and forth on an attempt to navigate hills and cliffs clearly not meant for hospitality. At one point the car got stuck; we got out to see obstacle, but there was none. We had just gotten stuck on the road itself.
We entered the monastery. We followed the monk down the stairs into a courtyard where another identical black robed, black bearded man was standing. We shook hands and met Father Lazarus, an American hippy who after losing himself in the 1960's San Francisco, re-found himself in Orthodoxy, "with the Russians, " as he put it. He has spent the last twenty years in Mar Saba, thus far upholding a vow never to set foot outside. He showed us St. Sabas's tomb, and then in an adjoining church his body, held in a glass display case. He took care to point out both the un-decomposed state of the body, as well as its sweet smell. I did not go close enough to verify either.
I came to Mar Saba in the footsteps of William Dalrymple, a favourite author of mine I've mentioned here before. Dalrymple spent a few months among the many sects of Christians still extant in the Middle East, and gave special attention to these monks, direct descendants as they are from a historically very important line. He passed through Mar Saba and stayed for a few days, enough to earn the place a chapter in his book.
I asked Fr. Lazarus if he knew Dalrymple. He did, but was dismissive. "I was not that impressed by him. He was trying to write a book, he was not interested in learning about the mysteries of Orthodoxy." Sensing that I was about to earn a lengthy lecture about these mysteries, and knowing that my co-worker was still waiting with the nuns outside, I beat a retreat, though not before accepting a glass of water from the spring which St. Saba had caused to appear 15 centuries earlier. It was quite nice.
In Dalrymple's book, there is a sense of fatalism surrounding these ancient communities. In Turkey, he recounts how the Armenian Christrians, having been more or less forced out of the country, they are now being systematically removed from history as well, as their churches and graveyards being torn down and buried. In Lebanon, he describes the once powerful Maronite Christian community as a group of short-sighted thugs, hellbent on taking the country down with them on their path to self-destruction. In Israel and Palestine, it's a simpler, perhaps sadder story of the Palestinian Christians taking advantage of their relative wealth to simple up and leave.
There are 15 monks in Mar Saba today, down from the thousands of antiquity, down from the 80 of Mark Twain's visit in the 1860's, and down from the 20 that Dalrymple saw ten years ago. Their decline is less stated than that of the majority of Palestine's Christians, the vast majority of which have moved away to less insane parts of the world. One often thinks of the Jews and Muslims at each other's necks in the Holy Land, but in this internecine battle it’s the Christians who have been hear the longest, and have suffered the worst: the population of Jerusalem was over 50% Christian at the time of Israel's independence, today it is less than 2%.
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