The Herald embarks on the ‘pilgrimage of a lifetime’ to the Holy Land with the Order of Malta for a spiritual journey like no other
Our pilgrimage to the Holy Land had been three years in the making. Derailed by Covid, the trip was originally intended to be an “international pilgrimage” involving over a thousand members of the Order of Malta. That’s not a tour group. It would have been a mini-Crusade.
Thankfully we ended up with 28, as the Order’s British Association decided to go it alone. To an outsider, our party lining up by the El Al check-in desk for Tel Aviv at Heathrow must have looked like any other group of British tourists – many in blazers, panamas and chinos; average age over 60.
If you looked closer at our pilgrim band, however, there were clues that we weren’t the sort of religious group that has always been welcomed in the Holy Land. “Even before the Crusades,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in his book Jerusalem: The Biography, citing a medieval source, “no travellers are as evil as pilgrims to Jerusalem.”
Our giveaways were a Maltese cross on a red baseball cap worn by one member – a former Order of Malta president carrying a JP Morgan conference holdall – and a battered white suitcase emblazoned with a black Maltese cross that had seen service in various humanitarian situations in war zones.
This is the same cross worn by 12th-century Hospitaller Knights on their black mantles as they marched around the old Holy City, or practised archery with the Knights Templars in the Valley of Kidron outside the city walls, after the city had been captured in the First Crusade. Their job had been to protect pilgrims, to wage war on infidels, serve in the hospital and defend Christendom. We were there only as pilgrims – fortunately killing infidels in the defence of Christendom is no longer a duty of members – but our spiritual mission was the same as our knightly forbears.
The questions fired at us by the member of security at the El Al desk at Heathrow were not the usual “Did you pack your bag yourself?” queries.
“What is the name of your tour chaplain,” she asked curtly.
“Monsignor John Armitage,” I replied.
“What hotel are you staying in Jerusalem?”
“The Gloria.”
Our passports were returned and we were ushered through. It’s fair to say that 800 years ago, any group identifying themselves as Knights of the Order of Malta would not have had such easy passage to the Holy Land.
The Holy Land is often described as the “Fifth Gospel”. After our week there in November, armed with a complimentary Albina Tours (est. 1949) archaeological tourist map entitled “In the Footsteps of Our Lord Jesus”, I can confirm this pilgrim cliché is true. It’s more than reliving the stories of the Gospel and getting a better sense of the Old Testament. Following the story of Christ’s life challenges you to confront and re-examine your faith.
Often this involves touching ancient rocks upon which sacred churches have been built (and rebuilt) based on oral histories of the Gospel. After visiting the Mount of Olives, we descended the steep trail leading to the Garden of Gethsemane, which is still a cultivated garden. Ancient, ragged olive trees and thorny bougainvillea line the walls where Christ experienced the “agony in the garden” before being led to his trial and execution.
In front of the altar is the ancient “bedrock” of stones – encircled by an iron ring of thorns – where Jesus prayed before he was betrayed. As I knelt, I read from Luke 22 (39-46) – a framed passage hung off the altar rail – in which Jesus is described as coming down from the Mount of Olives, knows his end is nigh and says to his apostles: “Pray that you may not be put to the test.”
I looked up at the dramatic mosaics depicting His agony on the wall and reflected how all our lives are a form of trial (certainly for the chairman of the Herald in recent years as we nearly faced the last rites during the pandemic) and prayed for God’s grace. Then I reflected how faith was physically built on rock and a cycle of early Christian/Byzantine birth, Muslim destruction, Crusader rebirth and modern architectural resurrection.
Like medieval pilgrims, we were more than happy to crawl in order to worship and pray at the Silver Star of Bethlehem at the Grotto of the Nativity. The silver had become the colour of lead, smoothed by hundreds of years of pilgrim touches and prostrated kisses.
One of the most moving moments was visiting the bronze shrine in the Holy Sepulchre church in the heart of the old Christian quarter of Jerusalem, which marks where Christ’s broken and flagellated body was laid after being taken down from the cross. But this is what a trip to the Holy Land is: a form of physical and historical communion with the Gospel. A spiritual adventure as daily excavation of the Soul.
I’d recommend going in a small group led by a priest (we celebrated Mass every day, often at only 10 minutes notice if a chapel was available). Try to follow Christ’s life chronologically, starting with the sites of Jesus’s ministry around the Sea of Galilee – a highlight is Capernaum where you can see the stone House of St Peter. You should include Nazareth, the Dead Sea (my father and I floated like salted pickles), and the River Jordan where John the Baptist baptised Christ, although there are rival (one under Israeli occupation, the other a World Heritage site in Jordan) claims for the actual site.
We went to the Qasr el Yahud baptismal site, near Jericho, on the West Bank. The River Jordan is more narrow and reedy than I expected. On one side of the bank is a rustic platform and chapel where one can be christened. As a member of our group filled an empty magnum of Chablis with muddy water for a family christening, we saw a group of evangelical Christians from Nigeria being ritually dunked into the waters.
Relying on my shamefully rusty knowledge of the Holy Land from my school days, I came to feel like a travelling actor in a medieval mystery play which re- enacted scenes from the Bible. There were moments of comedy such as when our Hospitaller leader, James Pavey, huddled us all into a hotel room on Remembrance Sunday and calmly announced that the Gloria Hotel in Jerusalem could no longer host us as their builders had “not yet finished” the new rooms. So there was no room at the inn, literally (we ended up in a hotel in the diplomatic quarter).
Another was when our Deacon Philip Ogilvie, given just minutes notice to serve Mass, had to run after our bus to retrieve his portable mass kit. Our effort to pose as ‘locals’ to attend the 7am Mass celebrated by Franciscans inside the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem failed miserably. Some of our party were frogmarched out after their lanyards betrayed them as members of a ‘group’. Groups must wait until the tourist doors open at 9.30am.
Still, it was worth every minute as I soon found myself hunched under the altar where Christ was born – a tiny, cave-like Eastern Orthodox grotto full of glimmering beaten-silver thuribles and candles on intricate pulleys, dark ruby walls decorated with faded gilt drapery and Crusader knight graffiti. A few days later my wife and I held hands as we knelt cramped under an altar where Christ was nailed to the cross at Golgotha.
During the 20 seconds I had to kiss the site where Christ was crucified, my mind went blank. I struggled for the right prayer, like an actor fumbling for his lines. The next thing I knew we were being herded out by a Greek Orthodox priest. It took a return visit at 6.30am the next morning for me to better understand what the real purpose of this “pilgrimage of a lifetime” was for me; and why I will be going back, leading a Herald pilgrimage in 2023. That first time, I mumbled a Hail Mary and asked God for his grace to make me a better person. The prayer was essentially about whether God might help me on my daily struggle to be a Catholic. I also prayed for the Herald.
But on the return visit, when I realised you could put your arm down a shute in the altar and touch the foundation rocks of Golgotha in the Calvary chapel, I prayed differently. This was a prayer of thanks: for being so blessed to be a pilgrim after the vicissitudes of my life and so grateful to be married to my wife who was kneeling beside me.
Why so few Catholics go to the Holy Land, or visit only once, was something I found odd after our week. Why had so few of us been to the Grotto of the Annunciation in Nazareth, or walked the 900 metres of the Stations of the Cross uphill along Jerusalem’s Via Doloroso, when we regularly visit Lourdes, Rome and Walsingham?
Indeed, within a century of Christ’s death, Christian pilgrims began heading to Jerusalem, searching for meaning in their lives as well as relics (iron nails, splinters of the cross). The first written report of a pilgrim was that of a Bordeaux traveller in 337 AD. By the 12th century, in the reign of Queen Melisende, Jerusalem was viewed as the very centre of the world. But today only a trickle of the world’s estimated three billion Catholics make the journey (not that the coach car parks are empty).
According to Benedict XVI, a pilgrimage should be a spiritual journey, not a “bring your own beliefs” experience: “To go on pilgrimage means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where He has revealed himself,” he writes. Rather than the new-age mantra of seeking to find yourself, a Holy Land pilgrimage is about finding God in yourself as well as the truth of Christ’s life.
On the tour, I recommend including a trip to Acre, a critical coastal defence town during the Crusades. The Siege of Acre was where the last Crusader knights fought to the death in 1291. The site of the Hospitaller castle is unmissable along with the tunnels under the city which was destroyed after the Mamluk leader unleashed huge rocks from a large catapult called “The Victorious”.
The finale was seeing the original site of the Order’s Hospital of St John, close to the Holy Sepulchre, which had been caring for pilgrims before the crusader knights liberated the Holy City on 15 July 1099. The hospital could care for up to 2,000 patients, including a section for Muslims and Jews with their own halal/kosher kitchens (just as the Order’s maternity hospital in Bethlehem primarily serves Muslim women).
The sites where Christ preached around the Sea of Galilee were especially memorable. I loved the ancient mooring steps by the Church of the Primacy of Saint Peter where Jesus would have disembarked from a fishing boat to preach the Sermon on the Mount. On our first morning we were led around the archaeological site of Tabgha, where our guide, Father Kelly, said it was “probable” Christ preached in the ancient synagogue. We also saw the contemporary Duc in Altum chapel where the altar is in the shape of a fishing boat carved from a Lebanese Cyprus.
Outside, by chance, we encountered Cardinal Péter Erdő of Hungary – a favourite to be the next pope – who was leading his own Hungarian coach tour pilgrimage. Having interviewed him in Budapest last April for the Herald, we were both as surprised as each other to meet again so soon. Seeing the Cardinal pop up that day in Capernaum on the Lake of Galilee, at the Church of the Beatitudes and the Church of the Multiplication proved to be a good omen for our pilgrimage. I look forward to returning with my fellow Herald pilgrims from the US and UK in 2023.
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