Within the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre lies a tiny chapel built over the spot St Helena identified as the tomb of Christ. The holiest shrine in the Orthodox faith, it is host to the most controversial and divisive ceremony in the Christian world. On the night before Pascha – the Orthodox Easter that is dated as the first Sunday after the Spring Equinox and Jewish Passover – the Patriarch of Jerusalem descends into a tiny aedicule that houses the remains of Jesus’ tomb and returns with a candle lit from heaven as proof of divine endorsement for the Orthodox faith. Quite understandably, the Vatican doesn’t send any representatives.
Holy Fire is Victoria Clark’s third historical pilgrimage into dim and distant areas of the Christian world. Unfolding against the backdrop of the current intifada, it is an account of an area of the world riven with age-old disputes as well as a probing of the strange religious passions that inflame the eastern sects of Christianity. Her attention is drawn to the unending ideological, and occasionally physical, battle waged by various denominations of churchmen for their saviour’s tomb. This conflict was most recently manifested in Easter 2002 when a scuffle between the Patriarch of Jerusalem and an Armenian priest, who apparently tried to “hurry the miracle along” with a cigarette lighter, hit newspaper headlines around the world.
Clark reminds us that there is more to the religious life of Jerusalem than a war between Palestinian and Israeli. It is sacred ground to all three Abrahamic religions, Christianity in its most exotic forms included: in one brief stroll through the Old City, Clark encounters a Franciscan fortified house, the headquarters of the Arab Catholic Scouts and a Palestinian beggar whose dress is reminiscent of a Cardinal’s robes. She uses the ceremony of the Holy Flame as a centrepiece to probe the various religious passions that inflame the eastern sects of Christianity. Furthermore, she perceives the struggle between these sects as a microcosm of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a matter equally political and religious in which every inch of sacred territory is disputed.
It is quite clear where her sympathies lie. She believes the sacred ceremony originated in the ninth century as a means to spite the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem. Holy Fire is not a sacral rite, but a sectarian battle standard and, as she earnestly tries to prove, a fraud. Her mockery of its authenticity and relevance in the modern world is part of a wider critique of the head-on collision between religious movements that often differ in only a hair’s breadth of dogma. This argument is highlighted in a series of entertaining vignettes such as suppertime conversations with chain-smoking Orthodox bishops, a Franciscan Friar from Texas and a learned, rather pompous Armenian historian. However, her point about the destruction and intolerance faith can bring is heavyhanded and unenlightening. Like so many other benign amateurs casting their words of wisdom on the Middle East, her treatment of vast and intractable problems is cursory and avuncular. In the fine tradition of British colonial rule, Clark expresses a desire to bang their heads together in an effort to make them all get along, forgetting that an attitude so blithely benevolent gave us Congo, Rhodesia and Iraq.
But even if her conclusions speak for naught, Clark’s investigative journalism does touch on one very important facet of religious life in Jerusalem; the paranoia and suspicions mask a state of permanent fear. Christians in the Near East fear extinction, a fear which is exacerbated by their diminishing numbers and significance in the Middle East and every encroachment onto their sacred space.
It is a fear felt by all. Since the Shoah, the Holy Land has become a symbol of Jewish survival to Jewry across the globe. Meanwhile, to the Palestinians, it is a symbol of their burgeoing but beleaguered national identity. Aggression, after all, masks a fear that in a turbulent and violent world, faith alone finds difficult to to assuage.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2005
Religious fire and fervour
