The Christian Thing

I have been on a lot of hikes lately:  to Pella in the northern Jordan valley which overlooks the river Jordan and its incredibly fertile flood plain where fruit and vegetables never stop growing (the most delicious peaches I have ever eaten are in season 8 months of the year!  Take that Niagara!).   There are remnants of human settlements that date back 5000 - 8000 years, including Byzantine, Roman, Greek and Canaanite ruins, and evidence of nomadic hunters wandering through back to the early stone age - hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I was also in Machaerus, the stunning palace ruin of King Herod, whose kingdom included a strip of land along the east bank of the Jordan River and Dead Sea.  This palace - one of several of Herod's - is perched on a high hill top, protected by precipitous cliffs, overlooking the Dead Sea and the west bank beyond.  Here John the Baptist was held in a dungeon for saying the wrong thing about Herod's son's wife and eventually lost his head as a result.

When you are in these places you cannot help thinking about the sequence of things:  when did the Greek empire fade?  When did the Roman empire start to extend its reach and hold sway over these lands?  And when did Jesus come along and shake things up?   You find yourself in conversations you never imagined having:  Like, for example:  Hmmm,  I wonder if  Jesus ever walked here?  Did he ever take the eastern route from Galillee down to Jerusalem?   It would have made sense.  Walking up the hill from the Sea of Galilee to Umm Qais (Gadara), then heading 20km over to Pella, then Jerash, Amman (known as Philadelphia at the time), Madaba and then a hop over the Jordan river and a day's walk to Jerusalem.  These were all bustling cities about  day's walk from each other with populations who might have been interested in hearing his message.  He was obviously good at PR.

Whether Jesus took that route of not, the Byzantines thought that he did, so there are pilgrimage churches dating from the 2nd - 6th centuries all along the east bank of the Jordan river coming down from the Golan Heights.  In many cases the walls and foundations are still there, as are the elaborate tiled mosaic floors, which have weathered 1800 years of use.  It stops me cold when I think about the passage of time and the people who built these original structures.  They were only a couple of generations removed from Jesus Christ himself, and may even have heard stories from their parents who heard stories from their grandparents, right back to the "year zero" as we know it in the western calendar.

It is interesting for me to be confronted by all these thoughts of Christ as a person.  All of my colleagues here simply assume I am Christian.  Because I have to be something.  It is not an option not to have a religious identity.  There are only 2 types of cemeteries in this country - Muslim or Christian - and you have to be one of them because if you die, you have to be buried.  And that's the law.  And they know I am not Jewish.  And when I am asked what I am - which happens all the time - I say that "I guess I am Christian".  Because I know I am not Muslim - and they know that too.  

But I am not sure if anyone could have a more secular, scientific, rationalist upbringing than my own:  I was born in a post-war planned town full of Cambridge-educated British nuclear scientists fully focused on creating the new modernity.  If ever there was a place where God was dead ... or rendered irrelevant... Deep River would be it.   In Canada, I would never call myself a Christian.  So, of course it is fascinating to now live in the holy land and think more about these questions of faith and belief and religious or ethnic identity.  And about how these physical places have become a metaphor for guiding people all over the planet in their spiritual lives.

Thinking about these questions of belief and place have been further complicated by an interesting culture clash that I witness every day between work and home.

At work, I have a number of colleagues who are Christian.  They are generally Greek or Syrian orthodox and their families have been Christian ever since there was a Christ to believe in.  Their religious identities pre-date the coming of Islam by a good 400 years or so.  If you google their last names you see that at some point in the last few centuries, someone in their broader family or tribe (eg with the same last name) has been a Patriarch or a Bishop in Aleppo or Damascus or Beirut in one of the splinter factions of the Orthodox or Maronite Catholic Church.

This is just my observation - no research or backing for this - but I would say for many of these colleagues their Christianity is less about religious belief or observance, and more about an ethnic identity.  Some young men, in particular - who definitely don't go to church on Sunday mornings and are not remotely devout - cleave to this identity and are fond of tattooing christian imagery on their bodies - the cross, images of Christ, bleeding hearts.  I was on a dive boat with a group of Maronite Christians from Beirut several months ago and the fellows were all tattooed.  One young man had a huge tat that covered his upper thighs and full torso that read something like "onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war."  In English.  One of my young colleagues has a big tat of Jesus on his shoulder.  These are the same guys who are going clubbing every night and are enjoying alcohol to the fullest, in defiance of the majority rules.  It is all a part of their definition of being Christian.

So I contrast this to the situation I find around me in my apartment building.  I happen to live surrounded by neighbours who are evangelical christians - mostly from the United States, but also from Australia and the Netherlands.  Most of them are here studying intensive arabic at a purpose-built language school that was created in order to teach proselytizers how to bring the "word of God" to this part of the world.   One of these neighbours has been here for 14 years.  He is originally from Missouri, I think, but now lives here in Amman and, when I asked him what his job was, he told me that he spends his time in the homes of Iraqi refugee families "helping them clear up their misunderstandings about the bible".  So that is what he does all day.

I find this both deeply disturbing and richly layered with irony.   That someone feels compelled to bring the 'word of God' to a culture where it is the norm to pray 5 times a day, and there is someone singing from a minaret daily like clockwork to remind us all that 'God is Great', is simply absurd to me.   To propose that their brand of evangelical christianity - that is about 5 minutes old in the scheme of human history - is somehow more worthy of attention than the churches that have been here since the beginning of the Christian era is also suspect.  I acknowledge that my reaction is visceral, knee-jerk, but I just don't like the gall, the imposition, the idea that their faith or belief system is somehow more valuable than the those of the people who live here.

Plus - unlike the tattooed guys - this group doesn't go clubbing or go drinking and they are much too earnest and much less fun.  Believe me, there is nothing more achingly dull than an afternoon barbecue with a group of evangelical christians in the holy land!

I am not sure what to make of all these observations.  I am still sorting through them.  I am actually not sure there is a conclusion to be made, except to say that the internal contradictions between historical fact, physical place, and spiritual belief within this very fluid and wide open notion of "being a Christian" is totally fascinating.  All the more so when I imagine that I have trod on the same footpath which that guy called Jesus Christ walked about 2000 years ago.