Jerusalem, December 1496
I have now stood at the sites that three major religions claim as the most sacred ground on earth. The Temple Mount. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Al-Aqsa Mosque. In a radius of perhaps five hundred meters, the most contested geography in human history, and standing in it you understand something that no amount of reading prepares you for: the physical reality of the place is entirely ordinary. Stone. Air. The sound of pigeons. The smell of incense and old stone and human bodies gathered in close space.
What people are willing to die for is not the place. The place is simply stone. What they are willing to die for is the story they have agreed to tell about the place, and the story’s power to tell them who they are, which is a power that no mere stone possesses and which the stone should not be held accountable for providing or withholding.
I was condemned at fifteen for asking why the church required my obedience rather than my understanding. The answer I have arrived at, after forty years of asking and thirty-eight years of wandering through every major tradition’s holiest spaces, is that the requirement of obedience is precisely what the institution needs in order to remain an institution. Understanding is corrosive to institutional authority. Obedience is its foundation. This is not a theological argument. It is an organizational observation.
I have been to holy ground. The ground was not holy. What was there was human longing, very intense, pointed at stone.