Written by Alan Elrod
Jerusalem: It’s one of the most storied and coveted cities in the world. Considering that Harding has an overseasprogram that sends students there three times a year, it’s also one of the most visited.
Since it’s a Christian school, most people who have yet to go seem to count themselves like someone from New Jersey who’s never seen Bruce Springsteen in concert. However, this need was something that eluded me for a long time. That seems like a weird thing for a Christian to say, but let me explain. Partly, I’ve never thought it looked attractive. You can disagree; it’s fine. Paint your entire neighborhood various shades of beige and white if you want. I’m sure a tumbleweed will make itself at home there. Still, there’s more to it than that.
When I think about Jerusalem, I think about dust. In my mind it’s lying over everything like a thin layer of history, the dead skin of an ancient place. I imagine walking through it, the grainy particles adhering to my sweaty legs and feet, and realize what it meant when Christ commanded his apostles to shake off the dust of any town that rejected them. Each individual grain bears the nature and substance of all who have tread on it. The soil connects you to a place, to a people, and bindsyou to them. Walk where Jesus walked? To wander about, letting that same dust cling to my skin, convicting my unconviction, fails to register the expected response. I picture the footsteps of Jesus preserved like fossilized dinosaur tracks. You could put your foot inside and compare shoe sizes. But there aren’t any, not even those black shoeprints that cartoon detectives always peel off the ground to inspect with a magnifying glass.
I’m aware of how much of this is self-contradiction. I’ve spent four years here studying history. I’ve always imagined that, when brushing against brick walls or trailing my hand along banisters, I was touching fingertips with the past through some lingering, well-aged particle. Man was brought from dust and back to dust goes. In Jerusalem, my mind turns to questions of nature and Chalcedon and I push my hands deep into my pockets.
Mark Strand has a poem inwhich he says, “In a field, I am the absence of field … Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where I have been.” Imagining myself there in that city, I bend space around me but do not join it. This is holy land, holy ground, and I’m not lion-hearted. I wouldlie down with England and Judah, myself barely a sheep in wolves’ clothing: a sheep comforted by too many shepherds’ staffs to follow any.
Staring at a photograph, looking at that baked brown landscape and sizzling sunlight rippling and rebounding off of a golden dome and a thousand cars, I remember how much I hate summer and all its dust-speckled heat. I realize why lost people wander in deserts; it is because the lukewarm don’t get found. It stirs my dispassion and rouses my disinterest.
Holy ground, holy land, but what about Holy Spirit? That’s the turn. Wherever something is not, the Holy Spirit is. In my absence of faith and flame, God can enter. Here, where Jerusalem is not, I am it. My friends are the torn and divided history of man, the parched deserts, the expansive heavens and the love of God. The temple that some would rebuild already stands inside of you. Here’s to pilgrims’ progress.
ALAN ELROD is a guest contributor for the Bison. He may be contacted ataelrod@harding.edu
