I arrived in Jerusalem on the evening of June 11, but what was meant to be a four-day visit stretched into two weeks. When Israel launched missiles at Iran’s nuclear and military facilities on June 13, everything shut down: airports, airspace, checkpoints, even the gates into the Old City. But while my planned pilgrimage to the Holy Land imploded, I discovered a different aspect of pilgrimage: the key role of religious orders and houses in offering safe haven to travelers.
As a medievalist, I have spent years immersed in texts shaped by the call of Jerusalem. So, although friends and family were divided about the wisdom of this trip, I decided to take advantage of the cheap airfares and visit the holy sites. A friend of mine has worked in the city for a few years and offered me a place to stay. He lives inside the compound of the Charles Borromeo Hospice, or German Hospice, founded in the early twentieth century by German-speaking nuns. Over the years, the compound has served as an orphanage, a care home, and now houses a simple hotel and a kindergarten. The sisters (many now of Romanian origin) still speak German and maintain close ties with the city’s German primary and secondary schools. Though they are relative newcomers in the region’s long history of religious orders, they belong to a tradition of communities who have served the land, its sacred sites, and those who pass through them for centuries.
Since the consecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in A.D. 335 under Emperor Constantine, Christian religious communities (Catholic, Armenian, Orthodox, and later Protestant) have maintained a continuous presence in Jerusalem. In the medieval period, hospices and monasteries were founded by the Franciscans and the Order of St. John, amongst others, to care for pilgrims. Through waves of conquest, crusades, and modern conflicts, this tradition has never entirely disappeared.
With the outbreak of hostilities, my planned pilgrimage was effectively canceled. Instead of walking the Via Dolorosa or visiting the tomb of Christ, I spent most nights being jolted awake by sirens and rushing down to the bunker housed in the cellar of the kindergarten. My first, then second, flights out were canceled, and clear direction from the embassies was lacking. Every gate of the Old City was under armed guard. The Grotto and Garden of Gethsemane, the Armenian Church of Our Lady, and the Franciscan Church of All Nations were also closed. The only other people I saw out and about on foot were Orthodox Jews being admitted in small groups to pray at the Western Wall. In the days that followed, the Old City remained sealed to non-residents. As those gates stayed shut, I noticed how other doors were kept open.
At the hospice, a steady stream of new arrivals began appearing. There was no official coordination or invitation, but they came. Teachers from the German schools, NGO workers from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, diplomats, friends of friends. My host and I watched as the hospice garden, usually quiet and empty, filled with mostly German and Austrian individuals bringing their friends, colleagues, and partners. The sisters moved through it all with calm efficiency, never betraying a hint of panic. I only once saw one flustered or distressed, when she spoke of the children who could not now attend their kindergarten and her concern for them and for the teachers and employees.
Most of those who came had no interest in the religious life of the sisters, nor any connection to the Catholic Church or the Christian faith. But they came because they knew, through decades of tradition and word of mouth in the German-speaking community, that this was a place of refuge. Some were fleeing the more intense strikes in Tel Aviv; others had been ordered to leave their posts in the West Bank and were hoping for overland exit through Jordan or Egypt. In the evenings, we sat beneath the cedar trees, trading information and statements from our various embassies, which were often confusing at best, dangerously out of touch at worst. We were all, to an extent, adrift in this situation, and the hospice acted as a place of stability and refuge. Here, there were beds, meals, and safe shelters and bunkers for when the sirens went off.
At the nearby Abbey of the Dormition, the also German-speaking Benedictine monks were offering something equally vital in the form of the liturgy. The site was acquired in 1898 by Kaiser Wilhelm, and it stands just outside the city walls, at the place where Catholic tradition holds Mary was assumed into heaven, body and soul. My friend and I would walk out to the abbey to attend Mass and midday prayer, but also to speak with the monks and the guests who had found refuge with them and were staying in the rooms left vacant by theology students. Over post-Mass coffee, I met students, diplomats, scholars. Some were calm, intending to wait things out, others were anxious to leave. But all of us were buoyed by the presence of the monks, their patience, hope, and good humor. Where our embassies had issued vague and incoherent advice, the religious brothers and sisters gave us a much needed sense of stability and continuity: They would never willingly retreat from their houses, nor leave a traveler in need stranded.
The ceasefire means I may finally step through the gates of the Old City, but my time here is drawing to a close. Although I may not see all the places I had planned to, I did what pilgrims have done for centuries: I took refuge within the walls of religious communities. I just never expected to do it so literally. My first experience of modern war has, in hindsight, taken on a distinctly medieval shape. Once, monasteries and convents were natural way stations along pilgrimage routes; places that sheltered the body as well as the soul. In Jerusalem, that ancient role is still alive.
The post Finding Sanctuary in Jerusalem appeared first on First Things.
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