CENTRE OF THE WORLD

It’s actually quite hard to write about our day in Jerusalem yesterday. For one thing, it was packed with things to talk about, and for another, it’s hard to do many of those things justice. I’ll try though; they say you write best about what you know, so I’ll start with the one thing I knew from the moment I woke up: it was my birthday.

Paul kicked it off (obviously) by singing at me. Thankfully he went for ‘happy birthday’ and not something by Beyoncé (which might have been his second choice). Then we had breakfast, while I opened the boxes of tea he’d bought as a present, and I read my card.

It’s a strange one, having your birthday in a foreign land. Perhaps it’s even stranger knowing that you’ll be going for the first time to the Faithful City, stepping into the history you’ve been reading about all your life. It seemed significant somehow to be there on that day.

We jumped off the tram at City Hall, just up the road from the New Gate. The Old City lies at the heart of modern Jerusalem, and with its Sixteenth Century turreted stone walls, fluttering flags and tall cypresses, it was unmissable. The City was always a fortress, and while the current walls might not be where they’ve always been, they still encircle many of the important sites, allowing you in through a series of gates: the Zion Gate for example, the Dung Gate, the Damascus Gate, and the place we were headed, the Jaffa Gate.

The Old City is quietly breathtaking in a way. It’s hard to describe how - everything you might expect is there, including the narrow colonnaded markets that twist and turn through its heart, the stone churches, the ancient buildings and the jostling cultures of its three great religious traditions. We dived into a steep market in the Christian Quarter, and bustled past vendors selling everything from ‘I love Jerusalem’ t-shirts to ornate silver chess sets. There were rugs hanging from the roof, there were incense burners, there were baseball caps and yarmulkes, rosary beads and fridge magnets, ornaments and nativity scenes and crucifixes and painted boxes, paintings of Jesus, portraits of Mary, and the smell of spices and cigarette smoke and incense in the air.

Through the streets beyond the Jaffa Gate we turned and overtook and nudged through with our rucksacks, until eventually, we found ourselves, almost by accident, right outside a place I’d only seen in pictures: the Western Wall, and beyond that, the tip of the Dome of the Rock, glistening bright gold in the sunshine. Temple Mount - the place where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, where the Jewish Temple stood for generations, where for 1900 years, the Jewish people longed to be, and now, where the modern worlds of Judaism, Christianity and Islam collide in history, geography, politics and tradition - the furious, beautiful, red-raw, centre of the world. 

“Happy birthday buddy,” said Paul. I smiled. There was more to come though. It had seemed already that Jerusalem, the Old City, was a place of such interweaving spiritual forces that in a moment, in just a few footsteps, the atmosphere could shift and change: one minute you’d feel elated, the next heavy, and perhaps at peace, then joy, then fear and oppression - as though the physics was as different as you might expect at the centre of gravity’s pull. I had to pray. And that thought made me chuckle, given that we were right there opposite the Western Wall.

“Atmosphere changer,” whispered a voice inside me. I think I understand it. There is nothing to be afraid of when you carry the atmosphere with you. If I could do that here, at the centre of the world, I could do that anywhere. And there would be more to come...