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Jerusalem 1966

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

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To come here for three days seemed rather meaningless beforehand. But since the itinerary included this visit, I did not want to miss it. It would at least be a preparation for the real journey one is always hoping for, with unbounded time at one’s disposal. Then there were other reserves: it’s no good hoping to penetrate the religious reality which lies below, behind, especially in so short a time; everything that obscures and blocks this — the tourists, the petty commerce, the local colour of the East, the apparatus of rival devotions — all this asserts itself in a much more clamant way.

No contact with the religious reality — that was a foregone conclusion. But man proposes, God disposes. I could hardly imagine a more brutal contact with this reality. I passed those three days in solitude, with the Gospels and Jerusalem. I had little idea that so charged a current would pass between these two poles.

Nevertheless, with every year that passes I am more and more seized by fear as I listen to the lamentations of Holy Week. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.’ And I know that Jerusalem, which once meant the people ofjuda, the synagogue, now means the Church, Christianity, divided, heir not only of the promise but of the betrayal.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers