Haifa, Israel

It is early morning in Port Said, Egypt, where our ship is tied up at the entrance to the Suez Canal, waiting to enter. Constantly, ships of all shapes and sizes float past us, honking their horns with men on board yelling something in Arabic. In the background, if there is room for one more sound in this medley of noises, the muezzin’s call for prayer from the nearby minaret adds a haunting aspect to the sound landscape. Then, all noises stop. No more yelling, no more hammering sounds drift across from the ship yard across the Canal, no more honking. For all Allah-fearing Muslims, it’s time to lay down the tools and pray.

It is against this backdrop of sounds and sights that I want to write about my experience in Israel. We have just spent some time there and my mind is bursting with impressions and thoughts. I could write volumes about my relationship with Israel and the Jewish people and all the emotions this relationship entails. But I have no idea where and how to begin – and aside, this is not the place nor the time to elaborate on my soulful, and equally conflicting thoughts about this part of the world. This tiny country has loomed huge in my conscience all my life. Yet, I have never visited Israel – until now.

To start, you cannot be of my generation (the post WWII generation), grow up in Germany and not have feelings about Israel. As a people and as a country, Germans had to come to grips with the Holocaust and shape a new relationship with the Jewish people in the decades after the war. Reparations were made, words of apology spoken and a friendship formed between the two nations. While all of those are necessary steps towards reconciliation, nothing can and will make up for the horrifying acts of aggression against the Jewish people.

And then there is my Christian upbringing, which added a strong sense of home coming to this trip to the Holy Land. After all, this is where Jesus acted out his role as the founder of the Christian faith, my faith. Having seen so many images of the places, over the years, where Jesus walked, taught and lived, you could have blind folded me, and I could have described the scenery and landscape to you. But being able to recall the place from the pictures I have seen and experiencing it personally and in the physical are two very different modes of remembering.

For me, visiting the sites of Jesus’ life, turned into a pilgrimage - but not in the usual sense. As an “unchurched Christian”, who no longer listens to Sunday morning services nor belongs to a Christian denomination, I was seeing and experiencing the sites from the perspective of someone, who has knowledge of the historical significance of the locale and has spent much of his life in the midst of the evangelical world, but has stepped away from organized religion.

As I stood and observed other pilgrims worship the ground they were standing on, kiss the rock where Jesus is said to have shared a meal with his disciples, pray at the spot where Jesus preached the “Sermon on the Mount” and get baptized in the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized, I was touched by the sincerity of the faithful, their heartfelt devotion and the love expressed in their actions. How much comfort billions of people around the world derive from the spiritual practices they learned in Sunday School, in their mosque or temple, or through religious teachings in their synagogue and through pilgrimages. In today’s society we tend to emphasize the negative aspects of organized religion, the wars fought in the name of faith, the twisting of spiritual truths and the abuses by religious organizations, that the benefits are lost. Fact remains, spiritual practice feeds the soul and religion has found a way to show us humans how we can have a relationship with the Divine. And while I have decided to grow my faith outside of the structures of organized religion, I respect the devotion of my fellow pilgrims at the holy sites of Israel. Yes, I do believe these things happened here and yes, I do believe they were significant events in history. After all, what happened here 2,000 years ago and believing in these events have made me into the person I am today. Perhaps forever, my evolving faith and my life as a spiritual being have taken me away from church structures but, in no way, shape or form do I judge those who find comfort in them.

After visiting the sites where Jesus lived and preached around the Sea of Galilee 2,000 years ago, I end my day at the Temple of the Baha’i faith in Haifa. Here, we are being shown a very different way of communicating with the Divine: through the creation of beauty. And while I have a long way to go before I can even touch the level of perfection we saw in the gardens of the Baha’i temple, I humbly submit that I know a thing or two about connecting with God while pulling weeds…