Humble Monk with a Tall Tale to Tell
Authenticity amid shenanigans
Somehow, I stumbled upon an old Irish monk of the Franciscan variety while I got lost in the drama, the beauty, the mystery, and the mystic music of the old city of Jerusalem many years ago.
I was trying to find the starting point of the walk to end all walks, taken by the God-with-skin-on-man, on his way to be crucified way back when.
“I know the way well,” says my surprise guide, fully clad in his monk’s robes of very faded brown. “I’ve walked it many a day since I got here sixty years ago.”
He certainly had the look of a man who had walked long and hard. Thin as a wisp, gaunt, but still relatively agile for a man of great age. He carried the marks of a fella who had suffered much on the Franciscan quest for the holy grail of humility.
The walk was remarkable, made even more so by the profound and authentic insights offered by my ancient monk along the way. There wasn’t an inch of this famous terrain that he didn’t know intimately.
If I had to sum him up in a word, it would be authentic. This fella was the real deal. His long trek had made him an extraordinarily humble human being.
We ended where all pilgrims do on this venerated walk, in perhaps the most holy place in the world for Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within its walls are both the place where Jesus was crucified and the tomb from which he rose.
But it was the humble candour with which my Irish monk spoke about the shenanigans that have gone on over the centuries between the rival Christian denominations jockeying for power and prestige within the church walls that most intrigued me.
In one sense, the Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian Orthodox, and Ethiopian ongoing presence in the church serves as a symbol of Christian unity. However, just behind the façade, I received the no-holds-barred historical back story of territorial disputes, and darkroom deals, which could be the stuff of cinematic drama.
Far from united, these various factions had left no stone unturned over the centuries in attempting to gain total control over various sections of this most holy place. The resulting divided areas of the church persist until today. They got hammered out with successive Ottoman Empire Sultans during their long reign over the Holy Land.
Divine as this place is, it got littered with the legacy of people who were, let’s just say, so very human in their behaviour.
When my youthful ears received this information, it frankly appalled me. Especially the fact that the poor old Ethiopian, apparently lacking much skin in the game, got relegated to an area not even in the church but on its roof. This was, one might say, not so much like being left out in the cold but being cast out into the heat. The Ethiopians, however, had made the best of a bad lot and erected a monastery right there on the roof, in which a few of their monks still dwell.
In the end, despite the human drama and intrigue, it was the authentic telling of this tall tale by this genuine holy man that remains with me still. There was no whitewashing, he told things as they are. And if I had any doubt about his authenticity, it dissolved completely when took be into the bowels of the church and showed me the tiny monk’s cell where he had been living in the past sixty years.
The shenanigans of human behaviour notwithstanding, many truly holy people had dwelled within the walls of this remarkable place, and my guy was well and truly amongst them. This fella, comrades, was the real deal. A walking, talking, genuinely humble monk with a tall tale to tell and the mystic music of Jerusalem in his soul.
— Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
