Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Book Review: The encounters that cause sparks to fly

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Book Review: The encounters that cause sparks to fly

    The Tablet , UK
    Feb 11 2005

    Lead Book Review - 12 February 2005
    The encounters that cause sparks to fly

    Holy Fire
    Victoria Clark
    Macmillan, £20
    Tablet bookshop price £18.

    My wife was recently asked by the accident and emergency department
    of a London hospital to complete a form requiring her - in addition to
    the usual enquiries about ethnicity, religion, blood group and so on -
    to state her "cultural identity". In the end she entered "Anglican",
    even though she had given the same answer to the question on religion.


    The best passages in Victoria Clark's very clever book suggest that
    the NHS bureaucrat behind that form may have been on to something:
    there is a dimension to our sense of identity which certainly includes
    religion - or the lack of it - but encompasses all sorts of other
    factors too. And if Ms Clark is right it is a thoroughly destructive
    force. There is little in Holy Fire about religion as a source of
    goodness, holiness or moral order; instead, poisoned by politics,
    race and history - and poisoning them in return - religion in this
    book is a sectarian battle standard.


    Her story begins with a brawl between two clerics in one of
    Christianity's most sacred places. Within the Basilica of the Holy
    Sepulchre in Jerusalem is a tiny chapel known as the "edicule",
    built over the spot St Helena identified as Christ's tomb. On Easter
    Saturday the "Holy Fire" is said to appear miraculously within it,
    and candles lit from this wondrous confirmation of Christ's divinity
    are, by ancient tradition, passed among the faithful by Jerusalem's
    Greek Orthodox Patriarch and one of the church's Armenian Orthodox
    priests. In Easter 2002 the Armenian priest decided to "hurry the
    miracle along a little" with the aid of a cigarette lighter. The
    Patriarch intervened, and the two came to blows. A couple of Orthodox
    monks piled in to help their leader and the Israeli police had to
    storm the chapel to restore order.


    The incident inspires Ms Clark's investigation of the centuries-old
    war between the Christian denominations for control of the Holy
    Places. Some of the stories are very funny: the Ethiopian Orthodox nuns
    and monks of the Holy Sepulchre have been reduced to living in a squat
    on the church's roof, and jealously guard their territory from the
    Egyptian Copts next door; when an elderly Coptic monk started taking
    his afternoon snooze in a chair by the Ethiopians' gate they suspected
    him of annexation by stealth, and Israeli police were again called
    to stop things turning violent. Some of the stories are dreadful:
    the Holy Fire ceremony of 1834 ended with a stampede, mass suffocation
    and a massacre by panicky Ottoman troops; a British observer described
    the church walls "spattered with the blood and brains of those who had
    been felled, like oxen, with the butt-ends of the soldiers' bayonets".


    Holy Fire unfolds against the background of the current Palestinian
    intifada, and Ms Clark moves skilfully between contemporary anecdote
    and big-picture history, using the Holy Sepulchre's story as a focus
    for exploring the broader issue of Christianity's involvement in the
    Holy Land. For the most part her points are subtly made, and she allows
    her characters to reveal themselves. Fr Athanasius, a Franciscan from
    Texas, tells her: "What we have in that church [the Holy Sepulchre],
    is not three different takes on Christianity - Orthodoxy, Catholicism
    and Oriental Orthodoxy. That would be complex enough, but it's worse
    than that. The territory the church occupies and all its contents are
    divided six ways on mostly tribal lines except for us Franciscans -
    we're multinational. Otherwise you've got Greeks, Armenians, Egyptians,
    Ethiopians and Syrians."


    Explaining the "status quo" agreement which froze the
    interdenominational rivalries where they were in 1852 and still
    applies today, he says: "It's important to realise that there are
    three different sets of rights governing everything inside the church
    and everything that happens there: rights of property, rights of use
    and rights of cleaning. Having the right to clean something doesn't
    pre-suppose a right to use it, and the right to use it doesn't
    necessarily entail ownership, because ownership can be shared."


    Every so often the author's voice intrudes when she asks her
    interlocutors whether this kind of talk has very much to do with
    the teaching of what she terms the "man-God" the Church of the Holy
    Sepulchre is supposed to celebrate. It is gently done in the book,
    but this tale encompasses centuries of petty rivalry, greed, venality,
    corruption and violence in the name of Christianity.


    There is a bigger point behind all this, but when Ms Clark finally
    steps outside the brilliant artifice of her narrative to make it
    directly it is disappointingly crude. During one of her highly
    effective vignettes - a meal at which two old friends, one Jewish
    and one Palestinian Christian, confront the damage done to their
    relationship by the intifada - she lets us know what she really thinks:
    "They are waiting for me to speak but I am suddenly overwhelmed by
    the thought of Arabs and Jews dying in their hundreds and thousands
    on account of mistakes made and crimes committed by a succession of
    Christian powers over hundreds of years."


    So there you have it; we Christians have infected Jerusalem with what
    Edward Lear called its "squabblepoison", and we are responsible for the
    world's most intractable political problem. I found myself scribbling
    "Up to a point, Lord Copper" in the margin, and this statement a couple
    of paragraphs later is even more questionable. Listing the Christian
    enthusiasts who contributed to the foundation of the State of Israel,
    Ms Clark writes: "I suspect that if the Earl of Shaftesbury, Arthur
    Balfour, Lloyd George and President Truman had not been so versed in
    the Old Testament and therefore so susceptible to Jewish emotionalism
    about a God-given homeland, so willing to dream the Jewish dream,
    an Israel would eventually have come into being, especially given
    the Nazi Holocaust, but it would not have been here."


    This huge historical assumption jars - and is at odds with the subtlety
    which characterises the rest of the book. Holy Fire successfully
    demonstrates that nothing relating to Jerusalem is ever simple; and
    I suspect that the author has a sense that she may have overstepped
    the mark here, because she plunges immediately back into the West
    Jerusalem restaurant where her two friends are finishing up their
    meal. But from this point the book goes downhill: the material on
    Christian Zionists is perfectly respectable, but it feels familiar -
    and Christian fundamentalism is too easy a target.


    In her introduction, Victoria Clark writes: "My argument is that
    fourth-century Byzantine Orthodoxy and twenty-first-century American
    Christian Zionism are two ends of a single long continuum in the
    eyes of many non-Christians. Three years on from 11 September 2001
    it seems more urgent than ever that we in the traditionally Christian
    West begin to see ourselves as others see us."


    I am not quite sure she makes the case she states in the first of those
    sentences - but the aspiration expressed in the second is triumphantly
    realised; and this is a humbling book for any Christian to read.

    Edward Stourton

    --Boundary_(ID_agim4QQjaupCj6zoqF6P4g)--
Working...
X