THESE ANCIENT FAITHS ARE DRIVING PEOPLE APART
Andrew Bolt

Melbourne Herald Sun
July 01, 2009 12:00am

THAT’S twice I’ve now visited Jerusalem’s holiest sites without
feeling a skerrick of uplift.

True, I’m not Christian, Jewish or Muslim. But surely a city so
inspiring to three great faiths shouldn’t leave me so cold?

In fact, flying back into Melbourne on Saturday, I felt even our new
city – not even two centuries old – better lived the gospels preached
in Jerusalem for more than two millennia.

The problem is not that so many of Jerusalem’s churches, mosques
and synagogues are so sparsely decorated, as if beauty were a sin,
and only the severe were holy.

(That’s not a mistake made in Catholic Italy, Savonarola aside. Thank
God, a Sistine Chapel makes a worshipper of even a pagan like me.)
The real problem is that the faiths as practised within this most
sacred of cities divide, rather than unite, and seem to bring men
not closer to God but further from each other.

Even the Christianity there seems tribal in a pre-Christian way.

Take the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which should be more revered
than any other church in Christendom, being built on the very spot on
which Christ is said to have been crucified, entombed and resurrected
from the dead.

The dark, shambolic building, marred by graffiti, is controlled by
six warring Christian denominations – Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox,
Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian – who so
distrust each other that the church’s keys are in the care of two
neutral Muslim families.

The battle for control over every cranny of the building is fierce. In
2002, a Coptic monk moved his chair into some shade, which Ethiopian
clerics read as an invasion of their space. Eleven monks were admitted
to hospital after the punch-up.

On Palm Sunday, just last year, more people were carted off for
treatment after a fight over a Greek monk who’d strayed over some
invisible line.

And this brawling is not new. Under one window is a ladder placed
there nearly two centuries ago, and left ever since because none of
the rival churches can agree where it must go.

One result of this endless bickering over who may touch what, is
that parts of the church now risk collapse – especially a monastery
on the roof.

And another result is that a stranger tends to feel that in a war
between such tribes, there’s no place for him. In fact, I’ve felt more
at home in a humble church on Burke Rd than I have on the church on
the rock where Christ died.

As with the church, so with the city, whose every square inch is
contested.

NOT only does the Old City have its traditional four quarters, divided
between Jews, Muslims, Christians and Armenians, but Palestinians
also claim political control of the half that Israel seized from
Jordan in 1967, when Arab armies tried to destroy the Jewish state.

Meanwhile, rich Jews buy buildings in the Arab quarter and defiantly
fly the Israeli flag, while Muslim youths throw stones down at Jewish
worshippers from the walls of the Dome of the Rock, which Muslim
conquerors built precisely over the ruins of the Jewish temple as
the ultimate so-there.

In such a place, who can feel that faith makes us brothers and sisters
under an all-forgiving God? Instead, the call to the newcomer is to
pick a side – or get out of the way.

No wonder so many Israelis, particularly secular ones, flinch from
their capital and live somewhere less contested, such as cosmopolitan
Tel Aviv. Indeed, if people wanted Jerusalem less, we’d all like
it more.

As it is, it now stands as a memorial to division, and especially to
the way faiths can cut us off from the rest of humanity.

Oddly enough, it’s Melbourne that more truly lives what many imams,
rabbis and especially priests claim to profess. Here we do have all
churches from all faiths, free to worship where they wish and how
they wish, with none of that "I was here first".

Well, none, other than native title claims by some activists and
their faddish supporters insisting they are the "First Australians"
despite being born around the same time as you and I. That’s that
Jerusalem spirit that’s best avoided.

We’re better off sticking to the creed we’ve developed and now
demonstrate so beautifully, if imperfectly, in this country – that
people are judged best by their character, and not their skin, faith,
sect, origin or ancestry.

Really, that was the essence of Christ’s preaching, too, or so St
Paul said to the non-Jews he sought to embrace.

If only the monks now tending the holy place where he died could
better heed what he said when he lived.