Reflections of Tantur

Prof. John Cavadini

Traveling to the Holy Land always seems like traveling to a place in the soul.

Anyone formed in the traditions of the great Biblical narratives and their use in various liturgical settings knows almost instinctively that the places these narratives name are places in the soul:

• Egypt is the name of a spiritual place, one of spiritual slavery.
• The desert is the spiritual place of intimacy with God, a place in the soul of temptation and liberating guidance.
• The River Jordan is the name of a state of the soul, the threshold of final liberty.

These place names are often so spiritualized in the religious imagination of Christians that it almost occurs as a shock to discover that they are actual, literal places.

Jerusalem is not simply a figurative way of referring to the reign of God yet to come: It’s a real city, with streets, parking spaces, plumbing, and sewers. The River Jordan is a real river, somewhat narrower than imagined, perhaps. One worries that the real river may not quite be up to its place in the Christian spiritual imagination as figuring the waters of baptism and the freeing of the soul from sin. But it’s a real live river at any rate.

These places are physically as real as South Bend and the St. Joseph River, one discovers with a twinge of (let it be admitted) disappointment.

What's even worse is to discover that these real places are not only real, but real enough to be contested, precisely as places. The ugly wall, or separation barrier, which now runs between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, easily visible from the roof of Tantur, shows that contestation dramatically and immediately. Almost everything about the places here, as places, is contested, at least three ways and sometimes many more. If you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, you will see that contestation visibly demonstrated in the various parts of the Church carved out for each separate Christian communion.

The longer and closer you look, however, the more you realize, in the end, that one's initial feeling about the Holy Land being a place in the soul actually has something to it. These are places in the soul; there is nothing neutral, objective, or given about them, except that they are literal places—places that are ineluctably located not in only one spiritual narrative, but in competing narratives. These places almost overflow with spiritual reality, all the more visible for its being contested, all the more poignant, all the more urgent.

To visit the River Jordan is in the end, then, not just to visit a physical place, but to enter a place in one's soul. Whose place is this? That place in the soul you thought was just yours alone -- it's not anymore. Your soul has to grow to accommodate this, somehow.

At the Jordan, you do not encounter the more prestigious rivers of the world, grand and sweeping like the Mississippi, the Amazon, or the Nile—something more worthy of what one imagines for oneself, perhaps. Rather, for some of its distance, the Jordan resembles a mere gulch, and for much of its distance it is inaccessible because it is contested.

But isn't this characteristic of the places where God has chosen to act, which God has chosen as instruments of revelation? Not the prestigious places, the mighty rivers of this world, so to speak, but the lowly and the humble …. Isn't this place, precisely as a physical place, a carrier of spiritual reality? a place which—in the seemingly hopeless situation of mutually opposing claims on something more like a creek than a river—reminds us that God's way of working, both in Biblical times and now, may not be as self-evident as the expectations we have brought with us?

God did not choose the Mississippi, but the most unlikely of rivers, the Jordan, and perhaps, encountering the real Jordan apart from our own spiritualized versions, we are up against the real choice of God. This is a spiritual reality, after all, but one greater than the one of our imaginations, constrained as they have been by an overly narrow interpretation of our own narrative.

As one encounters the Jordan, and so many other places in this Land truly called Holy, one finds oneself in a place in one's soul after all, but a place of admonishment and a place of challenge—admonishment and challenge to avoid the twin temptations of despair, on one hand, and, on the other hand, an imagination too conformed to the cramped quarters of our own souls. A cramped imagination precludes a vision of anything as spiritually real as these very places are physically real.

Prof. John Cavadini
Chair, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
Member, Advisory Board, Tantur Ecumenical Institute
30 May 2007