My experience is limited to a single stay some six years ago, but while on pilgrimage in Jerusalem, going from holy place to holy place, I did not often find myself feeling particular pious or suffused in the numinous, quite the contrary. Much of the old city was, and is no doubt as I write, palpably on edge, the undercurrents of violence and hatred always threatening to boil up to the surface. Barbed wire and patrols of heavily armed soldiers, security cameras leering down from the fortified walls of settlers, the somber placards declaring this house and that house as the former home of a Palestinian martyr, it all ebbs and swells as you move through the streets and in and out of the holy places, a constant presence that, for me at least, never really receded into the background. The holy places themselves are to an extent insulated—at least at the time I was in the city—from the constant troubles of this unquiet land, but they have their own limitations. My visit to the Tomb of Christ was interrupted—after standing patiently in line with a very pious group of older Russian women on pilgrimage—by a couple of tourists who quite literally barged in, past the custodian monk at the entrance, to snap selfies within the chamber, only to be chased out by the visibly irritated monastic guardian. A more saintly man than I might have seen such an interruption as an opportunity to practice inward peace and Christ-like love of the unlovely, perhaps even to question my own expectations and reaction to this holy place, but sadly that was not my response. I was just angry.
How different, though, was the Tomb of the Theotokos. Lying on the opposite side of the old city, the entrance to the tomb-shrine is through a medieval facade, entered through a sunken courtyard, gnarled old olive trees in the fields immediately adjacent. From the sun-drenched courtyard you immediately find yourself descending into the womb of the earth, passing back through the last two thousand years of human history and into the late Cretaceous stone out of which Jerusalem is built, the precipitate of a warm and life-filled sea the long preceded today’s Mediterranean. When Our Lady was laid upon the limestone slab here the entrance to her tomb would have been level with the surface, but in the intervening two millennia the sedimentation of human events has pushed her tomb much deeper underground, and you must now descend forty-seven steps into the chthonic dark. Where the Tomb of Christ was once a cave but is now really primarily an above-ground structure, the opposite has happened here: the Theotokos’ tomb has merged even more strongly and deeply with the earth, sheltered in a richly numinous and quiet space softly lit by candles and lamps, the lights glimmering upon a couple centuries’ worth of accumulated iconography from every corner of the Orthodox world. For if everyone visits the Holy Sepulchre, even if only as a skeptical or curious tourist, the Tomb of the Theotokos remains primarily a pilgrimage destination, and largely only for the various branches of Orthodox Christianity (it was once also a site of Muslim pilgrimage, and while the names of Muslim pilgrims can still be seen as pious graffiti in some corners, and a mihrab still stands near the tomb, otherwise their presence is largely a thing of the past).
To reach the actual tomb itself, you must duck down into a yet smaller grotto of sorts, the edicule, and there before you is the rough stone slab upon which ancient (dating to at least the fifth century if not before) tradition holds was laid the body of the Mother of God after her death. The edicule is, deliberately or not I do not know, built like a womb, small and warm and dimly lit. You can reach through and touch the stone slab, carved from the living limestone, and because the press of the crowd is not so great here, gather your thoughts and feel the presence that this place has, and reflect on the absences as well. I pressed a small pocket icon of the Theotokos and Christ Child to the rock, asked our Lady for her prayers, and after sitting there for a few moments, crawled back out into the cave-church, and so back up the steps into the hot sun without.
In Orthodoxy we are fond of saying that the mystery of the Theotokos and our devotion to her is something that is contained in an interior manner to the Church and to ourselves, that it is only really understood from within. While I grant that such an argument can sound like special pleading (and when I was still a curious Protestant looking in, it did not sound very convincing at all!), it really is true, in a way that is hard to express. I do not know in a purely objective sense to what degree the traditions about the life and death of the Theotokos are literally historically accurate, and certainly there has been much ‘accretion’ over the centuries, the work of articulation and imagination and inspiration on the part of believers great and small across the world. At the risk of sounding overly subjective or hand-wavingly mystical, there are indeed truths that are not contained within historical narration, that evade precise description.
The mystery of the Theotokos takes us into many realms, all of an inward nature, into the deeps, and indeed into the deep past. To enter her tomb is akin to entering the oldest of human sanctuaries, the painted caverns of our Paleolithic ancestors, with similar visual and ritual logics applying. I do not think it is mere coincidence or evolutionary convergence, though such explanations would not in themselves lessen or detract from the resonances, nor exclude the workings of Divine Providence. Is there not an echo or a prefiguring of the Theotokos in the maternal images and shapes and allusions etched and painted and sculpted on Paleolithic cave walls and in ivory and stone and clay? Within the pages of the comparatively much young but still ancient to us Hebrew Scriptures there are echos, too, in those mysterious passages concerning divine Wisdom, always expressed as a woman, as a mother, her identity sometimes seemingly concurrent with God’s, at other times distinct, an ambiguity also expressed in the diversity of interpretations these passages have received from Jewish and Christian exegetes over the centuries. Perhaps we need not choose: it can be true, as the Church Fathers tend to argue in reflecting on these passages, that God is shown in them as Mother, as holy cosmos-ordering Wisdom, and that the Theotokos uniquely inhabits and expresses Divine Wisdom within the flow of human history, a mutual offering and giving between God and humans, gift upon gift, the holy dialectic of transfiguration and transformation. Like the geological and historical layers above and below the Tomb of the Theotokos, meaning is layered, polyvalent, condensed and rich, hidden as infinitely deep substrate lying upon the thin surface of the visible present.
If the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a supremely public place, that is as it ought to be, my sentiments and expectations aside. We preach to the peoples Christ crucified and risen from the dead; we do not preach, not in the same manner, the life and death of His Mother, her story and mystery are not precisely ‘public’ in the same sense, but this is not to detract from her centrality and presence. And while our devotion to the Theotokos is perhaps best understood as ‘interior’ and ‘mystical’ (in the full-fledged sense of the term), that is not to say there are no implications for public life and contemporary concerns.
Demands for a more ‘masculine’ and ‘muscular’ Christianity have become, once again, current, easily bleeding into dark and violent politics that seek to subvert and co-opt the person of Christ, ultimately trending towards overt fascism, with or without a religious veneer. It would be nice to say that Orthodox Christianity has proven immune to such things, but of course this is not true, and as I write our mutual faith is being used as war propaganda and is being incorporated into increasingly naked fascist narratives and aesthetics. At the same time that such currents grow in strength, our various global crises of culture, economy, society, and ecology continue apace. In the face of all of this one can well wonder what the point of devotion to the Theotokos can be; we bring flowers to be blessed after the Liturgy on the Feast of the Dormition, a lovely gesture no doubt, but will it stop dictators or halt the march of climate change or feed the poor?
No, not of itself, nor will our proclamation of the good news of Christ lead to immediate ‘practical’ fixes, for that is not the point, at all. But the meaning that lies behind our devotion, the theological truths of the Gospel and of the whole Christian life and practice, of the centrality and vitality of humans offering the gift of the created world to God and graciously receiving back from Him as gift, supremely in the self-offering of Christ: therein lies the salvation of the world, the impetus and the template for any politics or praxis worth having. To descend to the cave-tomb of our Lady is to step away from the thin skin of the present and to enter into a depths that spiritual darkness cannot comprehend, that the violent angry gods of the nations cannot encompass or control. It is to touch and to carry outward the hope of the resurrection of the body and the transfiguration of the cosmos, enacted not by strong men in uniforms or the iron will of the masses, but by the meek and humble and marginalized of the earth, in gentleness, in mutualistic love, and in self-giving.