Took my time eating and reading the Jerusalem guidebook. Not planning to do much today, but I do intend to walk with minimal equipment and see what is around locally– get my bearings. This is my first morning in Jerusalem, 2009, and I head out to explore. I can see the Temple Mount Mosque from here. It stands out from among all Jerusalem.
I stop along the way photographing the neighborhood and eventually come upon a Muslim cemetery. I decide to walk among the dead… funny, one of the first places I shot in Prague was the Jewish Cemetery.
I remember arriving in Prague to find that too many churches were closed. I eventually meandered my way to the Jewish Cemetery – definitely a consecrated space, set aside for the resting of the dead and a remembrance for the living.
It was odd when I thought about it, that the place for the dead would be open while the places of worship for the living were closed. I walked in the Jewish Cemetery among the dead that day in Prague, in the rain among 12,000 tombstones leaning and tilting poetically above an estimated 100,000 buried. Small pebbles rested atop the markers: wishes and prayers, offering respect to lives once lived.
It is different here at the Muslim Cemetery. But also like the Jewish cemetery in Prague, it is open for the living to walk among the dead.
Just across from here, on the other side of Jerhico Road, I sees the most coveted Jewish cemetery in the world (the Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives where it is believed by the Jews that this is the closest place to heaven one can be buried and when Messiah sets foot down on this hill, the dead here will be the first to rise in the resurrection)–it too is plain, telling me nothing of theology-just silent markers where the dead had been laid to rest.
Even among the aged trees of Fairhaven Memorial Park in California, very little tells me any tale to consider other than once there were people who walked this Earth and now walk no more; their lives are gone and forgotten but for an identity plaque.
When I think of a church as a consecrated space–one that visually tells the story of Grace, how that speaks to the eyes what the ears may not hear, I think of how Hope can be transmitted through the visual arts. Fewer churches serve us any more in this way. The churches that do speak with such beauty are falling to the ravages of time a lack of money to repair, and a disconnect to the existence of God as anything more than a relative fiction.
There are some amazing cemeteries that do express a life within the theological grace. There were cemeteries throughout Czech, that told of the Christian theology with beautiful tombs, like mini churches. In Florence too and Paris. The faith of the deceased was expressed, and I would reflect there within the warmth of my own faith the lives lived faithfully now in a different relationship to the Divine.
But here, today, all I am given to ponder is bleak existentialism where life at best leads to a lopsided tombstone.
We can do better.
~JWL
