The God-trodden mountain – Sinai

Some places feel like dreams now,

…both faintly written, as day turns into day,

…but also with a haunting vividness should one have the courage to summon up the images again.

Perhaps that’s one reason for our reluctance to glance backwards

…because there are beauties and questions that linger on, and which at any moment can break your heart again,

…and who is so eager to open that Pandora’s box?

But, of course, dream-images are also gifts.

(You didn’t know that Debi was thinking of becoming a nun, did you?)

She’s just not quite certain to which order she’ll belong.

As long as she has been writing icons,

…in fact, perhaps as long as she’s known what an icon really is,

…she has wanted to come here,

…to St. Catherine’s Monastery

…at the foot of the God-trodden mountain,

…Mount Sinai.

It is the oldest continuously existing Christian monastery in the world,

…built upon the site of the Burning Bush.

It is also the only Christian monastery in the world to have a mosque within its walls.

God might not be descending quite so dramatically right now.

Still, you might want to take your sandals off. Isn’t everywhere holy ground?

Sometimes it must sound like only rhetoric – the way we speak to you in the second person

…as if you’ve been on this journey all along.

Except…hasn’t this been true?

This is Judy Delany. She and Debi have known each other for forty years -- and in addition to her friendship with both of us and emails brimming with energy and support, she makes comments here as "Schweetiecakes."

Notice her "Red Egg" necklace.

Since our last blog, many of you have sent generous notes and new ideas.

Sometimes your ideas seem like they’re arising at the same time as our own, and sometimes, like with Peggy, it seems you’re half a step ahead of us.

Here is Peggy O'Farrell two years ago in the Philippines.

Dennis Gobets has been keeping the home-fires burning – and doing his own gallivanting, too.

He's been helping keep an eye on Rocky Creek and

...inviting us to go with him to the southwest when we return.

So while we’ve been at our crossroads, he’s been contemplating his own descent into a canyon.

Steve Tryon has been with us from the beginning, every step along the way. Without him, the Red Egg website and these words and images wouldn’t be appearing – or not the way they do.

He writes, “I think you are in the perfect position…”

…and offers to help even more what he calls the beginning of “a yours-become-ours journey through mind, matter, and connectedness.”

Shall we say that again?

It has become a new mantra for us.

Or better yet, can we keep saying it to one another – because we are saying it to you just as so many of you have been saying that to us.

This is Debi’s neo-Coptic icon teacher Stephane Rene and his wife Monica – when we were with them in London.

We had assumed that crossroads meant: that either we’d come home earlier than we had thought, or we’d travel on awhile more.

But what if you’ve been teaching us

…that somehow it’s possible to do both things at once?

But enough of that for now. We still have a mountain to ascend.

Our Bedouin guide Nasr understood at once and had chosen the least-traveled path to the mountain.

In fact, sometimes it appeared to be no way at all.

But hasn't that been the point all along?

This has never been a tourist-trip

…even if sometimes it might appear that way.

After a few hours, Nasr led us up a draw where he knew rainwater would be pooled.

We gathered brushwood for a fire there.

OK. Two of us did.

Debi and I have backpacked and hiked a lot -- but we have never had a hiking-lunch like this.

Nasr kneaded and rolled wheat-flour and water on the stone

…and built the fire.

The bread went right into it – because in the Sinai, if you’ve gotten the sand hot enough

…it will not stick to even bread.

He roasted eggplant for the baba ganoush – and cut peppers and tomatoes and lemons,

…while Debi helped with the garlic.

Nasr always brings black tea with him,

…but he also gathers herbs to add to it.

His tobacco is from the desert, too. He knows all of Sinai’s plants

...and Sinai is the most bio-diverse place in Egypt.

Nasr gathered more plants after lunch

…and made our soap as well.

“Food always tastes better in the mountains,” I said afterwards.

“Everything is better in the mountains,” Nasr says.

We did pass a few other pilgrims along the way, it is true,

…but they were all occupied more or less as we were.

Two days later I went up the mountain on my own. It wanted to take the Sikket Saydna Musa, the steepest route, the one tradition says Moses had taken himself when he climbed alone to meet the one who had told him here, I AM.

Byzantine monks laid down the stones of this path fourteen hundred years ago.

Why have stones been so prominent all along our way?

Stones and sin. Gathering them sometimes

…and at other times casting them away.

Remember Iona then?

The Sikket Saydna Musa is also sometimes called the “Stairway of Repentance,” or the “Stairway of Forgiveness.”

There is a repentance gate as well that you must pass through,

…and both before and after this gate, pilgrims have built cairns everywhere.

So I built my own as well.

How can you not be mindful passing through a repentance gate, especially since beyond it Elijah stayed, and that beyond even that, Moses still climbed?

(Please excuse the photographs in this little stretch. They’re the best I could muster on my own.)

The real photographer was occupied otherwise at the time. She and Nasr had gone to visit Bedouin families.

Impossible to choose who had picked the better route, isn’t it?

But I was hurrying on then. I wanted to make the sunset from where Moses stood.

And sometimes you’re just in places that take the photographs for you anyway.

And each of us – Debi and I – ended up where we were meant to be that day.

Do you believe that -- that each of us is always where we’re meant to be?

There are no photographs for my descent at night. Actually, I got lost for a little while. But a Bedouin saw me and put me on the right path again.

Up by the summit, there are Bedouin huts that offer pilgrims tea and coffee by day. Most of those were closed up by now, but from within a few, firelight spilled out across the path, and soft voices rose in prayer and conversations.

And, oh, the stars.

I wish we could pour those stars into one another’s open hands right now.

Certainly, if there is any solitary journey, it must be this one, the Sikket Saydna Musa, where Moses walked alone to meet his God. The mountain had been cordoned off for Moses’ journey, and it had been decreed that anyone else who touched the mountain then must be killed.

What could be a more solitary way than this?

We had asked Nasr, “How many nights a month are you out in the mountains away from your family?”

He thought awhile.

“Most nights,” he said.

But even this solitude is a kind of illusion, too,

…because actually Nasr rarely goes out into the mountains alone.

“Bedouin like to talk,” he says.

After climbing the mountain, we told Nasr we wanted to go even deeper into the desert. We presumed we’d have to be driven from one place to another and make day-hikes from where we stayed.

“Why don’t we just walk the whole way instead?” he asked.

“But what about our travel-bags?”

“Schnapps can carry them,” Nasr said.

But that’s a story for another day.

Let’s go back to Moses’ journey one more time -- when the mountain was cordoned off to everyone but him.

Isn’t even this journey, which seems so absolute in its solitude, only a thread in a story bigger than any single life can ever be?

How big a story is Exodus after all?

And how many people, for how many centuries, have seen their own lives writ large in it?

Like this man.

“I have been to the mountaintop,” he said. “And I’ve seen the Promised Land.”

“I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people

“…will get to the promised land.”

Because even this repentance-and-forgiveness path,

…this whole pilgrimage, in fact,

…even for the stretches we experience as a stony, narrow path,

…even then,

…it is not really a journey we are making on our own.

Notes

1. The title of this blog-post is stolen from the title of a beautiful article/reminiscence written by our friend, the Dingle peninsula artist Maria Simonds-Gooding (cf our March 21, 2009 blog-post) -- "On the God-Trodden Mountain" -- based on her own experiences at St. Catherine's.

2. And for a beautiful account of people finding their own stories within the frame of Exodus, you can listen here…

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/exodus/

3. Our blog doesn’t discuss political and economic realities for Bedouin people. But we recommend an excellent story on the subject that was appearing in the March issue of National Geographic just when we were in the Sinai ourselves.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/sinai/teague-text

East or West – what comes next?

Why this reluctance to begin to take a backward glance?

Is it because the future still beckons with promises and hardship?

A rainbow and a Kenyan post-election refugee camp – what could be more ambiguous than that?

Or is it simply because the present has such pressing requirements

…that none of us can afford to take our eye off that?

Still, here we are like a dancer with one foot inclining home

…and the other still needing to complete the arc it’s begun.

We’re also out of money, which isn’t beside the point, but it’s also not the only reason for this natural pause...as we plot how to raid our own slender retirement

…either to come home sooner than we might have thought

…or else to take the next turn ahead of us -- towards the east, towards India.

Our friend Cyprian emails: “…while everyone else in the world is worrying about the financial situation, you’re liquidating your retirement fund! That’s my kind of living!”

Or else it’s just plain foolishness.

We’ll find out, won’t we?

Either way, it seems like the perfect time for another yarn-- full of radiant faces

…and exotic topography.

So load up the saddle bags

…and brew yourself a tea or coffee.

A story from the Sinai desert is coming next.

“Uncle Mehmet isn’t here…”

You look at any one of these earth-forms

…and they could be peopled still.

The soft tufa – volcanic ash mixed with sandstone – makes it possible.

In Cappadocia, early Christians carved vast underground cities out of it -- where they could hide for months at a time from Roman soldiers.

Centuries later, they hid again from Arab invaders.

Here at Keşlik Manestir the tufa mounds seem both to congregate and to be on the move at once, as if each of them still has something it wants to say,

…which may be true since manestir means monastery in Turkish. And Keşlik is thought to be one of the oldest monasteries in Cappadocia, which means it was one of the oldest monasteries anywhere.

Each apparently blank form could be…

…someone’s interior castle

…or the church itself

…carved out of tufa

…and winding in tunnels

…through one story after another of good earth

…until perhaps it disappears entirely underground

…only to connect with all the others in ways we can no longer perceive.

And you begin to suspect that there’s no end to the subterranean passageways that connect all of us in some vast lost time we don’t understand either.

Sometimes the signs are virtually effaced, and human art melds easily back into earth’s forms and colors again.

Sometimes a human hand has painted a chapel with wild and archaic forms.

And sometimes it seems as if the Byzantine fresco painter just walked out yesterday and left the pigments to dry on the wall behind him.

The landscape helps decide what should be preserved – and for how long and in what form.

But it is also true that Turkey’s population is approximately 98% Muslim now,

…and there hasn’t been a Byzantine monk living in any of these caves in more than 700 years.

And yet their presence is still so strong that our friend Torrey says he became a Christian because of them.

So what else should we do, but look for these monks ourselves?

We stopped to ask a farmer for directions to Pancarlik Manestir. He wouldn’t tell us.

Instead, he packed up the dried apricots and mulberries in the back of his truck and came to show us.

This kept happening. At each turn we’d make a new friend, like Pinar in Göreme

…and Unal who drove us to the most hidden monasteries he knew.

Angels would make themselves visible on city streets if that’s what it took to show us where to go next.

But when we had arrived at Pancarlik Manestir, there was no one to open the chapel for us. It wasn’t yet the season for visitors.

But still the tufa was swept,

…and there were flowers and candles on the altar inside.

So each of us wandered off on our own to imagine a community of monks and caves and stone. It was easy to do since the place was so well kept.

We met a guide walking along the sandy road.

“Who’s the man who keeps care of the monastery?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Uncle Mehmet…”

“He must be a good man.”

“He’s a very good man,” the guide said. “I’m going now to buy some tea and sugar to give to him. He always makes tea for his visitors.”

“Would you buy Mehmet some tea for us?” we asked.

“Of course.”
From Cappadocia, we made a long bus ride to Konya, the home of Rumi.

The woman in front of us was reading the Qur'an.

She was also reading perfect English.

Konya is a big and conservative city. Hülya took us by the hand, led us from the bus to tram, bought our tickets, and took us downtown.

We went to her mosque, where she prayed, and we did, too. Then she walked us to our hotel and gave us her phone number and asked us to call her if we needed anything.

It’s true that we couldn’t find a beer or glass of wine in Konya.

It’s also true that each person we met was kind and generous with us.

Conservative, we learned again, isn’t a synonym for extremist or fundamentalist. In Konya, it seems to mean something closer to faithful instead.

But we couldn’t find Rumi either -- moved as we were to pay our respects at his tomb.

“You won’t find me here,” he said.

“What dome could you build for me that would be better than the open sky?”

“My grave will be in the hearts of the wise.”

His Friend, Shams of Tabriz, went even further.

“I will go somewhere where words will never find me,” Shams said.

When we visited Shams’ turban...

...a couple of people were praying quietly in the small mosque.

But as we started to leave, four men were coming in. The man who takes care of the mosque smiled and nudged us back inside. And just then, one clear voice rose into the air in a long beautiful stream of praise and poetry and prayer and song.

The voice must have spilled outside because soon women began following it inside and crooning in a low undertone of prayer themselves.

The Sufis are here, the Sufis are here! they must have been saying.

Afterwards the Sufis told us, “We aren’t from here,” as they gestured to the city streets all around us. “Do you understand?”

They were from Bosnia. But that’s not what they meant. They meant they weren’t from this realm of commotion and inner noise.

They wanted us to come with them to their "Sufi place" at Menzil.

“We want to push you into the ocean,” they said.

But we had a bus to catch. You can’t say yes to everything.

So we bowed and shook hands and touched our hearts and went our separate ways.

"We'll fall into the ocean anyway," we said.

Later, on our plane back to Istanbul, we were sitting among a group of thirty, mostly women, buzzing with excitement at beginning their pilgrimage to Mecca.

We laughed and gestured and touched our hearts many times with them, too.

“We’ll pray for you,” they said. “Please pray for us, too.”

They had already given each of us their prayer beads.

In Cappadocia the 4c was the century of three saints: St. Basil the Great, his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend, St. Gregory of Naziaranus.

Had we met Uncle Mehmet, he probably wouldn’t have parsed their mystical theology for us.

But we hadn’t come for that anyway.

We had come here for the tea he served.

Maria Simonds-Gooding

Why do you turn this way and that, love,

…north, south, east

…and west of west, further than the eye can see?

“It isn’t given us to see the soul,” Rumi says.

And so she lays out a golden thread before us, which we can follow or ignore.

But what is it about these islands -- off every western shore?

“We have a plane to catch tonight,” we said. “We don’t have time for any more of this. You’ll have to beckon to someone else instead.”

And anyway, no one lives here any more.

Certainly not on Sceilig Mhichíl where Celtic monks once built stone cells out of a stone island.

Nor on the Blaskets, off the Dingle peninsula, a refugia for an oral literature once so rich that late in life Tomás O’Crohan was persuaded to learn to read and write so that more of us could have his stories.

His sole purpose in writing, he said, was “to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again.”

Is that what we’re straining for – some curraich that could carry us back there?

“Well, what if we just go for a little drive?”

“There were those engravings we saw in Dingle…”

“But we don’t even know who the artist is.”

“Nor if he or she even lives in Ireland, let alone near here.”

“I love this one.”

“’Going into the island’ is what it’s called? What could that mean?”

We leaned into the west

…as long as there was any light at all.

But still it wanted to show us more.

And then in the winter-hail, on the headland, one small light came on.

It was Ionad an Bhlascaoid MhóirBlasket, the Blasket Heritage Center – but it was closed for the winter, too.

“Come on, let’s snoop around a bit,” we said.

And when we knocked on one of the doors, Micheál de Mordha appeared, the director of the center. He was working on a paper late at night, and on his walls were engravings like those we had seen in Dingle.

“Oh, that’s Maria Simonds-Gooding,” he told us. “She lives up this road.”

And so we knocked on her door, too.

And beneath a vault of shining stars, Maria invited us into her cottage and led us through it

…until it opened up into the studio she has built.

And, oh, the work…

We had walked into the middle of new work in a new medium.

Maria has discovered big surfaces of aluminum which she etches and inscribes and roughly brushes and polishes until forms and textures change with each movement of your eye.

“I’m a halfway house between a sculptor and a painter,” Maria says.

And we talked about our pilgrimage as well.

Maria encouraged us to go to Cappadocia, where we’ve just been

…and to Ephesus

…and to St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, where we are now. Maria has a special love for this place, too.

You can see how there’s stone and solitude in all of this.

“I have to go right to the place itself,” Maria says.

“Give yourself the time for anything to happen,” Maria also told us.

And we’ve been following her advice ever since.

“Didn’t we feel like friends as soon as she opened her door?” we asked ourselves afterwards.

In Athanasius’ life of St. Antony of the Desert, he speaks of Antony’s inner mountain,

…the way that Blasket islanders speak of “going into the island.”

Maria has been there many times herself and has known well the last residents of these islands.

And if in the heart of winter you can’t find a pilot for a curraich to carry you across these waters,

Maria’s work can help to take you there as well.