After the European Christians departed from the Holy Land in 1291, the Franciscan Order of Monks remained to care for its Christian places. The end of the Crusades failed to discourage pilgrims from landing on the Holy Land's Mediterranean shore where Franciscan monks could lead them, by donkey, thirty-nine miles inland to Jerusalem. In those days processions for the Way of the Cross varied greatly. One Italian pilgrim said he went from the Mount of Olives through the present St. Stephen's Gate, sometimes called Lion's Gate, past Islam's golden Dome of the Rock to St. Anne's Church, the Via Dolorosa, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Later medieval pilgrims reported processing in the opposite direction, from the Holy Sepulchre at daybreak to Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, and Mount Zion.
Pilgrims could be locked into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre overnight and process among its many chapels, eating and sleeping there. The duration of their visit depended on their piety and on the patience of the Muslim family that always held the church keys. In the fifteenth century, English pilgrim Margery Kemp had herself locked in the Church for twenty-four hours, but most pilgrims just stayed overnight. They might, however, return for more than one night.
Meanwhile, the Crusaders had taken the idea of Stations of the Cross home to Europe, where murderous struggles between Church and State, wars among nations, the Black Death, and famine had given the people of medieval times a new appreciation for Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection. These particular attributes of Christ became the principal focus of medieval spirituality. Walking his Way of the Cross was a meaningful expression of the penitent's pain and of ultimate healing through resurrection.
Other forms the drama took in Europe were passion plays such as the one performed at Oberammergau, Germany. First presented in 1634 in thanksgiving for deliverance from the Black Death, it continues to the present day. Artists such as El Greco, Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt expressed the Passion in paint, bas-relief, and sculpture. Religious men and women wrote about it. Julian of Norwich described her vision of Christ's wounds. In The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis invited readers to take refuge in the wounds of the Savior, to undertake the holy Way of the Cross.
Through the centuries, this mystical path was also called the sorrowful way, via crucis, the “mournful way,” or the “very painful way.” Stations of the Cross, built like stage sets along a path, sprang up in medieval European towns and were given such names as the Seven Falls, the Seven Pillars, the Sorrowful Journey, the Way of Affliction, or the Holy Way par excellence.
“Those who cannot go there in person can still make this voyage by the grace of God, through devout and pious meditations as follow,” wrote Jan Pascha in his 1563 book, Spiritual Journey, describing the Stations of the Cross in Louvain, Belgium. “You will find here the holy places as clearly depicted as if before your very eyes, all shown by the descriptions of pilgrims, who have themselves been personally to these same holy places,” Pascha wrote.
Perhaps the most famous set of stations in Europe, the Louvain group has been called the original of today's Way of the Cross because the stations, eight bas-relief pictures, begin with a “Pilate's House” and end in Calvary. Other famous stations in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, and Hungary had different station names and numbers.
You can imagine the confusion, therefore, when European pilgrims visited Jerusalem and sought to reconcile their European “passion play” with Jerusalem itself. In 1725, Franciscan Eleazar Horn drew a map of Jerusalem showing fourteen stations (some located differently than today) to which Jerusalem's Franciscans began to lead the Friday afternoon pilgrimage we still see today. Nine of the stations come from the Gospels. Five come from medieval European imagination: Jesus’ three falls, his meeting his mother, and Veronica wiping his face.
The Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem today lead right through the busy marketplace; pilgrims are as uncloistered and unprotected as Jesus was on the first Good Friday. Our senses are assaulted with the sound of children shouting, Muslim muezzin chanting from their minarets, merchants calling tourists, tourists talking, and car horns honking. We smell lamb broiling, falafel cooking, and heaters burning. We see exotic fruit stands, small carts delivering construction materials or pastries, mysterious faces, rivulets of water slowly running down the concave center of the street, and unknown side streets leading into shadows.
All sorts and conditions of people are walking this Way at any hour of the day on any day of the year. Among them are those who come to St. George's College located just outside the walled Old City of Jerusalem. Founded for British and Palestinian priesthood candidates, the College has become an international, ecumenical, continuing education center for everyone who wishes to spend ten days to ten weeks becoming acquainted with the Bible's landmarks under the leadership of experts in its archaeology, texts, geography, history, and spirituality.
Director of these courses at St. George's College from 1979 to 1989 was the late Bro. Gilbert Sinden, SSM, who wrote the liturgy of prayers in this book. A priest of the Anglican Society of the Sacred Mission, Sinden had already edited a new Australian Prayer Book. Though English-born, in 1929, Gilbert became an Australian citizen and died on duty there in 1990.
Bro. Gilbert was a beloved figure of wide girth, with the gift of revealing the Bible and the Church so that “you suddenly understood what you had not known before,” as a friend said. “I remember once he took me to the top of the Mount of Olives and we said Morning Prayer, while behind us the sun came up and illuminated Jerusalem before us, as Gilbert could illuminate Jerusalem in one's mind.”
Though he had taught Old and New Testament courses for twenty years elsewhere, “experience of the geographical reality of the Land of the Bible can give one a radically different perspective on the Bible,” Gilbert once wrote. “I went looking for a top dressing on what I already knew; I leave ashamed that I had presumed to teach for so long out of so much ignorance.”
And who knows, friends say now, how many people he helped through difficulties, how many were strengthened in their faith, how many learned a new respect for themselves, because of his immense and costly care for them. He had always battled tenaciously for the underdog, for the rejected, and for the devalued. In Palestine/Israel he had a passionate concern for justice and peace for all people who share that land.
“This is not the place to rehearse the details of the tragic situation in the Holy Land, but no attempt to reflect on my years there can ignore the devastation in my mind and heart which that conflict between two contradictory kinds of justice has wrought,” he wrote. “For I found myself living with a people to whom the simplest natural justice has been, and still is being, denied in order to do justice to another people to whom they have done so much less harm than the rest of us.
“I thank God for Jewish friends who boldly tell their fellow Jews that the Palestinians deserve the same identity, security, dignity, and homeland that they themselves deserve; and for Palestinian friends who recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and steadfastly seek a balance of the two kinds of justice the two peoples each need, knowing perfectly well that this will mean real sacrifices on their part.”
The longer Gilbert stayed in Jerusalem, during those ten years at St. George's College, the more difficult he found it to pray. “This is difficult to describe because it was so unexpected, but I have come to think that it has much to do with the history of Jerusalem, and not least with the fact that it was here that Jesus was crucified: the cosmic conflict that raged around the cross seems to have raged in this city throughout all generations, and no less so today. Those who try to pray here find themselves caught up in that conflict: ‘I thirst;’ ‘My God, why have you abandoned me?,’ ‘Father, forgive…’”
I dedicate this book to Gilbert in part because he wrote its liturgies, which we used every time we did the Stations of the Cross during my whole tenure as Dean of St. George's