it into a cocked hat, architecturally. The Christian communities of Jerusalem have never been rich enough or powerful enough to build a magnificent monument to the Passion of Christ. It is a hotchpotch, inhabited by five different denominations, and endlessly squabbled over. During the day it is like a religious Disney Land; swarms and swarms of pilgrim/visitors and the curious. It is impossible to maintain any sense of English decorum, and almost impossible to imagine the events that happened in this point in space so many years ago. But, come to the Holy Sepulchre at 6 in the morning, to find the third or fourth mass of the day being celebrated in the Latin Calvary, pilgrims in silent meditation before the stone of Golgotha in the Greek Calvary, "St Stephen's Parish News : July 2006 : 9 The Edicule (The Chapel of Christ's Tomb) Armed Prayer the Copts singing the morning office in their little shelf of a chapel behind Christ's Tomb, and Philip Larkin's sceptical English words become real: "A serious house on serious earth it is/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet".

Then there are the places that shouldn't have any effect upon the pilgrim, but curiously moved me. On the Mount of Olives stands the Church of the Paternoster. Here, tradition tells us, there is a grotto in which Christ taught the disciples the Lord's Prayer. Of course, he did no such thing. Matthew's Gospel tells us that the Lord's Prayer was part of the sermon on the Mount, delivered in Galilee. Luke doesn't tell us where the lesson was given. But a church was built over the cave, and we faithful pilgrims entered into it, and together, quietly, said the Lord's Prayer. The hairs on the back of my neck rose and my eyes pricked with tears. This is the truth of the Holy Land. George Bernard Shaw advised that the following sign should be erected at all the Holy Sites: "Do not bother to stop here. It isn't genuine". He was wrong; the genuineness or not of a site does not prevent it meaning something. As Norman Woods constantly told the pilgrims "Here, or hereabouts, such-and-such happened". Hereabouts : in the context of the Holy Land it is such a profound

"Remember, it's not a holiday", said Stephen Laird to me the weekend before I travelled to the Holy Land. 'Well, that will be hard to remember!" I thought to myself, as the prospect of twelve days away from the parish and the miserable weather of an English May entranced me.
Never has Stephen spoken a wiser word. Twelve days in the Holy Land, visiting the sacred sites of Israel and Palestine, could never be a holiday. There is too much work to be done; physically, emotionally and religiously.

The physical work is obvious enough. The Holy Land is a small country (the traditional unit of scale for small countries, the "Belgium", doesn't even apply. It's only two-thirds the size of Belgium, and almost exactly the size of Wales). But what it lacks in geography, it more than makes up for in history and archaeology. The normal day would begin with leaving the hotel at 7.30 am, returning by about 6.00 - 7.00 pm. Breakfast and visits to the Holy Sepulchre for morning mass would have to be fitted in before that! So the days were long, and also filled with physical exertion; as Isaiah says "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob". Zion really is built on a hill, or rather, a series of steep hills, and there is a lot of walking up and down to do. The emotional and religious demands were another surprise.

I have never had a great devotion to the idea of the Holy Land; I have never felt a pressing need to visit the Holy sites. Coming to faith as an adult, I had always found St Luke's description of the Gospel being sent out into the world to be profoundly moving. The Gospel has come to us; there is no need for us to go to the Gospel. I thought that I would visit the Holy Land, tick it off my list of world sites to visit, and think no more about it. How wrong I was.

I have never visited such a beautiful or such a terrifying country. We went to sites that I desperately want to re-visit, feeling that I haven't been sufficiently infused with the atmosphere and meaning of the place. There were places that we weren't able to go to, that I think I really need to visit  to understand the whole of the story.

What do I mean? An example: the church of the Holy Sepulchre is a (mostly) Crusader building, on top of the basilica built by Constantine and his mother, the Empress Helena. It is the most likely site of both the crucifixion and the resurrection tomb. It is not an impressive building. Canterbury Cathedral knocks

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