Don’t we always live in two worlds at once? – Lalibela, Ethiopia

The first world is deforested, and there is small cause for hope.

Priests are bored and vaguely resentful

…that they must lift up their church’s ancient cross for you -- in return for ten birr or so.

Sometimes no photographs of the second world seem possible at all.

After all, a camera around your neck is different from a cross,

...but Debi's warmth can draw the second world up towards the surface anyway

...because the second world we live in is always a relationship.

This woman might have carried firewood for four hours

…to sell it in the town

…of an utterly deforested land.

In the second world, walking is as natural as grace,

…and the scent of frankincense and smoke rises from the same firewood,

…and the scent of the roasting beans rises, too,

...in a coffee ceremony meant entirely for you

…when someone invites you into their home.

In the first world, street kids lie to you.

“I am a student,” the young boy says. “I want to be a lawyer. To end corrupt.”

You know what he means. And he has learned well the rhetoric that someone like you would want to hear.

“My examination is in several days. But I don’t have pencils or books.”

But in the first world, if you buy them for him, as soon as you round the corner, he returns them to the store, and in collusion with the shop owner turns a neat little profit, perhaps for ch’at or beer.

And he continues to learn that begging on the street brings more quick money to hand than long hours over those same books.

In the second world, children go to school,

…perhaps even a traditional Ethiopian liturgical school,

…where many of the brightest students in Lalibela go.

In the second world, peers read to a blind student – the young man on the right

…in the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez,

…and the young man learns the liturgical texts and songs by heart.

In the first world, missionaries, even those of good intent, don’t critique deeply enough the cultural and political assumptions they still import.

Perhaps the church still looks European

...and white to them,

…and they build compounds and empires, large and small, to protect themselves from a history they, and we, have helped create.

Perhaps you recognize them. Perhaps you’ve lived in one of them yourself.

In the second world, the church is indigenous.

It has had its own relationship with Jerusalem and Alexandria -- and with the trade route through the Red Sea between Greece

…and India.

That is to say, it has had a history of influences and engagement as has any land,

…but no one has painted its faith

…in the color of someone else’s face.

Rumi is one of the poets who has written of these two worlds -- for instance, in his poem “Tending Two Shops.”

“The only real rest comes
when you’re alone with God,” he says.

“Live in the nowhere you came from

“…even though you have an address here.

“You own two shops,
and you run back and forth.

“Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap
getting always smaller.

“Checkmate this way,
checkmate that.

“Keep open the shop
where you’re not selling fishhooks any more.

“You are the free-swimming fish.”

So let’s go back a second time through the rock-hewn churches of Lalibella,

…quietly and alone this time.

We’ll enter through the portal called Adam’s Tomb -- because we must pass through death

…and the underground,

…and the way is circuitous

…and never all the way apparent in any single glance,

…no matter in which single place you stand at any given moment.

Nonetheless, you’ve already been intuiting as you walk

…that these rock-hewn churches of Lalibela,

…form some map of your own soul.

“Are you a Christian?” I am asked in this second world by a man with good English who, like me, is circling the Medhane Alem on the feast of the Redeemer,

…prayers beads through our fingers,

…small Ethiopian crosses around our necks.

In the second world, there is only understanding

…and the beautiful cross of the church, which the priest is eager to show you now, has become even more beautiful still,

…and in the second world, he sits

…and prays beside you.

There have been paths

…and doorways all along the way,

…and in the second world, no door is really closed,

…and there are no dead-ends anywhere, no matter how things might first appear.

Later, when all the churches have been closed, you cannot count the prostrations a young man makes at the doorway of the Biet Emmanuel far below you.

He thinks he is praying all alone,

…but in the second world, the unseen is always praying with you.

There have been crosses all along the way as well,

…forms

…that have come

…from everywhere,

…and yet each belongs exactly here.

When you hear rock-hewn churches, you might think this just means they are made of stone.

And sometimes this is partly true.

But more often they are monolithic, or semi-monolithic. This means that they have been carved from one block of stone as a whole.

Think of that a moment.

This means that a church like Biet Giorgis is not a fabricated building at all.

Rather, Biet Giorgis is a sculpture,

… carved inside

…and out,

…from one great single stone.

In the second world, all of us are pilgrims,

…and when you emerge from an underworld like this,

…back into a town that has never stopped surrounding you,

…no matter how single you might have felt,

…you find friends passing and greeting and acknowledging one another all along the street,

…and since you do not press for eye contact long yourself,

…friends greet and acknowledge you as well.

There has been a funeral on this day, too,

…down in the River Jordan that runs through the churches of Lalibela.

It is called the River Jordan because the churches of Lalibela are understood to form an image of Jerusalem itself,

…and the journey which you just have made

…has been from an historical Jerusalem

…to the cosmic New Jerusalem.

It will take you two more weeks to understand this -- without ever really understanding anything -- because at the same time that you were walking through the underworld of these churches,

…your dear friend Jeannine was making this journey in the most profound way of all,

…so that only now do you understand that your own pilgrimage,

…from darkness into light,

…through the threshold of death

…into some new life,

…has only ever been the necessary foretaste and preparation

for the difficult

…and blessed journey

…that each of us must make.