Published by Catholic Digest, August 8, 2003
At The Monastery of The Burning Bush
By Bruce Feiler
Dateline: Sinai Desert, Egypt
August 8, 2003 (CD) -- I bolted upright the first time I heard the bells, a sound so loud it yanked me from sleep. I held my ears when I realized the clamor was just outside my door. It was a carillon 15 centuries old; a wake-up call older than clocks.
I looked at my watch: 4:25 a.m. The room was whitewashed, with a bed, a desk, and a chair. A reproduction of an eighth-century crucifix hung on the wall, alongside a small painting of St. Catherine, the Egyptian martyr and namesake of the monastery at which I was staying. Before I came to the mountains, people had warned of the cold, meager facilities. But the room was quite accommodating, with plenty of bedding, a portable heater, hot water, a toilet, and even a bidet. This was the Ritz for pilgrims, a hermitage with a view.
I slid into my boots and splashed water on my face. The morning service would start in five minutes. Outside, the courtyard was still dark. A rosefinch hopped quietly on the banister; even the birds didn't speak at this hour.
I was stationed on the third floor of the dormitory, a dark wooden Tudor with slabs of plaster. Shakespeare would be at home here.
Across the square was another three-story building that looked almost Moorish, with stone arches and candles flickering. Between stood a jungle of structures - a refectory, a handful of chapels, a library, even a mosque, built in the twelfth century to appease marauders. After checking in the previous night, I sat on the banister and admired the timelessness. The place seemed almost haunted, with cats scampering across the eaves, skeleton keys dangling against brass doorknobs, and doors opening, creaking, then slamming shut. A monk chanted evening prayers. By 9 p.m., not a person was in sight.
Before going to bed, I decided to visit the burning bush. The bush, which grows alongside the chapel, is a rare mountain bramble akin to the raspberry that monks say is the actual shrub from which Moses first heard the words of God.
I went from my third-floor perch to a set of stairs that led to the base of the chapel. A deep darkness seemed to reach out from below. Across the alley was a crypt with the bones of every monk who ever lived in St. Catherine's, including a heaping mound of hollow-eyed skulls that spilled onto the floor.
I opted to go back for my flashlight. In my nervousness, I started to unlock the door adjacent to mine. This made me even more nervous.
I retrieved my flashlight and retraced my steps, cursing the creaky floors that seemed to broadcast my every move. I found the same stone steps as before. Even with the light, they seemed bottomless. On the ground level, I exhaled and rounded a corner. A cat, digging in the flowerbed, looked up at me and meowed. I jumped.
A few more steps and I rounded the last corner of the alley. Directly across the walkway was a stone wall that looked as if it were made of peanut brittle. Sprouting from the top was an enormous, fountaining bush. The plant was about six feet tall, with large, dangling branches like a weeping willow that sprouted from the center like a cheap wig. A white cat with a brown splotch around one eye was perched at its base, and off to the side was a slightly out-of-date fire extinguisher. A fire extinguisher? At first I thought it was an eyesore, but then I realized the unintended humor. Was this in case the burning bush caught fire?
By the time I arrived in the chapel, it was just after 4:30 a.m., and the service was under way. The basilica was still dark, except for some candles above a lectern, where a monk in thick, black robes was chanting a prayer in Byzantine Greek, a mix of harsh Slavic consonants and singsong Mandarin vowels.
I slipped into a wooden chair. In the first few minutes, several monks began making their way around the room, lighting the dozens of brass lamps that hung from the ceiling. Gradually, with a glow of light like liquid apricot, the dimensions of the room became apparent.
The basilica, built between 542 and 551, is small, designed for the monks, not the masses.
The service moved at a measured tempo. A monk would step forward to a lectern, located in the middle of the nave, turn up the flame on an oil lamp, and read a few passages. He would back away and another would step forward. Occasionally there would be a call and response, with one monk chanting a passage from an enormous, leather-bound prayer book, and the other monks echoing responses as they strolled around the chapel or sat in dark wooden chairs in front of the twelve columns in the nave. Holy! Holy! Holy! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
The pace was steady, rhythmic, mesmerizing. In a way, the service reminded me of the pyramids - perfectly balanced, reassuring in proportion, and completely devoid of time. A "living tradition," as the monks like to say.
At one point, a particularly tall monk circled the basilica waving a brass lantern with incense burning on coals. A sweet, pungent aroma, like singed flowers, filled the hall.
Along with this service, actually two services in one, there were three others every day: at midday, in the afternoon, and in the evening. Extended back in an unbroken line to the sixth century, this sanctuary had hosted almost 3 million services - all in the same place, in the same language, in the same manner. A living tradition, indeed.
In the light, the compound was less spooky, though no less jumbled, a testament to the failures of ecclesiastical urban planning. Like so many sites around the Middle East, St. Catherine's was founded in the fourth century, when Empress Helena took advantage of her son Constantine's hegemony to identify places associated with the Bible. Building on a tradition that said the burning bush was located in the valley below Jebel Musa, Helena erected a small church and a tower.
Helena dedicated the site to Mary because Church elders believed the burning bush symbolized the Annunciation. Just as the bush was filled with fire, but remained unburned, so Mary conceived the Savior, but remained a virgin.
Emperor Justinian expanded the facility in the sixth century and built the basilica. The monks claim the basilica's doors are the oldest functioning doors in the world, and that they lead to the world's oldest continually operating church.
The Monastery of the Burning Bush existed for close to 600 years but didn't thrive until 1000, when it became associated with another prominent woman in the region, St. Catherine. Born to a high-ranking official in Alexandria in the third century, Catherine (née Dorothea) was a woman of exceptional intelligence and beauty. Numerous suitors sought her, but Catherine wanted someone with unchallenged qualities of wisdom and virtue. Her mother, secretly Christian, introduced her to an ascetic, who said, "I am acquainted with a unique man who incomparably transcends all those attributes and countless others."
Through prayers and visions, Catherine met and mystically married Christ. One of her suitors, Emperor Maximinus, tried to persuade her to renounce the marriage. When she refused, he ordered her killed.
According to tradition, Catherine's body came to rest not on Jebel Musa, but on nearby Jebel Katarina. In 1025, a monk went to visit the remains and, while pouring an offering of oil, inadvertently broke off three of her fingers, which he then carried to Europe and which miraculously began to heal the sick.
The spirit of St. Catherine ministered to Joan of Arc, among others, and churches in her honor were built in London, Paris, and Venice. Soon, a growing number of pilgrims began flocking to the Sinai to see her remains, and the monks renamed their abbey.
My tour guide Avner Goren and I spent the next few hours exploring the monastery. The small spring near the entrance of the compound is known as the fountain of Moses, or Jethro's well. According to legend, this is where Moses, still a fugitive from Egypt, met Zipporah. The small stone well, square with an old-fashioned iron hand pump, is one of five wells inside the monastery and testifies to the facility's one ample resource, water. This water feeds the garden, which brims with almonds, peaches, poplars, and olives.
The olives produce just enough oil to light the lamps in the church, which hang from the ceiling on 15- or 20-foot chains. The oil is such a delicacy to rodents that each chain is adorned with a whole ostrich-egg shell designed to prevent rats from climbing down for a quick toddy.
By far, the monastery's chief curiosity is its so-called burning bush, easily the most famous shrub in the Sinai, probably in the Middle East. According to the monks, the plant alongside the chapel is unique and has been growing in virtually the same spot since the time of Moses. Evidence suggests that the first claim, at least, may have some truth to it. The bush belongs to the species Rubus sanctus, which grows in the mountainous areas of Central Asia but is rare in the desert. Goren says he knows of only five other specimens in the Sinai.
Beyond its rarity, the reason this bush was identified as the burning bush of Moses is unclear. Many have suggested the shrub's red berries contributed, but the monastery's specimen does not fruit.
One thing everyone agrees on: The bush grows quickly, like that bramble in the back yard you can never quite contain. The monks have been known to prune it and give the clippings to visiting pilgrims - which means there may be thousands of baby burning bushes in leftover jelly jars filled with water on sink counters around the world.
In 1984, the bush grew so big that the monks held an anxious meeting in which they elected to crop the plant close to the roots.
On the day of the event, there were more remains than the assembled visitors could cart home, so the monks did what any pious congregation would do to the assembled pile of clippings: They set it on fire. As one wry monk who witnessed the event reported, "Yes, it did burn."
For all the bush's prodigious qualities, it occasionally requires assistance in the fickle Sinai climate. "When I first came here, the bush was just a few feet high," Goren said, "and not doing very well. But with water and fertilizer, they managed to nurse it back to life."
"Fertilizer?" I said. "You have to fertilize the holiest bush in the world?"
"You can't be too careful."
For all the architectural wonder of St. Catherine's, by far the monastery's greatest asset is its collection of religious manuscripts, said to be second only to the Vatican's. Following our tour of the compound, we returned to the chapel, where one of the monks, Anastasis, showed us around the library.
After about an hour, we ended up in a dark corner of the library, and I asked Anastasis why the morning service started at 4:30. He mentioned that he and the other monks had work to do, and that if they started at 9 they would never have time. "Also," he said, "it's been this way for a long, long time."
"And what about praying here?" I said. "Do you feel closer to Moses because you live here?"
"It feels a little bit strange," he said, "because when Moses met God, he did it on this spot. 'This is holy ground,' God said. The ground is much more important than the bush."
"So do you feel closer to God, too?"
"No," he said. "Wherever you are, if you are close to God, you are close. If you are far away, you are far away. It doesn't matter where you live. It matters what you feel."
Even before we arrived at St. Catherine's, I had heard of an American monk at the monastery, the first in the institution's 1,500-year history. We were sitting in the office later that day when a monk in his late 30s walked into the courtyard. I recognized him as the one who had sprinkled the incense in the morning service. I introduced myself, and he invited Goren and me to join him for a cup of tea.
"Living here has been a profound revelation," Father Justin said. “Especially for an American." He was close to 6 feet 5 inches tall, with long flowing black robes that accentuated his otherworldliness.
"What's amazing," he said, "is that I see the Bedouin girls walking through the mountains, feeding the goats, and I think, 'That's exactly what Zipporah would have looked like 34 centuries ago.' Even to this day, you still see tents. And these tents are exactly like the ones used in the time of Moses."
"Do you feel isolated?" I asked. "There's a whole world out there you never hear about."
"Who says?" Father Justin replied. "Some Americans came here about a year ago and said, 'You people need e-mail because you need to be in touch with scholars all over the world.' "
"You have e-mail?" I said.
"They gave us computers and we hooked them up. The problem is, usually the telephone lines are so poor that if you try to open a Web page it will take you two minutes or longer. The worst is when people send us these mammoth files, and then you sit there for a whole day and try to get a connection!"
I was stunned: downloading problems at Mount Sinai, the place of the most famous download in history. The irony was too rich to contemplate.
"What's amazing to me," Father Justin said, "is I can sit up there in the library working on the computer and look out the window, and there's Mount Sinai to my left. It's 34 centuries between me and Moses."
I asked how he came to be at the monastery, and he began to sketch the story. Father Justin first visited Jerusalem as a young adult and was transformed. He studied Hebrew, Latin, ancient Greek, and modern Greek and joined a Greek Orthodox monastery near his home in Massachusetts. After a decade, he made a pilgrimage to St. Catherine's, where he told the archbishop he would like to become a member.
"He just gave me this icy look," Father Justin recalled. "And then he left for Greece." After three weeks, the archbishop returned.
"Now that you've seen the monastery without rose-colored spectacles," he said, "do you still want to become a member?"
Father Justin said yes.
"Many people come here with idealistic views of what it is to be a monk," Justin continued. "Only after we had gotten to know each other was he willing to discuss my becoming a member."
And now that he lived here, what did he think about scholars who suggested that events in the Bible, specifically that events at Mount Sinai, may not have happened?
"A lot of people say that what's important is that it happened, not where it happened," Father Justin said. "We base our confirmation on two things: One is the living tradition. Moses lived in the area for 40 years. It's recorded in the Scriptures that he told the people around him what happened, and they passed it from generation to generation. The second is research. In the 19th century, when they first deciphered hieroglyphics, many, many scholars came to the conclusion that this is the only place that fits every description of Mount Sinai in the Bible.
"There's an amazing continuity that defies all human explanation," he added. "The only explanation is that it's a place especially protected by God."
It was almost sunset now, and the next morning we would begin our ascent up the mountain. But one paradox still puzzled me. Was retracing this route something that the Bible itself demanded? If anything, the opposite seemed true. Exodus, for example, clearly states that Mount Sinai was so sacred - and so highly combustible - that no one was allowed to climb it, no less touch it, look at it, or sleep on it.
"That's right," Father Justin said. "When the Israelites first came to the mountain, they marked the whole area off. There was thunder and lightning, and even the animals were not allowed to go up the mountain. And that's when they heard the sound of trumpets, as if the mountain was on fire. Everyone was terrified. And the people said to Moses, 'If we go up we will surely die, so you go up and speak to God for us!' "
"If that's the case," I asked, "how do we justify walking up the mountain today?"
Again he was serenely confident, even brotherly. "In ancient times," he explained, "a monk would be at the top of the path and hear a person's Confession to make sure that he was spiritually prepared. That's how we justify it. You come to the monastery.
You purify yourself. And then you ascend."
"And once you arrive at the top?"
For the first time all afternoon, he smiled. "You don't have to prepare for that," Father Justin said. "As the Bible says, 'This is holy ground.' When you get there, your heart will be beating and your head will be light. Just shut your eyes and listen closely. God will tell you what to do."
Adapted from the book Walking the Bible. © 2001 by Bruce Feiler (www.brucefeiler.com), published by William Morrow an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 10 E. 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022-5299.