Return to St. Catherine's

Going back to St. Catherine's and Mount Sinai was great. It was very, very different from the last time I'd gone there with AIT. You've all heard me say quite a bit about the differences between going with a large commercial group and going alone as a pilgrim, so I'll spare you the obvious observations.

In any case, that wasn't even the biggest change. I purposefully set out to do things differently. First of all, I stayed in the monastery guesthouse, which competes with Fauzi Azar Inn in Nazareth as the best money spent on this trip. Something like $30 for a single room, with breakfast and dinner included, clean sheets and towels, (mostly) hot water- really great. I'd recommend staying there anytime. In addition to a few other brave travelers- a couple from Seattle, two French fellows- there was also a Romanian pilgrimage group there taking up a good number of beds. To hear them singing at dinner was a marvelous treat.

I thought about doing a dawn hike, but when my alarm rang at 4am, I decided that it just wasn't worth it. Instead, I did the smart thing, and set out for an afternoon hike to catch the dusk. The person running the cafe at the guesthouse even put me in touch with a reliable Bedouin guide. For this time, I wasn't taking the well-trod and easily-navigable camel path. No, I was going up the three thousand, seven hundred fifty Steps of Repentance.

What, you ask, are the 3750 Steps of Repentance? Well, it's a giant uneven staircase up the side of the mountain. The first 3000 are the Steps of Repentance proper; the next 750 are the ones everyone ascending to the summit has to climb once the camel path terminates. But it's not so-named simply because they're a form of penance, or because (more often) you repent of your decision to go them once you're about halfway. No, they're called the Steps of Repentance because those three thousand steps were laid and carved out by a single monk as a form of penance for some unknown sin. Talk about hardcore.

Pictured left: Boy and donkey descending the steps on our way up.

I have to say, though, they weren't nearly as bad as I'd expected. First of all, I made them my own personal devotional by doing the same as in the Negev between Succah in the Desert and Mitzpe Ramon: namely, praying the (Lutheran) rosary fourteen times before stopping to rest while reading through the Stations of the Cross. Let me tell you, fourteen breaks for prayer on the way up and down is a great way to catch your breath. Forget my own piety- I was looking forward to each and every one of those stops.

Second, the path is actually shorter since it's a fairly straight ascent. I was thoroughly surprised when the 3000 were over and I recognized the top of the camel path. What a great feeling.

And speaking of great feelings: third, I'm in far, far better shape than I was on my previous visit three months ago. Last time I took a camel up the wide and winding path and then only climbed the 750 stairs to the top, and let me tell you, I thought I was gonna die. This time, I went straight to the top and felt totally rested within minutes of reaching the summit. There has been no better confirmation that these months have whipped me into the shape that humans are supposed to be in.

Of course, I'd sent my heavy jacket back with my parents at the beginning of January, and I lost my raincoat somewhere in Galilee. Who knows. As a result, I had to buy some cheap replacements for the hike, but hey, I don't mind looking like a bum (or Kyle Reese from Terminator).

I might as well mention here that I saw no one else climbing up the steps, and that there were only about two dozen people at the top for dusk, as opposed to four hundred for sunrise.

Anyways, if you remember, there's a chapel and another building at the summit. First off, the other building is actually a mosque. My guide, Hussein, had it opened so that once we got up and had some time to kill before the sunset he could perform his afternoon prayers. As a result, I was invited to go inside and take a look- and a photo (left). Honestly, I found it to be one of the nicer mosques I've visited here.

More importantly, though, there's the chapel that they keep perpetually locked. I asked one of the Bedouins who sells tea and blankets whether the monks ever come up and open it. He replied that when there's a Greek Orthodox group staying at the monastery, they'll give them the key so they can hold a service.

As a result, everybody wonders what it looks like inside.

Well wonder no more!

No, I didn't get to go in. What I did do is climb around to the front of the church, where the windows of the sanctuary (behind the iconstasis) look over a fifty foot drop. However, there's just barely enough room to crawl out on a ledge, hang over the abyss, put one hand through the broken glass holding the camera, and snap a shot:
Of course, I can hear my mother's fury now. "You did what?!"

Naturally, I then found an easier way to get a photo. The keyholes are particularly large, so you can just look through some of them. For instance on Facebook, there's another picture of the iconostasis of a chapel near the intersection of the Camel Path and the Steps of Repentance. Well I looked in the main door at the rear of the church- this time facing the sanctuary and the iconostasis of which you can only see the rear in the above photo- and found that I could just barely get the picture:
From left to right, that's Theotokos and Child, Christos Pantocrator, and the Holy Trinity. What a perfect collection.

Oh, and, of course, here's a picture of the approaching dusk:
In due course, I also revisited the monastery itself and found something far more interesting: the monastery has Sacred Sacristy, which in layman's terms is a museum for displaying its treasures. And what treasures! Unfortunately, there's no photos allowed inside (though perhaps fortunately, given that people would inevitably- accidentally or not- use flash and destroy precious manuscripts and icons), but the items displayed are unparalleled in the world.

Because of its isolation in the Sinai desert, St. Catherine's monastery was spared the pillaging of the iconoclasts, who went around the Byzantine Empire destroying icons in the latter half of the first millennium. As a result, St. Catherine's has the very oldest Christian icons in existence, some dating to the fourth century.

Perhaps more importantly, the monastery contains a library of early manuscripts second only to the massive Vatican library. The monastery's Codex Siniaticus is one of the earliest and more reliable biblical texts in existence, and alongside the Codex Vaticanus (you may as well guess where that one is from) is foundational for the biblical text we all use today. So yes, I've now seen the Condex Siniaticus and the Aleppo Codex. Booya.

Well, after two nights I headed back to Taba, crossed the border into Eilat, and took the bus up to Kibbutz Lotan, from whence I write this post. What a strange and ridiculous place this is- but that's for the next post.