Pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai

Summit of Mt. Sinai

Up Mt. Sinai

These two pictures are of people going up Mt. Sinai and of me at the summit.  On March 20^th I went with the Tantrum group to St. Catherine monastery in the Sinai desert to stay two nights and go up to where Moses encountered God.

We left our rooms at 2:00 A.M. to ride camels from Bedouins (who seem to have some authority over the mountain) about 4 miles up a winding path to a level place on the mountain called Elijah’s place.  From there we walked up approximately 800 steps to the summit.  We got there in time to see the rising sun, as it peaked through the wintery clouds.  The wind picked up and it got cold.

Early Christian monks settled in the rugged and vast Sinai Peninsula during the early 3^rd century to escape the decadence of a dying Roman culture and to encounter God in solitude.  A monastery was built at the base of the mountain, known as the God-Trodden Mount, under the patronage of Helena (Emperor Constantine’s mother who helped establish many biblical sites and monasteries).  It is a thriving monastery with a magnificent library of ancient books and biblical manuscripts (the famous 4^th century Codex Sinaiticus of the New Testament was found there in 1865 and is now in the British Museum), and monks continue to pray basically the same liturgies that their founders did in the 4^th century (we attended their vespers prayer service).  I heard that before Egypt had its recent political unrest, approximately 3000 people daily would walk up Mt. Sinai.

It is a famous pilgrimage site.  We were pilgrims.

It is important to know the difference between a tourist and a pilgrim.  A tourist goes to a place to look at it, to speculate on it.  Tourists are attracted to the novelty or curiosity of a place, and sometimes will go great distances at great expense to see a place.  However, the easier a tourist place is to get to, the more tourists will go to it.

But pilgrims are different.  They go to holy places not just to look and speculate about them but to encounter something and experience inward transformation.  The more taxing and demanding it is to get to a holy place and the more emotionally challenging it is, the more pilgrims are drawn to it.  They seek an encounter with what made or continues to make the place holy.

The famous early 20^th century theologian Rudolph Otto defined the holy as the “mysterium trememdum et fascinans.”  The phrase means a holy place has a mystical pull to it, which is both tremendous in that it is very different to the ordinary and fascinating in that its meaningfulness and implications arrest our attention.

A holy place does not have to recreate the original holy act.  The effects can still be there.  Though on Mt. Sinai I did not hear Yahweh speak to me as Yahweh did to Moses approximately 3,400 years ago.  I was not surrounded by a dark cloud and did not hear Yahweh walk before me, as did Moses.  But I felt the effects of such an encounter.  When a pilgrim realizes that he or she stands in the vicinity to where it happened, the whole story of Moses speaking with Yahweh and receiving the Commandments becomes more dramatic and memorable.  I’ll read these accounts in Exodus with a new sense of what it must have been like.  In fact, because I was there, they all seem more concrete, real life, and life changing.  Because I was a pilgrim there and not a tourist, I believe that I’m generally more receptive to the trememdum et fascinans.

In the 1980’s there was talk of building a cable car up to the top, but I’m glad the monks and Bedouins rejected the idea.  The fact that it is so remote and challenging respects the allure and fascination of the place, because Mt. Sinai is not an ordinary mountain.  It is the God-Trodden Mount.