A journey through Jerusalem, Mount Sinai and the Dead Sea becomes a meditation on pilgrimage, responsibility and the uneasy line between freedom and fate.

Twilight slowly descended on the garden and once again I was alone. I gazed at the thick shattered trunks of the ancient olive trees and at their parched, sun-blasted branches that cast feeble shadows on the darkening day. I was in the Garden of Gethsemane, just 50 metres outside the old walled city of Jerusalem. Forty miles from where I stood was the Dead Sea, and just over another 200 miles of desert was Mount Sinai; a trivial distance that took you from the basement to the attic of the world. The geography and topography of the Holy Land seemed straight out of a dream, bewildering and beguiling.

I did not plan to spend so long in Jerusalem. I ran out of money and couldn’t afford the extravagant airport departure tax. So I spent a month washing dishes at the Tabasco Hostel in the Old City. It was run by an Arab man who had high expectations but also wanted to get out of the kitchen as much as I did. I was still recovering from eating the local food on my first night in Cairo. For over a month I had not been able to keep much down. My diet now consisted of plain digestive biscuits and Coca-Cola. In a strange way, these seemed like sacraments. I would take small sips of Coke and allocate myself half a biscuit at different moments of each day.

As long as I was at the hostel in the early evening to wash the dishes, the days were my own. I spent them wandering through the arid landscape of Jerusalem, following some strange inner directive. I walked on narrow winding trails that surrounded the scattered houses on the Mount of Olives, just outside the Old City. On these trails I would sink into deep reflection and imagine I was a pilgrim in 1,000 AD. Very few things in this landscape would contradict this fantasy. There was the odd car that passed by but mostly people were on foot or travelled on donkeys.

In the late evening after I had done the dishes I would walk through the narrow passageways of the Old City, exploring its Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian quarters. Occasionally I would get a glimpse of the underlying tensions when a man would run through the Arab quarter waving the Israeli flag, or when a group of Arab boys taunted a young female Israeli soldier protecting the Wailing Wall. But mostly everyone went about their day-to-day business, running the busy markets in which I loved to get lost, or rushing down some alleyway to a service that was just about to begin.

Although I did not attend a service, I found myself returning to the fourth-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre over and over again. I knew that it was unlikely this was the spot where Jesus had been crucified but it did not matter. The atmosphere inside was intoxicating. I found passages that led to clandestine corners where individuals were taking part in earnest prayer. On one occasion I came across a small Ethiopian man in priestly garments silently praying to a small golden crucifix. I wondered what had drawn him to this ancient church in Jerusalem.

A pilgrimage seems to belong to a distant era. I think of medieval Europeans being called to travel to Jerusalem to commune with the sacred landscape. But pilgrimage also means enduring hunger, illness and homesickness. Getting lost out on the land in search of a lifelong spiritual connection.

Mount Sinai is difficult to get to. It is deep in the south of the Sinai desert at the bottom of a triangle it shares with Jerusalem and Cairo. Twilight was falling when I arrived at St Catherine’s Monastery at the base of the mountain, the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world.

Just before midnight, I started to walk up the rough gravel pathway to the summit of Mount Sinai. It was pitch black except for the stars and the odd fiery glow of a lit cigarette, belonging to men who sat beside their camels hoping to entice a pilgrim to make the ascent without walking. As I was almost entirely broke, I could easily forgo this temptation.

By 5am I was hungry, tired and discombobulated. The pathway seemed to go on forever. But when I looked down in the glimmer of pre-dawn light, I realised I was ascending the final section of this colossal rock formation. I felt elated when I came upon the last of the 3,750 ‘steps of penitence’ that were carved into the rock by a monk as penance. Before I climbed up these steps, I looked up at the immense canopy of stars as the warm desert wind swirled around me. It is hard to describe just what I felt, except that I was sure I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing, and that Moses must have felt something very similar.

As I reached the summit and watched the 4.6-billion-year-old sun come up as if for the first time, I thought about Moses’ challenging relationship with God. It was at this place that they both became exasperated at the behaviour of those they had drawn out into the desert. In the Exodus story, no one seemed to be able to take responsibility for anything. At first Moses tried to shirk God’s call for him to free the Israelites from slavery. Then the Israelites started worshipping a golden calf when Moses was up on the mountain. Even God had tried to free himself of the humans he had created, saying to Moses: “Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.”

Feeling the burgeoning daytime heat of the desert, I wondered why the Ten Commandments are a list of prohibitions, a list of Thou Shalt Nots. As Durkheim once observed, “liberty is the fruit of regulation”, meaning that freedom results from accepting the responsibilities and limitations that give life direction. This is what the Israelites and Moses had struggled to do.

As I slowly began descending the mountain, I thought about how true to life the Exodus story is. To accept a difficult responsibility is something that we all try and avoid at one time or another.

Standing at the base of Mount Sinai again, I became acutely aware that I was in this unforgiving landscape for a reason that I could not rationally understand. That I was somehow called to be here. To make sense of something that was both troubling and sublime.

A week later I found myself in an even more foreboding desert landscape. Immersed in the volcanic heat of the Dead Sea desert, I wondered how anyone could survive for long in this earthly furnace. And yet Jesus had supposedly fasted here for forty days and forty nights, exactly the same length of time that Moses spent up on Mount Sinai; a mythical, symbolic number that exists beyond space and time.

While floating in the Dead Sea where no fish swim, I was conscious this was the place where Jesus resisted the devil’s three temptations: earthly bread, earthly authority and earthly miracles. Each refusal seemed to draw him further towards the life he had been called to live. He was free to choose but fated to follow. I let the paradox sit just out of sight of my consciousness. It was not the right time to make sense of it now.

It was with some relief that I entered the Garden of Gethsemane in the cool of the day. Walking up the Mount of Olives, my legs ached and the dry heat of the desert made my lips and skin feel like torn sandpaper. After I watched the sun slowly sink behind the withered olive trees, I closed my eyes and sank into the story that could not be separated from this landscape.

At Gethsemane, Jesus’ disciples had fallen into a deep sleep after he had asked them to stay awake and pray with him. They were in the eye of the hurricane. Much had been done that they hadn’t understood, which was not surprising. Their practical and quotidian lives had been upturned by following this otherworldly revolutionary teacher. They must have had their doubts, as he did. It was in this garden that Jesus’ agony began:

Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will. (Mark 14:36)

One of the saddest prayers ever recorded, and devastating in this context. But who was there to witness it?

I thought of Jesus burning brightly saying “yes” to people whom the world had rejected – the prostitute, the tax collector, the man possessed by demons. Yet it was also true that Jesus’ earthly life had been brief and had ended in disappointment, here in the garden and then on the Cross. But did he really have a choice? Or was everything preordained?

The paradox started to rise from the depths of my consciousness. If the Son of God is not free to escape his fate, what hope do the rest of us have?

The following morning, I walked back towards the church at the Mount of Olives and watched American tourists disembark from gleaming air-conditioned buses, eyeing the shade that beckoned from within the open church door. These Americans in their leisure wear looked physically imposing but the plastic crosses they carried were light. A plastic cross. It seemed so uniquely modern and American. And yet they had also made their own pilgrimage to this difficult part of the world. What had driven them? And why had I decided to visit this part of the world on my own, when there were so many other options?

In a world of glossy travel brochures and meticulously planned holidays, a pilgrimage is an odd undertaking. It’s not something you choose to do; it is something you are called to do.

I don’t travel overseas anymore. Other things call me now. But Mount Sinai, the Dead Sea, Jerusalem and Gethsemane all remain alive deep inside of me. I remember, I still remember everything.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.