PEOPLE OF THE ARK
Here is a real life experience foreign to most western Christians.
Check it out.
Fr, Orthohippo
As a dark curtain of rain drew near, my tour group made its descent down the hill, leaving the Ethiopian town of Lalibela behind us. In the distance, rows of lush green plateaus stretched out under the thunderclouds before plummeting down to the valley.
Only one thing could cause us to look away from this tropical Grand Canyon: a giant cross jutting out from the mud-red hillside.
Our group—myself, two couples from Chicago, and our tour guide—soon found itself on the edge of a gaping hole in the hillside. Inside was a full-sized church, hewn out of volcanic rock. A zigzag of stairs and trenches led to the Church of St. George—or, Bet Giyorgis in Amharic (the main Ethiopian language). From the base, the 17-story church towered above us, its finely carved four columns forming a Greek cross from base to roof. With volcanic red walls scarred by yellow splotches and green stains, the church conveyed a sense of time as well as timelessness.
We entered the church, after first removing our shoes—one of many ubiquitous holdovers from Jewish tradition that I would witness on my trip. The interior was bathed in a cave-like darkness, pierced only by shafts of light from spade-shaped windows high above us. As in other Orthodox churches in Ethiopia, there were no pews or chairs, just a mish-mash of plush carpets. What appeared to the untrained eye to be one room was actually two: the qene mahlet around the entrance, where the congregation sings hymns, and then the qeddest, where the faithful receive communion. A third room was hidden from view in the front: the maqdas, the Ethiopian equivalent of the Jewish Holy of Holies.
It is not for nothing that St. George has been dubbed the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World.’ Were it the only rock-hewn church there, the small northern Ethiopian town would still be worth the visit. But in fact, Lalibela has not one, two, or even three such churches, but a dozen.
How these churches of Lalibela came to be is the stuff of legend. Some modern historians have credited the Knights Templar with their construction. Ethiopian tradition, however, maintains that angels worked on the churches during the night, picking up where tired villagers had left off. Adding to the mystery is the fact that not a single tool has ever been found. “Maybe the angels took them away with them,” our guide quipped.
In the absence of material for carbon dating, no one is even really sure how old the churches are, although tradition holds that they were built after the 12th century King Lalibela received instructions for building them during a vision in which he was taken up to heaven.
The remaining 11 churches are clustered in two compounds elsewhere in town. Wandering through the maze of moss-covered trenches, stone archways, and tunnels that connect the churches within each group has all the thrill of a treasure hunt—but I was in it for more than the sights, as breathtaking as they were.
By day, these churches stood as architectural fossils of an ancient faith with nothing more than a lone priest here and there and the bones of pilgrims at one church to keep the occasional gaggle of tourists company. But one Monday morning, after 6 a.m., I witnessed one of these church compounds burst into life in the celebration of the daily liturgy.
Since I was more than half an hour late, I braced myself for the inevitable embarrassment of trying to sneak into whatever church was hosting the liturgy. Instead, I found the area still bustling with activity. Some white-clad worshippers were pouring into and out of one of the churches. Others were circulating through the compound, kissing the walls of each church or making the Sign of the Cross as they made their rounds. One man bowed repeatedly before a church wall while immersed in prayer. Another leaned against a church with an open book.
Apart from a sizable crowd that sat or stood on the ground above the compound, everyone else seemed oblivious to the rattle of the liturgy that belted out of the loudspeakers near one church. The whole scene had more in common with the pandemonium of an open-air market than the regimented order of the Mass.
But that did not seem to make the devotion of these Ethiopian Orthodox faithful any less intense or sincere. Inside the Church of Mary—across from where the liturgy was being celebrated—I sat on a bench, and, in my earnestness to participate, opened up a recent copy of Magnificat magazine. Next to me was a priest immersed in a book that he was speed reading. He seemed unperturbed by the interruption of a worshipper who asked for a blessing. A boy nearby sang softly while in the center of the church, a group of people kneeled, prostrated themselves, and then kissed the floors.
As a new Catholic convert at the time—this was the summer of 2009—I felt a spiritual kinship with these Ethiopian Orthodox devotees that would have been unthinkable when I was an evangelical Protestant. Their icons, their devotional customs, their traditions—all seemed very foreign to me, but so had many things about Catholicism. And so, I found the strangeness of Ethiopian Orthodoxy oddly familiar, even inviting.
What is it that has allowed Ethiopia to persevere as a Christian nation? Ultimately, as with any such question, one must acknowledge the grace of God.
Read on here Ark of the Covenant
Versions of this article were originally published in Parable, the diocesan magazine of Manchester, New Hampshire.
