I was fortunate, a few years ago, to pay a very brief visit to Lalibela. I was on a work trip as a journalist looking at Ethiopia 25 years on from the famine that made headlines around the world. The rest of the group were reluctant to make the detour to Lalibela, but finally agreed on the basis that I could have just an hour there. An hour isn’t nearly enough to absorb and understand a millennium of pilgrimage to this remarkable spot by Orthodox Christians, with its extraordinary churches dug into the ground, but my memory remains unusually vivid of pilgrims in bleached white cotton ceremonial <em>natelas</em> walking through the thin mountain air tinged by a reddish haze and then suddenly disappearing into the pits that contain these 11 churches. I want to go back to have time to join them in their rituals so I can understand them better; explore the mystery behind why the churches were built in the ground. But with Lalibela caught up in the (largely unreported but bloody) war in Ethiopia at the moment, I may have to wait a while.
There is so much Christian history in the holy sites in Ethiopia, symbolically given names from the Holy Land by the only pre-colonial-period Christian Church in sub-Saharan Africa: the Monastery of Bethlehem in south Gondor, the Mount of Olives in Oromo, and most significantly the Church of Our Lady of Zion in Aksum, the ancient Ethiopian capital, which according to legend houses the Ark of the Covenant.
My wife, Siobhan, my grown-up children, of course; because it would be such a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I’d want to share it with them. Plus our dear and much loved (Ethiopian) friend Semira and her family, who grew up in the region and with whom I talk about Lalibela and its stories and secrets.
I am a creature of habit when it comes to food, and lack a spirit of adventure, which I know is feeble of me, but it is how I am. So can I have our local Italian, Ida, in Queen’s Park, north-west London, run by Simonetta, Avi and their family, with delicious Pugliese specialities, homemade pasta and unmissable Nutella cheesecake.
If that is the choice, then under the stars, but if there was somewhere slightly more comfortable for my bad back, I’d be tempted, even though I know it isn’t quite in the spirit of pilgrimage.
I am shamefully ignorant of Orthodox Christianity, so something that would help me get up to speed with its history and rituals and how it has developed in Ethiopia.
A collection of RS Thomas’s verse. A Welsh Anglican clergyman who died in 2000, he explored faith, doubt and God better than anyone I know. And pilgrimage. At the end of one of his poems in his Counterpoint poetry collection, he writes of what he expects from a pilgrimage:
<em> I think that maybe</em>
<em>I will be a little surer</em>
<em> Of being a little nearer.</em>
<em> That’s all. Eternity</em>
<em> Is in the understanding</em>
<em> That that little is more than enough</em>
The Rosary – the habits of a Liverpool Catholic childhood, taught by the Christian Brothers, go deep.
<em>Dear Lord and Father of Mankind </em>or <em>You’ll Never Walk Alone</em>.
A decent pillow.
Its comforts, but that surely is the point of pilgrimage.
<em>Peter Stanford is the author of "Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning", published by Thames & Hudson. Between 1988 and 1992 he was editor of the Catholic Herald.</em>
