Photo Credit: mulugeta wolde | Unsplash
Installment #1 in Bucket Bejeweled is Lalibela! See the introduction to this series here which includes links to other installments in the series.
Who would have thought you could create the holiest of places out of the humblest of rocks! This discovery came for me in late 2005 when I interrupted a visit to a friend in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to venture out in search of this mystical pilgrimage site I had heard tell of. This hallowed holy-land for the country’s Coptic Christians dates back to the 12th and 13th centuries. As one of the world’s most unheralded places of peace, Lalibela is a “must see and experience” travel destination. I can think of no better place for somber ponderings and wanderings.
It was early on the sizzling morning after my late evening arrival in this tiny town in the Amhara region of Northern Ethiopia, that I set out with my guide in search of rock churches, artifacts and the holy men who give the place its air of serenity and profound humility.
Here, through these gentlest of souls, the essence of life is reduced to a walking stick – physical reinforcement, and the bible – intellectual and spiritual sustenance. I came across these holy men of Lalibela nestled in church windows and rock dugouts committing themselves to hours upon hours of silence and reflection.
As someone who has been to many holy sites – Jerusalem, Sacred Heart or Notre Dame in Paris, the Durham Cathedral in England, Buddhist temples in Japan or Jain Temples in India – I wondered what made this one feel even more special.
The answer came to me when I beheld the most famous symbol of Lalibela, the Church of St. George, a church shaped like a cross carved out of the rock deep in the bowels of this sacred land. Wow! No where had I seen divinity and the Earth so intertwined to join in the deep connection they were always meant to form!
The pilgrims, all dressed in white, filed past me into churches I was coming out of or vice versa. I felt like I had stepped into heaven prematurely and I was the “odd man out” – a bit like the little boy who inexplicably finds himself as a living soul among the “exuberant” dead in the colorful Pixar film, Coco. Like the dead in the film, the faces of these Ethiopian pilgrims uniformly portrayed contentment almost inevitably conjuring up the feeling in visitors that “I want to be like them!”
As my trek to Lalibela wound to a close, all around in this place, I felt the vibrations of calls to simplicity – reminders that the best life is the one that is simple, unencumbered and deeply connected to the natural world around us – a path I have been on ever since.
