Jerusalem is a city sacred to three faiths. The city that David made his capital and where Solomon built the Temple, where Jesus celebrated Passover, was crucified and buried, is also the place where, according to sura 17, al-Isra, of the Quran, Muhammad made his ‘night journey’ to heaven. Jews make pilgrimage to the Western Wall to pray before the massive stones that are all that remains of the great Temple structure destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Christians come to the dark and cavernous Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where, according to tradition, Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, discovered the true cross. For Muslims, the Dome of the Rock or the Noble Sanctuary, al-Haram al-Sharif, which now stands on the Temple Mount, is the third holiest site in Islam and the point towards which Muslims turned for prayer before Muhammad established the focus or qibla as the Kaaba in Mecca. These are all places hallowed by the prayers of countless thousands of pilgrims and devotees from the three faiths. This extraordinarily moving and tragically divided city, a mere third of a square mile in area, concentrates the memories and the lived experience of Jews, Christians and Muslims throughout the world. If religion had an archaeology it would be Jerusalem.

As I wandered around the old city for the first time I was struck by a single thought. The silver-encrusted circular hole in the floor of the church of the Holy Sepulchre may not have been the exact spot where Jesus was crucified. The hollow set deep down under the building may not have been the place where Jesus was laid to rest. But they could not have been that far away. For Christians, of course, the only important focus of pilgrimage is Jesus himself. The Fourth Gospel makes that clear time and time again; Jesus is the one in whom the religious institutions of Judaism, including the Temple itself, all find their fulfilment. Place, it seems, is transcended and no longer religiously significant. Such an interpretation of the scriptures, however, would be to underestimate the importance of history, and of certain historical events, for the proper understanding of Christian faith. Places preserve memories. There is nothing like a visit to the Holy Land to bring home the paradox that runs all the way through Christian history: that a universal truth is refracted through some very specific events that actually happened. The city of Jerusalem, divided by a history of conflict and tragedy, is still the ‘city of peace’, a place of strange inspiration. In this light, the sacramental instinct that forms Catholic sensibility is not something vague and irretrievably other-worldly. It is rooted in the power of particular signs to evoke memory and make present God’s undying promise.