Markers

Inherent sacred sites that loom larger than life don't need markers --- who can miss the Grand Canyon, after all? --- but the ordinary terrain where God abides may easily be missed without a visible reminder that God is here. So we construct markers on historical sites --- like the sign leading up to the Dome of the Rock, where the Temple once stood. ``Holy Place,'' it says, ``Jewish law forbids Jews to go there.'' A self-appointed elder from Jerusalem's Orthodox sects screams out the warning to the hordes of people who pass by anyway because they do not accept the validity of that law --- but at least (the elders must think) they have been warned.

Curiously, a marker for a site may itself become holy. In the 1940s a veteran Israeli tourist guide noticed that his group had become weary while walking from one famous spot to another. He therefore stopped beside a large boulder and proclaimed: ``In the war against Rome, a mighty farmer nicknamed Samson was at work up the road a ways. Upon hearing that the Romans were besieging the Temple, he picked up this rock, vowing to carry it all the way to Jerusalem where it would fortify the city's walls. He got this far and met a messenger who told him he was too late: the Temple was in flames. In his shock he dropped the boulder where you see it, and died.''

The guide had fabricated the entire account! Not a word of it was true. Nonetheless, ten years later he came upon the same spot and found an Arab child pleading, ``Mister, take off your shoes; this is the rock of the mighty Samson!'' By the 1960s the government installed an official signpost: Makom Kadosh, ``Warning: this is a sacred site; behave reverently.''

Thus a marker for a site may even generate its own marker. The sign announcing Samson's Rock is a marker for a marker, namely, the rock, which is itself a marker for a place that someone thought was sacred.

Our penchant for sacred sites thus alternates between our love of the sites and our fascination with their markers. We can speak then of marker fascination and of site fascination. Site-fascinated people love to visit places that are holy, but don't much care to know the story of what makes them so. Marker fascination is the opposite extreme: the practice of spending all our time reading marker signs, and none at all viewing the site. Marker-fascinated people visit shrines but keep their faces buried in Bibles or guide literature, using these as marker books to explain what they are viewing.

Most of us, however, need both site and marker. Sacred places thus cry out for road signs that rehearse their tale. Age-old cemeteries have lavish gates that explain what lies within, and the gravestones preserve the identities of the human beings who now lie buried there.