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<\/a>Gertrude Stein once said of her hometown, Oakland, California, where she was raised after having been born in Pittsburgh, that \u201cthere is no there there.\u201d This is often taken as a knock on Oakland\u2014a city that is not really a city, that has no center, that lacks an identifiable sense of place. This is how I felt about Los Angeles when I was teenager growing up there.<\/p>\nLooking out into the smog from a vantage point in the Hollywood Hills, I\u2019d ask no one in particular, \u201cWhere is the damn city?\u201d Los Angeles, to me, was an infinite sprawl of one-story structures stretching off into the desert and the scrub brush and the impossibly dry hills.<\/p>\n
I moved to New York City as a young man partly to find a place that had a \u201cthere.\u201d The density of Manhattan seemed the very antithesis of Californian spatio-temporal malaise. When you walked down the streets of Manhattan, I thought, you\u2019d know you were unmistakably somewhere.<\/p>\n
Over time, I came to doubt that, too. The search for the \u201creal\u201d New York can be just as frustrating as the search for thereness in California. In New York, authenticity evaporates. It is always one borough away, one generation and art movement ago, one gentrified neighborhood before you got there.<\/p>\n
Does everyone have the thought, at some point in life, that there is no there anywhere on Earth? Even the cosmos, with its vast swirl of galaxies and interplanetary stuff, seems overwhelmingly \u201cnot there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, one day, you find yourself in Jerusalem. You round a corner in the Old City and there it is, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.<\/p>\n
This Church is worshipped by millions of Christians as the site of Calvary, the place where Jesus was crucified. The Church contains the final four stations of the Stations of the Cross. It is also, according to many, the site of Jesus\u2019 tomb and, thus, the site of the Resurrection.<\/p>\n
It is said that in 326, the mother of Constantine the Great, Saint Helena, discovered the One True Cross in what is essentially a basement of the church. If that weren\u2019t enough, the prison of Jesus (the place where he awaited execution with the two criminals) is located within the church, as is the spot where the two Marys are supposed to have wept over the dead body of Jesus. And you can visit the Chapel of Derision, where Jesus is supposed to have been tied to a column and scourged (also one of the final Stations of the Cross).<\/p>\n
Do you see that otherwise unobtrusive little side chapel? Well, it happens to be right under the spot where Jesus was allegedly lifted up upon the Cross and died. When he did, an earthquake shook the land and a crack opened up in the rock. Look, it is right there. Right there.<\/p>\n
The spot where Jesus\u2019s blood flowed down through the rock and came to rest is the site of the tomb of Adam, the first man. So, when Jesus died, the original man was connected, literally, by a rivulet of blood, to the man\/God who renews history and begins a new covenant. There\u2019s the crack. There\u2019s the spot.<\/p>\n
There is so much there there at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that it verges on the absurd. Can one spot on Earth hold so much there? It is an overabundance of thereness. Forget the fact that just down the street is the Wailing Wall, a place of tremendous there. And across the way, the Dome of the Rock\u2014so profoundly right there.<\/p>\n
In his book on the Holy City, Jerusalem, Jerusalem<\/em>: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World<\/em>, James Carroll wrote the following:<\/p>\n As this book will show, vague intuitions about the numinousness of this place\u2014specifically, about the rock over which the Islamic dome now stands\u2014evolved from the fertility-god cults of prehistoric times into actual incarnationalism, an idea, larger than Christianity, that the sacred shows itself not \u201cnear here\u201d or \u201cin the air\u201d or \u201cperhaps\u201d or in \u201cthe idea\u201d of the place, but hic. Here and now. In this place and no other<\/em>.<\/p>\n As Carroll writes in his book, he went to the Holy Land looking for a real place, a real spot, hic<\/em>, where something significant and lasting actually happened. He was fleeing the places in which there is no there there. He was seeking a place of ultimate thereness.<\/p>\n Carroll ended up in Jerusalem. He also traveled to Bethlehem\u2014as did I\u2014to the spot on the floor with the plaque that says, Hic Incarnatus Est<\/em>. It happened right here.<\/p>\n \u201cDespite what that assertion has come to mean to me, my first sight of it left me cold,\u201d Carroll wrote.<\/p>\n From what I saw, the birthplace of the Lord was a tourist trap. And so, as I found on my own pilgrimage\u2014\u201cHere<\/em> Jesus wept over Jerusalem\u2026Here <\/em>Jesus cured the leper\u2026Here<\/em> Jesus mixed spittle and mud\u201d\u2014was every holy site. The assertions made at the sacred places seemed glib and incredible to me.<\/p>\n The problem with much of the world is that there is no there there. The problem with Jerusalem is that there is too much here<\/em> there.<\/p>\n But there is another comment Carroll makes in his book: \u201cThe Kingdom of God is here<\/em>, Jesus said again and again.\u201d The here<\/em> that Jesus was talking about is in Oakland, and Los Angeles, and New York City, and even the tourist trap of Bethlehem.<\/p>\n The task, it turns out, is not to find the magical place out there. The task, somehow, is to find the here<\/em> in every there.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Morgan Meis<\/strong><\/a> is the critic-at-large for\u00a0The Smart Set\u00a0(thesmartset.com<\/a>). He has a PhD in Philosophy and\u00a0has written for\u00a0n+1<\/em>,\u00a0The Believer,\u00a0Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, and\u00a0The Virginia Quarterly Review<\/em>. He won the\u00a0Whiting Award\u00a0in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at\u00a03 Quarks Daily<\/em><\/a>, and a\u00a0winner of a\u00a0Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant<\/a>. A book of Morgan\u2019s selected essays can be found\u00a0here<\/a>. He can be reached at\u00a0morganmeis@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n