A Sunday meditation 

The Jaffa Gate, c. 1880

WHAT IS WISDOM, AND how can religion support and sustain us in finding it? When wrestling with existential questions of this kind, it sometimes makes sense to travel to the source of all wisdom and drink from its waters. The German novelist and travel writer Adam Karrillon did so in 1898, visiting the Middle East, the Holy Land, and the Holy City itself. This is what he discovered there:

It was seven a.m. I made my way to the Jaffa Gate. Behind its wide walls I believed I had come closer to the solution to one of the great riddles filling all religions with dogmas that demand to be accepted blindly as divine revelations, and that contradict one another in every religion – the question “Whence do we come, and whither are we headed?” I felt as if I would rediscover the devout faith of my childhood years in the Holy Places, and the trust that prayer teaches us.

Dr. Adam Karrillon, 1853-1938 (Source: Project Gutenberg)

…And so I stood before the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem and recalled the Seven Petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. I felt so devout, so faithful...

So far, so pious. But Karrillon concludes this reflection by lamenting:

Oh that we have to grow and become wise! Blessed are the simple-minded! Deception is life, and knowledge is death. {emphasis added}

We all know that the morning air does wonders to clear the mind. But could it be that this insightful general practitioner and wordsmith penetrated to the very heart of religion on that chilly morning at the Jaffa Gate...?

Source: Dr. Adam Karrillon, Eine moderne Kreuzfahrt (“A Modern Crusade,” later published in English as Travels in the Levant), Weinheim 1898. {My translation above.}