Holy land of Jordan

In Jordan, we searched for the well-springs of our faith, and found the pervasive glimmer of an Indian connection. Out of Aman, we drove into increasingly austere landscapes.

Here, according to tradition, the Semitic rishi, John the Baptist, had trod, preaching a revolt against the excesses of his day, predicting the arrival of a cleansing leader. When troubled people had streamed through these harsh lands, seeking redemption, John had baptised them in an age-old ceremony of renewal. One of them was Jesus.

We had come to visit the legendary site of Jesus’s baptism. It surprised us. Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan had attracted pilgrims for centuries but it was still unspoilt. Along with the other visitors, we took a shuttle bus from the Visitor Centre, as private vehicles were not allowed further: security was rigid because Israel lay on the other bank of the narrow Jordan river.

Jesus’s baptism

All of us believed that we were being taken to the place where Jesus had been baptised, more than two millennia ago. The image of a haloed Jesus, standing in Jordan beside his emaciated forerunner, had been embroidered into our psyches.

It was like a revered woodcut from an old family Bible. Then came the disappointment. We were led to a spot where two workers were deepening and widening a hole filled with muddy water, at the bottom of a flight of steps. “This was, probably, where Jesus was actually baptised because it lay on the old bed of the Jordan,” our guide said.

To the right of the steps was a wooden shed. “That is where Jesus reputedly removed his outer garments before he stepped into the water.” At the top of the steps was a platform with a small patch of mosaic flooring: all that remained of three old churches that had been built, successively, atop the ruins of earlier ones.

Just two sheds, abandoned ruins and a muddy pool. But then why wasn’t this place being venerated as the Baptismal site? We moved on, clutching our tarnished zeal. Surely the place ‘where Jesus was actually baptised’ should have been more embellished, more visually appealing? Even Jesus, who had led a very simple life, had exhorted his followers to let their light shine before men and not hide it under a bushel, but put it on a candlestick.

We trudged through more thorn-scrub wilderness, along a hot and dusty path. We heard voices ahead and then we saw a glittering golden dome. A little further on, we stepped into the grounds of the imposing Church of St John the Baptist. It looked new, or recently renovated, built in the barrel-roof style of its Greek Orthodox faith and carrying the coat of arms of the Patriarchate.

This was, certainly, more like it. But even that heraldic escutcheon did not prepare us for the radiance inside. The walls of the church were a cerulean blue giving the feeling of receding, infinite, space. On them were powerful murals and mosaics depicting the most pervasive beliefs of Christianity.

Set in a golden frame was one of the most beautiful portraits of The Madonna that we have ever seen: serene, immaculate and sublimely compassionate. Then there was Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger, and warmed by the breath of an ox and an ass. We were enthralled by these evocative icons of our faith.

The Indian side

The Three Wise Men who, according to the great Indologist Father Heras of St Xaviers, Mumbai, were probably astrologers from southern India, shepherds and angels. Joseph, sitting on a stone, pensive at the miracle of the Christ Child. Carnivores and deer standing together in a grove. The Holy Spirit, as a silver dove, hovering over the monstrance holding the consecrated host, the focus of our living faith. And, naturally, Jesus being baptised by the gaunt John, who could have fitted easily into an akhara in the Kumbh.

In fact, he probably belonged to a congregation of ascetics called the Essenes who wore white, were vegetarian, and had their monasteries on the old spice-and-incense route from India to West Asia. That last image triggered a thought and we were pensive when we left the church. We walked down a flight of steps to a shelter overlooking the cool, green, flow of the Jordan. On the far bank, another flight of steps rose to the Israeli site with the Star of David fluttering on a flagpole. There were no pilgrims there.

On our Jordanian side, however, a tall priest in a black robe and a high hat stood over a baptismal font. Gathered around him, reverentially, were a youthful father and mother, their young daughter, an aunt, a grandmother, and a proud grandfather holding his infant grand-daughter. And as we looked, the priest, following a 2,000-year-old tradition sanctified by Jesus Himself, poured the blessed water of the Jordan on the little girl, in the ancient rite of baptism.

Suddenly, the significance of what we were witnessing homed into us. Our brains tingled. A myriad cells had suddenly begun to fire impulses to each other and images flared in exquisite inspiration. Such satori experiences had happened when we first saw the Pyramids touched by a desert dawn, heard plain-chant in an English cathedral, breathed in ittar from a Sufi seer’s mazaar in Dudhwa, had our epiphanic darshan of Balaji in Tirupati.

Now, we knew why the place where Jesus ‘was actually baptised’ had been virtually abandoned. Jesus of Nazareth had preached a strangely South Asian faith of love, forgiveness and tolerance to a people who worshipped a stern and vengeful god. But before Jesus could do so, he had to be anointed as the Khristos in a traditional Essene way. Flowing water is essential for the anointing conferred by a snaan, and so the site was shifted from an unsuitable muddy pool to the flowing Jordan. As in many matters of belief, the compulsions of tradition are more virtuous than the facts of history.

Or are we viewing our faith through the prism of our Indianness?