Three years ago this weekend, I had a ringside seat on one of the most ancient, exuberant, and terrifying events I’ve ever witnessed in a house of worship: the Ceremony of the Holy Fire.

According to church tradition, each year on the day before Orthodox Easter (April 18 this year), a flame miraculously appears inside the tomb of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The flame is captured by the Greek patriarch of the city, who first enters the tomb with fistfuls of unlit candles and emerges with flaming standards held aloft. More than 10,000 expectant pilgrims packed around the tomb burst into triumphant cheers as the church bells peal and the Holy Fire is hastily passed from