September. It was a hot dusty September afternoon. We were on a hot, dusty bus. Typical excited, casually friendly chatter, punctuated by commentary and one-liners from the all-knowing tour guide. Traffic was bumper to bumper, rivaling southern California freeways at rush hour. Impatient drivers blaringly expressing themselves, street side vendors muscling their way into the standstill to creeping traffic to hawk their wares. I imagine there was a sign(that I likely missed, since I'm not literate in Arabic or Hebrew), "Beit Lahem city limit Population 20,000" to differentiate its hustle from the southernmost bustle of modern day Jerusalem. Our sluggish progress was a maddening frustration.
We had to pass through a military checkpoint, since we were crossing from Israeli controlled territory to a Palestinian Authority sector. As an American, I was unaccustomed to the high-profile military presence in Israel, so I was unsettled by this delay.
The garbage. I remember the garbage. Piled 5'-10' deep in any and every spot wide enough to accommodate it. Plump, overstuffed trash bags, broken furniture, disused, rusty appliances, and derelict cars were all heaped in formidable stacks blanketing the landscape like the deep snow of a Norman Rockwell Christmas scene. I was grieved and saddened to the point of tears to find the place of the dear Savior's birth buried in refuse, looking more like a junkyard at the heart of a landfill than a venerated landmark.
The tour guide glanced at his watch, whispered with the driver and then announced that we'd have to run for it if we wanted to make it to the Church of the Nativity before it closed for the day. We all grabbed our cameras and abandoned bus into the urban sprawl of Bethlehem. The urgency and desperation of an impending deadline joined the volatile mix of emotions I was feeling as we scurried hurriedly down two city blocks past gold-white stone houses, apartment buildings and storefronts. We dashed through a narrow gate and across the cobblestoned Manger Square and through the heavy doors of the church before guards could lock us out for the night.
We all caught our breath, congratulated one another on getting there, and looked around...We were inside a massive colonnaded nave lined with dusty tapestries, icons and smoky walls with tall, narrow windows...And we stood at the end of a long line of tourist-pilgrims snaking its way towards the low doorway of a small tapestry draped grotto surrounded by flickering votive candles and silver lamps hanging from long chains. I was crestfallen and a bit angered at the pretentiousness, the inauthenticity of the ostentatious religious trappings that marked, or to my mind, marred the site.
Once inside the grotto, I was surrounded by more tapestries, more beatifically smiling icons, and more glowing votives. More censers and lamps hung from more chains. Marble slabs lined the walls and paved the floor. The rays of a 14 pointed silver(though it looked like gold by the light of the lamps and candles) star radiated outward from a 4" circle of what is presumably the original stone floor of the stable-cave where Jesus was born, the very Spot where He drew His first mortal breath. There, in that grotto, gazing at that 4" stone circle at the very heart of the urban sprawl of Bethlehem, somehow all the noise of the city faded into hushed reverie, and my intellectual skepticism, cold disillusionment, and bitter grief simply fell away. There, amid the chiaroscuro dance of dusky shadows and warm candlelight, I knelt and touched that small circle of the authentic, the real, the True.
This was why I had traveled halfway around the world to the Holy Land. This was why I had suffered the sticky heat of an Israeli September, wrestled with the relentless push-and-shove of metro Jerusalem traffic, and braved the Palestinian checkpoint. This was why I had pressed on through those heaps of garbage, raced to beat that closing time deadline, and stood in that long snaking line of pilgrims. This was why I parted the brocaded draperies of the grotto and stepped inside. This was my moment to reach out and touch the tangible, stony past, and through that simple act, to touch intangible eternity, the newborn, ancient face of God-With-Us.
I've relived that pilgrimage this Christmas season...Pushing my way through the urban sprawl of everyday business-as-usual life, digging through the garbage of superficial activities, thoughts and emotions that clutter my life, and pressing on until all the gaudy trappings of religion fall away so that only that bright spark of true faith remains, so I can reach out and touch the eternal Christ of Christmas, God-With-Me...
I suppose I actually make that journey every day.
