Eleven months ago, I stood in the middle of Bethlehem’s Manger Square. Earlier that day, our group, which was staying in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, boarded our bus for a day in the West Bank. Bethlehem was our first stop. Israeli soldiers walked through the bus before we were allowed to pass through the looming concrete and barbed wire wall that divides the occupied territory from the rest of Israel.
I remember both sides of the wall, The grim, gray concrete of the Israeli side. The Palestinian side, covered with graffiti, some of it truly beautiful, all of it striking, painted with slogans like “Make hummus, not war," images of doves bearing olive branches and Palestinian men hurling flowers over the wall. I remember sharing lunch with the leader of a Palestinian group that supports people in need of food and education, housing and work. I remember walking into the city of Bethlehem and through a refugee camp that was 75 years old, surrounded by another wall, painted with the United Nations’ bill of rights for children. A 75-year-old refugee camp with ragged tenements instead of tents within the town whose name translates as "City of Bread." I remember standing in the camp and looking up to the nearby hills. They were covered with shining white homes, occupied by Israeli setters, whose windows look down on the Palestinian “camp.” I remember visiting the Church of the Nativity. I stood in line with my traveling companions and tourists from myriad countries, inching our way toward the shrine traditionally associated with Jesus’ birth. As the line moved forward, I saw the heavy crimson velvet drapes that surrounded an opening about the size of my fireplace at home. An elaborate gold relief hung over the opening, the characters of the nativity gathered around the manger. I grew up in a Presbyterian congregation that didn’t put much store in shrines or relics, believing that sacred spaces were intangible. But I have been a Catholic for the past forty years, and I am more open to holiness breaking into real life. I watched the people in front of me approach the shrine, kneel on one or both knees, reach their arms into the black space. Some of them murmured a prayer and then rose to walk away. When it was my turn, I knelt before the opening and reached my arm into the dark space. Out of the blue, I recalled a moment in Rome years ago when I stretched my arm into the mouth of a mythic creature and laughed at the legend that the monster might bite it off. I was a bit nervous now, as my fingers reached into the dark space surrounded by a metal star. I fumbled for the ground and found what felt like stones that might have covered the floor of a stable long ago. Like some of the people before me, I muttered the words of a prayer – something about the light that the world still needs. And then I stood up to let the person behind me come forward. I remember all these things now, in a world where our latest war involves Israel and Hamas. Thousands have died, most of them innocent civilians who cannot escape the bombing that has laid waste to Gaza. I read online that Bethlehem has canceled Christmas this year and that one Lutheran Church there has scattered the characters of the Nativity through a pile of rubble. In my experience of this world, Advent often seems like a time to kneel, reach out, despite our fears, into the darkness, feeling for a fleeting brush of stone, pray for hope, stand up and then walk on. Never more than this year. A line from “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem" runs through my mind, my own refrain for Advent this year: “. . . the hopes and fears of all the years are met in you tonight.”
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