There will be a rare full moon this Christmas Eve. While
the fog from Central Florida’s unseasonably warm December may prevent many of
us from seeing it here, I remember with clarity a nearly full moon at Christmas
Eve that will likely be unmatched during my lifetime.
In December 1994, I was awarded a scholarship as a
seminarian to travel to Israel for a two week seminar on Jesus and the
historical holy land. Our group of 45 seminarians and theological scholars from
around the country assembled at John F. Kennedy International in New York to
board the Tower Airlines flight to Ben Gurion in Jerusalem.
It was an incredible two weeks. Our travels took us from
the Negev Desert to the south to Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee in the north
and out to the ruins of Caesaria on the Mediterranean. We had been allowed into
the excavations on the southern steps of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This
was the place where Jesus is recorded in both Luke and Matthew’s gospels as
lamenting the coming destruction of the city by its Roman overlords:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets
and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your
children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not
willing!
Many of us took our shoes off that day to feel the
recently unearthed rough stone beneath our feet, to touch the steps that Jesus
may have stood upon in the hours before his death. An overwhelming feeling of
despair swept over me as I stood that day looking out toward Bethlehem in the
far distance.
“You’ll be disappointed…”
Even though we were in Israel at Christmas, we found to
our surprise that Christmas lights were displayed all over the country. Many
Muslims celebrate Christmas as Jesus is seen as a prophetic figure in that
tradition. And Christians have been in this holy land for many years as a
minority religious presence first among Muslims and later among Israeli Jews.
A rabbi friend of mine had warned me I would not like
what I found at both the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of
the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. “Harry, I know you and you will be greatly
disappointed,” he had said. And he was right. The interiors of those churches
are divided up between competing factions of the Christian tradition, lines
painted down ancient flooring to denote where Eastern Orthodox, Armenian and
Coptic space ended and Roman Catholic space began. It was, as my rabbi friend
had warned me, disgusting.
Even so, a number of us had decided that we simply had to
celebrate Christmas Eve by going to Bethlehem for Midnight Mass. Our instructor
had tried his best to dissuade us from this plan but we charged ahead,
summoning taxis to take us the 9 miles from our hotel on the Mount of Olives to
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
While I am convinced there is no time in Israel which is
not tense, with its time bombs of settler communities with their luxury condos
and swimming pools guarded by IDF troops dotting the landscape of increasingly
desperate Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza, this time was
particularly tense. The Palestinian Authority had just officially adopted a
flag and insisted it be flown over Bethlehem at Christmas. The Israeli
government had initially refused, arguing that this would grant a legitimacy to
a people and authority they did not recognize but eventually worked out a
compromise on where the flags could be flown.
We encountered eight checkpoints between Jerusalem and
Bethlehem that night. At each checkpoint we were required to show our passports
and explain where we were going. Upon arriving at Manger Square, we were
required to pass through metal detectors and then go into a plywood room to be
bodily searched by Israeli Defense Guards (IDF). Once through the screening, we
emerged into Manger Square only to encounter IDF troops with automatic weapons
standing atop the two story buildings surrounding the plaza.
Very quickly we found out that our cab driver had misled
us, that we had no passes into the service in the Church of the Nativity which
was reserved for Roman Catholic and local dignitaries but not for those of us
commoners who fervently wished to attend the mass. Ironically, it was the
descendants of Herod and the occupying Roman Empire who stood above the grotto
over which the church had been erected to celebrate the birth of the peasant
carpenter’s child Herod would fail to kill as an infant and the Empire would
succeed in crucifying a mere 32 years later.
Bedlam in Bethlehem
Out in the plaza, things were hopping. A large screen
displayed the closed circuit broadcast from the church’s interior next to which
a set of bleachers hosted several American evangelical church choirs. In the
bars and restaurants surrounding the plaza, drunken tourists celebrated. The
noise grew louder by the hour and people began to throw their finished beer
bottles up into the air only to have them come crashing down and splintering
into a thousand fragments amid the crowd.
But the beer bottles were not the only danger. The only
bathroom in the complex was down a set of stairs into a dank, poorly lit
basement that became increasingly nasty over the night with urine and waste
paper all over the floor. Having travelled in a number of developing countries
over my lifetime, that did not bother me so much. It was the comments being
made to me about being an American in tones that suggested this was not a good
thing that made me increasingly apprehensive.
About two hours into this experience, I decided I’d had
enough. It was three hours until midnight. I had had enough mind numbing praise
music from American evangelical kids and dealt with enough push and shove in
the crowded square of increasingly intoxicated revelers in a scene more akin to
Times Square on New Year’s Eve than the silent, holy night of Christmas Eve. A
number of us gathered, left the secured area, hailed a cab and headed back to
Jerusalem.
In retrospect, I am not sorry I went. Though it was not a
particularly happy experience, I learned a lot in that short time. Today the
road to Bethlehem requires crossing through a military checkpoint in the midst
of the massive concrete barrier separating the settlements on the edge of
Jerusalem from the increasingly Islamic Bethlehem from which Arabic Christians
are slowly departing. The closest I got to Bethlehem during my visit to Israel
in the summer of 2014 was the barrier, looking across to the Church of the
Nativity in the far distance as I stood beneath bullet pocked plexiglass
windows of Israeli settlements on the hillside.
It was a very sad view, indeed.
A Taste of Home
But the night was not over and it would have an
unpredictable ending. I knew St. George’s Anglican Cathedral just outside the
gates of the Old City in Jerusalem would be holding midnight mass in English. A
couple of seminarians went with me to the service. It was glorious, complete
with the smells and bells we Anglicans love. It even featured tea and crumpets
afterward in the parish hall. After a trying night, it was a welcome respite of
Christmas like we celebrated back home.
When I finally departed the Cathedral gates, I began to
look for a cab. None in sight. Indeed, no traffic at all at 2 AM Christmas
morning. I waited for 15 minutes and nothing passed by. Jerusalem was shuttered
and sleeping.
That left me with a dilemma. My hotel was on the far side
of the Old City on the Mount of Olives, a good 3-4 miles away. While I have
always like to walk, I was keenly aware that I was alone in the middle of the
night in a foreign country with a long history of violence. Worst of all, I was
suddenly aware that the only way I could get home was by walking back through
the city gates into the walled Old City of Jerusalem and out the far side
because it was the only way I knew to get there.
I gulped, summoned up my courage and took off, entering
the Damascus Gate. The Old City was dimly lit where lit at all. Whole blocks of
its passageways were dark. I was alone, hearing my own footsteps echoing off
the paving stones, bouncing off shuttered shops and restaurants.
While I probably was not in any great danger that night,
I did not know that. The words of the psalmist echoed in my mind: “Yea, though
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...” I was terrified. But, like
the psalmist I felt that G_d was indeed with me that night. I made my way to the
Via Dolorosa and soon saw the Lion’s Gate ahead. I had made it.
Photo from Times of Israel, Dec. 24, 2015
Heavenly Peace
Emerging from the Lion’s Gate I could see the lights of
my destination, the Seven Arches Hotel on the top of the Mount of Olives.
Getting there would require weaving up the hillside on a series of two lane
roads populated by Arabs offering camel rides and photos with his donkey during
the day time. No camels, donkeys or their tenders were in sight as I began the
climb to the hotel.
As I walked, my anxieties began to subside. I was safe,
had a good story I’d actually survived to tell, and was almost home. That was
when the beauty of the night swept over me.
The moon would be full in two more days that Christmas.
But in the dry, desert air of Israel, not a cloud obscured the nearly full
moon. Everywhere I looked the hillsides were illuminated by white moonlight,
bright enough I could see the graves in the nearby Kidron Valley, the church
next to the Garden of Gethsemane. Indeed, it was bright enough I could actually
read the service booklet from St. George’s I’d brought with me.
Even more striking than the landscape around me bathed in
that ocean of white moonlight was how incredibly quiet it was. Jerusalem, with
its crushes of tourists, its vendors of everything from falafel to olive wood
nativity scenes, its church bells and calls to worship emanating from tinny
public address systems in Islamic prayer towers all around the city, can be
quite overwhelming.
But not this night. As I looked around me, I suddenly
heard the words of the hymn we had just sung to conclude midnight mass at St.
Georges:
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright…
Sleep in heavenly peace
Everywhere I looked, it was, indeed, calm. It was bright.
The city whose very name means a place of peace indeed slept in a heavenly
peace. For one shining moment, the internecine strife that marks daily life in
Israel had relaxed its bloody grip. Peace had actually come to the city of
peace.
I will long remember that night in Jerusalem. When I
close my eyes as we sing Silent Night at the end of our Christmas Eve mass this
night, it will be that brilliantly lit valley outside a heavenly peaceful city
that I will envision. And I will give thanks to a generous G-d that I was
privileged to be there for that beautiful sight.
May
the heavenly peace of Christmas be with you, your families and all the living
beings in the good Creation this night, folks. Sleep in heavenly peace.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If
the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be
it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most
things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For
what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to
walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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