Read an excerpt from “Christmas at Bethlehem” below, then read the full story.
Our decision to walk to Bethlehem at night on Christmas eve, our first together in the Holy Land, proved a most rewarding experience. Such a personal pilgrimage is as difficult to describe exactly as it would be to let the journey go unrecorded.
The stars were bright, high in the clear Jerusalem sky, as we found our way from Mount Zion down the steps leaving the Old City, and across the valley of Gehenna. A main road now carries modern traffic along that ancient path, but apart from a few hurrying cars all was quiet that night before Christmas.
The dull, monotonous modern flats for Israeli immigrants line one side of the road. The old style Oriental dwellings of the former Arab population on the other side mark a line of history, conflict, and confrontation at odds with the Christmas spirit.
A few Benedictine monks of Mount Zion’s Dormition Abbey passed us by as we climbed the hill overlooking the Old City. They, too, are following the age-old custom of Jerusalem’s faithful who walk the route of Mary and Joseph this sacred night.
Our journey was different. We wished to walk into the sunrise, more like the shepherds, and arrive at Bethlehem at dawn. We were a little fearful of the three-hour walk for Mary, my wife, was carrying our own first child.
Dawn seemed to be coming quickly to snuff out the gleaming stars. Near the end of Jerusalem’s modern city we came to the Greek monastery of Mar Elias just as the sun rose. In a ploughed field before the monastery we rested to watch the dew-covered furrows glisten in the new morning sun. Only later, when we read the guide book, did we discover the tradition that Mary and Joseph, too, had rested there on the way to Bethlehem.
As we turned the hill, there in front of us lay the long valley of olive trees. Farther away shining in the sunrise the churches, towers, minarets, and houses of Bethlehem huddled on a ridge to the south. We could pick out the bell towers of the Church of the Nativity built over the cave where Jesus was born, and saw the winding road up the hill to David’s royal city.
The warming sun and the nearness of Bethlehem gave new meaning to the words of the shepherds, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this event which the Lord has made known to us.” (Lk 2:15).
Just outside Bethlehem is Rachel’s tomb, where, as one tradition has it, the shepherds kept watch over their flocks, and first heard the angels’ message. There, too, an older tradition tells that the patriarch Jacob, the ancestor of Joseph, pastured his flock.