11th Day of Christmas 2023: "Bethlehem", by Annie Dillard

I don't know where this came from.  I found it in my archives, an unpublished draft from a few years ago.  I decided to post it simply because of the reference to the cave as the place of the nativity (let the reader understand). That alone seemed to make it worth posting.

One of the queerest spots on Earth — I hope — is the patch of planet where, according to tradition, a cave once stabled animals, and where Mary gave birth to a son whose later preaching — scholars of every stripe agree, with varying enthusiasm — caused the occupying Romans to crucify him.  Generations of Christians have churched over the traditional Bethlehem spot to the highest degree.  Centuries of additions have made the architecture peculiar, but no one can see the church anyway, because many monasteries clamp onto it in clusters like barnacles.  The Greek Orthodox Church owns the grotto site now, in the form of the Church of the Nativity.

There, in the Church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeonlike corridors where hushed people passed.  The floors were black stone of cracked marble.  Dense brocades hung down old stone walls.  Oil lamps hung in layers.  Each polished silver or brass lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone, the darker the space.

Packed into a tiny, domed upper chamber, Norwegians sang, as every other group did in turn, a Christmas carol.  The stone dome bounced the sound around.  The people sounded like seraphs singing inside a bell, sore amazed.

Descending once more, I passed several monks, narrow men, fine-faced and black, who wore tall black hats and long black robes.  Ethiopians, they use the oldest Christian rite.  At a lower level, in a small room, I peered over half a stone wall and saw Europeans below; they whispered in a language I could not identify.

Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs.  The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues.  The music threaded the vaults.

Now I climbed down innumerable dark stone stairs to the main part, the deepest basement: The Grotto of the Nativity.  The grotto was down yet another smoky stairway, at the back of a stone cave far beneath street level.  This was the place.  It smelled of wet sand.  It was a narrow cave about ten feet wide; cracked marble paved it.  Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of floor.  People had to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps, to see it.

A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall.  This silver star was the X that marked the spot: Here, just here, the infant got born.  Two thousand years of Christianity began here, where God empties himself into man.  Actually, many Christian scholars think “Jesus of Nazareth” was likely born in Nazareth.  Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy.  Here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy.  It must have struck many people that we were competing with these lamps for oxygen.

In the center of the silver star was a circular hold.  That was the bull’s eye, God’s quondam target.

Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole’s flat bottom.  When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a fringed sating drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole.  I could feel some sort of soft wax in it.  The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide petri dish.  I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.

Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God’s presence on Earth, to me, than did this marble grotto.  The ugliness of the blunt and bumpy silver star impressed me.  The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps — some human’s idea of elegance — bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it.  And why should he not?  Things here on Earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.

“Every day,” said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, “the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement.”