Letter from Bethlehem
I recently visited the Church of the Nativity to sit in the cave where tradition says Jesus was born. I arrived just as a young man was lighting the lamps. I watched him lower each one from the ceiling. He filled the lamps with oil and gently lit their wicks before raising them again. Over time, the cave filled with light.
Visiting the church has been my routine since the start of the war. With planes roaring overhead en route to Gaza, the cave was the one place where I could find quiet. One of the holiest places in the world, the church should be crowded with pilgrims, especially this time of year, but I am often the only person there, which always feels surreal. When I visit, I light candles for the dead, the wounded, the scared. I light candles for my family, my friends, my neighbors. And I pray.
Though I grew up Roman Catholic, my husband is the Syriac Catholic priest of a parish in Bethlehem. In the Syriac liturgical calendar, Advent is known as the period of annunciations. The readings at Mass each week highlight a different story of God interrupting ordinary life to make an announcement. Gabriel appears before Zachariah, telling him that Elizabeth is to have a son named John. Gabriel announces the birth of Jesus to Mary, and an angel addresses Joseph in a dream. Advent asks something of us. We’re not asked just to wait but to pay attention, look, and believe. I’ve always found comfort in this.
But this Advent, to see means to grieve. The people I know who have lived through wars in Lebanon and Syria warn me that the period after the fighting stops is often the hardest, because that’s when one must finally confront the totality of what has been lost. Gaza health officials have reported that at least sixty-nine thousand Palestinians have been killed in the war, many of them children, and aid workers continue to pull bodies from the rubble. The loss of life is unfathomable. Houses, farms, mosques, and universities lie in ruins. Israelis are still reeling from the attacks of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas killed roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. Though the surviving hostages have been released, the remains of the deceased hostages are only now being returned for burial.
Everyone I know is exhausted. In Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank, people often speak of feeling forgotten by the world. Because the local economy relies on tourism, there is a fragile hope that pilgrims might finally begin to return. But the situation in the surrounding areas is deteriorating. Israeli settlers launch attacks almost every day in the countryside. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 260 attacks in October alone. Since the war started, Israeli authorities have placed hundreds of gates between cities and towns in the West Bank, including around Bethlehem, which makes traveling difficult. The small moments that give Palestinians joy—a walk in the hills, a trip to see family in a neighboring village—now often feel out of reach.
In such difficult times, good news becomes precious. Last week, the mayor of Bethlehem, Maher Canawati, announced that the city will light its famous Christmas tree in Manger Square on December 6. The event draws massive crowds, but it was suspended during the war in a gesture of solidarity with the people of Gaza. Now, it is being revived as a sign of perseverance. “This year, after two years of silence, the Christmas Tree returns to Bethlehem,” the mayor announced on social media. “The tree that stands as a symbol of strength, of hope, of peace and of faith that endures.” He urged tourists to come for the lighting and to share in “the unbreakable message that light is stronger than darkness, and love is stronger than fear.”
Christmas markets will also return. Lights will once again hang on Star Street, which runs through the heart of the Old City. Youth from the Catholic and Orthodox Scouts will reportedly play their bagpipes and drums on Christmas day. (Last year, they processed through Bethlehem in silence.) The De La Salle Brothers at Bethlehem University are preparing to invite a choir for midnight Mass. These might seem like minor festivities, but for many of us here, marking an event like the Christmas-tree lighting on the calendar feels surreal. For two years, we have been wary of making any plans at all, unsure of what the next day, or even the next hour, would hold. To write a date in a calendar a month in advance, to begin to believe that it might happen—well, that feels like an act of courage. “We must celebrate well,” a brother at Bethlehem University told me.
The city of Bethlehem identifies so strongly with Christmas that it is written into the streets. You can buy bread on Manger Street, sip coffee on Star Street, and say a prayer on Milk Grotto Road, where tradition says Mary stopped to nurse the baby Jesus. You can attend Mass in Arabic in the city’s churches. But locals are beginning to ask a troubling question: What will Bethlehem be without its Christians? We are concerned about the future of our communities. Christians make up only one or two percent of the population in the Holy Land.
Now many talk about leaving. After the hits to tourism caused by the pandemic and the war in Gaza, families in Bethlehem are struggling to make ends meet. Parents say that the cycles of violence make it hard to envision a future for their children. Yesterday, I was in a friend’s woodcarving shop. During the war, he had to close one of his family’s shops, and his brother left to live abroad. My friend described his sadness in going to Mass and not seeing the familiar faces he has known since childhood. Another friend from Jerusalem envisioned empty neighborhood churches. “Who will stay?” she asked.
How can Christians—or anyone—make a life amid so much uncertainty? In July, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, delivered a recorded message to a plenary meeting of French bishops. He used the occasion to address Christians of the Holy Land. “Don’t let the war and the dynamic of the war shape your thoughts and your hearts,” he pleaded. “We need as Christians to decide how to be in this conflict.” He warned them that the difficulty was not going to disappear, that to live with these open wounds of conflict would now be part of our identity as Christians in the Holy Land. “It is not a parenthesis—it is a period,” he said. “It is the real place from which we have to give our Christian testimony, our Christian witness.”
We will need a new vocabulary if we hope to remain rooted in the present and still see a horizon of possibility. I often think of Pierre Claverie, the bishop of Oran, Algeria, during the country’s civil war. In 1994, he wrote in his Christmas letter: “We will remember that this Christmas, the path of hope passes through the cross.”
There are annunciations along the way. The man carefully lighting the lamps in the cave where Jesus was born. The staff at a falafel restaurant giving my little daughter a uniform so she can pretend to work there. A parishioner seeing my family walking past, calling us over, and lowering a bag of cookies from the window. Such moments allow us to get from one day to the next. They are acts of kindness that resist the logic of violence and despair.
This year, whether the fragile peace holds or not, Christmas is coming to Bethlehem. We will celebrate three times, for the Catholics and Protestants on December 25, for the Orthodox on January 7, and for the Armenians on January 19. Bethlehem is where Christ was born, and where our grief and love meet. We are witnesses. This Christmas, we will be singing, even if it’s through tears.
Stephanie Saldaña is the author of What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry. She writes from Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
