Darkest night of the year
Today, for our sake, the King of Heaven chose to be born of his virgin mother to reclaim lost men for the heavenly kingdom. All the angels cry aloud with joy, for God has come Himself to save mankind. Glory to God in the highest, and peace to His people on earth!
Christmas like none other. Never before in Bethlehem; never again. My final Christmas as a layman. Today I was given the tremendous gift of simply being here on this most blessed day.
As I mentioned yesterday, it's been very hard to internalize that Christmas is really here. Not only was it sunny and 75 degrees out today, but I wasn't with my family, opening presents by the tree. Everything secular that I've associated with Christmas all my life simply isn't here. The lack of those reminders was offset a little bit by my playing all Christmas music today - but even that felt a little strange, since I realized that the majority of those songs mention "cold" and "snow" in some way or another. This was particularly the case with many of the Christmas songs that Over the Rhine has done (because I was in the midst of "discovering" that band at this time last year, listening to all of their Christmas songs was absolutely delightful... it almost made me feel like I was back home). The weather has gotten so warm here this week that I've even had to shed the thermal underwear that has been keeping me warm inside - otherwise, I'd roast anytime I walked around outside.
At last night's Midnight Mass, we sat up in the sanctuary in our formal clerical attire. The celebrant was an archbishop whose name escapes me - he's the Apostolic Delegate to Palestine. (The "ambassador" from the Vatican to any nation-state is normally known as the Apostolic Nuncio. His job is to communicate any message from the Holy See to the church in that country. So when an American priest is going to be made a bishop, it's the Nuncio who calls that priest up to tell him. But since Palestine isn't technically a nation-state, the same position is only called an "Apostolic Delegate.) Like every Nuncio I've ever heard, he had an extremely thick Italian accent which made him almost incomprehensible.
Extra chairs were crammed into every nook they could find in the chapel at Bethlehem University. By 11:55 PM, the chapel was still almost empty. The pews and extra seats didn't fill up until about 12:15 AM, after the Mass had already started. It doesn't normally work that way back home! Almost all of the attendees were students from the university - Arab Christians in their teens and twenties. The Mass was beautiful and spectacular, of course. After it ended at 1:30, everyone went downstairs for a big reception. I lingered at the reception as long as I could gracefully do so before leaving... I've just become too old to have the same kind of late-nite stamina that college students do.
As if to illustrate that point, a lot of the younger seminarians high-tailed it down to the Church of the Nativity at around 2:00 AM, in the hopes of making it into the grotto for a Mass that was being celebrated by the Latin Rite Patriarch of Jerusalem. Amazingly, they were allowed in - the clerics they were wearing were apparently enough of a "ticket" for the monks guarding the place.
Among all of us, those men were the only ones who were able to make it into the birthplace of Jesus on the very day when we celebrate his birth. After peacefully slumbering until 11:00 AM, I woke up and headed down to the Church of the Nativity, curious about what it would be like there (I didn't honestly expect to get in to the grotto). Sure enough, the crowds in Manger Square and in the church itself were enormous. The line to get into the grotto was the longest I'd ever seen - the wait would have been at least two hours. Masses were being celebrated in there every half hour all day, but to participate in such a Mass I would have had to wait through the better part of the afternoon. As far as I was concerned, merely standing within feet of the cave itself on Christmas Day was blessing enough. The fact that I'd been in that cave nearly every day for the last month - along with the fact that the Octave of Christmas was only just starting, and by tomorrow the crowds will almost certainly have diminished - didn't exactly incline me to wait around.
Almost everyone in the crowd was a Westerner. People were flooding in from one tour bus after another, and Manger Square was crawling with foreigners. It continues to amuse me how all one needs to do is walk about a block away from that area, and the number of tourists is reduced to almost zero. Combine that with the fact that it's Friday (the Muslim holy day, when none of the shops are open), and in all parts of the town except that one square, it was almost totally empty. One would never know that there's anything different or special about this day in Bethlehem.
In the mid-afternoon, all of us gathered at a restaurant in Manger Square for an enormous Christmas dinner. An all-you-can-eat buffet included chicken, lamb, shrimp, and salmon that tasted like it had just been caught in the Great Lakes. We ate... and ate... and ate. Yeah, that made it feel like it was Christmas, too. Then tonight, we had our own little Christmas party here at Betharram, with a white elephant gift exchange (I was glad to have the chance to participate in something like that, since I had missed the famous gift exchange at the Boehms' party this year). The gift I picked out was a priest's stole that was adorned with a Jerusalem cross. I was starting to anticipate coming out of this pilgrimage with both a chalice and a stole, but then the gift was stolen soon after. I eventually ended up with the gift that I knew would be most practical for me: A can of Coke. One less thing that I have to pack up and lug back across the ocean!
It's true that I miss the family and friends with whom I normally celebrate Christmas, of course. I had some pipe dreams of trying to actually call my parents today, but that simply cannot happen. I tried turning on my cell phone today for the first time, and obviously no signal can be found here in the West Bank. Another option would have been to use Skype to reach them, but with the internet connection here, that's out of the question. (On rare occasions, some guys here have been able to pull off Skype, but that's precisely why it's been so hard for the rest of us to access the internet during those times. I can't do that to my brothers.) In fact, I'm once again in the midst of a stretch in which I haven't even been able to access e-mail for the last three days. This LiveJournal site continues to be the only site that seems to be able to open up.
And so my celebration of Christmas Day in Bethlehem has come to an end - but my celebration of the Christmas season is only just beginning. I have all the way from now to Epiphany, and I am so blessed to be able to experience it here. Merry Christmas to everyone back home whom I love... I'll see all of you soon enough!
Christmas like none other. Never before in Bethlehem; never again. My final Christmas as a layman. Today I was given the tremendous gift of simply being here on this most blessed day.
As I mentioned yesterday, it's been very hard to internalize that Christmas is really here. Not only was it sunny and 75 degrees out today, but I wasn't with my family, opening presents by the tree. Everything secular that I've associated with Christmas all my life simply isn't here. The lack of those reminders was offset a little bit by my playing all Christmas music today - but even that felt a little strange, since I realized that the majority of those songs mention "cold" and "snow" in some way or another. This was particularly the case with many of the Christmas songs that Over the Rhine has done (because I was in the midst of "discovering" that band at this time last year, listening to all of their Christmas songs was absolutely delightful... it almost made me feel like I was back home). The weather has gotten so warm here this week that I've even had to shed the thermal underwear that has been keeping me warm inside - otherwise, I'd roast anytime I walked around outside.
At last night's Midnight Mass, we sat up in the sanctuary in our formal clerical attire. The celebrant was an archbishop whose name escapes me - he's the Apostolic Delegate to Palestine. (The "ambassador" from the Vatican to any nation-state is normally known as the Apostolic Nuncio. His job is to communicate any message from the Holy See to the church in that country. So when an American priest is going to be made a bishop, it's the Nuncio who calls that priest up to tell him. But since Palestine isn't technically a nation-state, the same position is only called an "Apostolic Delegate.) Like every Nuncio I've ever heard, he had an extremely thick Italian accent which made him almost incomprehensible.
Extra chairs were crammed into every nook they could find in the chapel at Bethlehem University. By 11:55 PM, the chapel was still almost empty. The pews and extra seats didn't fill up until about 12:15 AM, after the Mass had already started. It doesn't normally work that way back home! Almost all of the attendees were students from the university - Arab Christians in their teens and twenties. The Mass was beautiful and spectacular, of course. After it ended at 1:30, everyone went downstairs for a big reception. I lingered at the reception as long as I could gracefully do so before leaving... I've just become too old to have the same kind of late-nite stamina that college students do.
As if to illustrate that point, a lot of the younger seminarians high-tailed it down to the Church of the Nativity at around 2:00 AM, in the hopes of making it into the grotto for a Mass that was being celebrated by the Latin Rite Patriarch of Jerusalem. Amazingly, they were allowed in - the clerics they were wearing were apparently enough of a "ticket" for the monks guarding the place.
Among all of us, those men were the only ones who were able to make it into the birthplace of Jesus on the very day when we celebrate his birth. After peacefully slumbering until 11:00 AM, I woke up and headed down to the Church of the Nativity, curious about what it would be like there (I didn't honestly expect to get in to the grotto). Sure enough, the crowds in Manger Square and in the church itself were enormous. The line to get into the grotto was the longest I'd ever seen - the wait would have been at least two hours. Masses were being celebrated in there every half hour all day, but to participate in such a Mass I would have had to wait through the better part of the afternoon. As far as I was concerned, merely standing within feet of the cave itself on Christmas Day was blessing enough. The fact that I'd been in that cave nearly every day for the last month - along with the fact that the Octave of Christmas was only just starting, and by tomorrow the crowds will almost certainly have diminished - didn't exactly incline me to wait around.
Almost everyone in the crowd was a Westerner. People were flooding in from one tour bus after another, and Manger Square was crawling with foreigners. It continues to amuse me how all one needs to do is walk about a block away from that area, and the number of tourists is reduced to almost zero. Combine that with the fact that it's Friday (the Muslim holy day, when none of the shops are open), and in all parts of the town except that one square, it was almost totally empty. One would never know that there's anything different or special about this day in Bethlehem.
In the mid-afternoon, all of us gathered at a restaurant in Manger Square for an enormous Christmas dinner. An all-you-can-eat buffet included chicken, lamb, shrimp, and salmon that tasted like it had just been caught in the Great Lakes. We ate... and ate... and ate. Yeah, that made it feel like it was Christmas, too. Then tonight, we had our own little Christmas party here at Betharram, with a white elephant gift exchange (I was glad to have the chance to participate in something like that, since I had missed the famous gift exchange at the Boehms' party this year). The gift I picked out was a priest's stole that was adorned with a Jerusalem cross. I was starting to anticipate coming out of this pilgrimage with both a chalice and a stole, but then the gift was stolen soon after. I eventually ended up with the gift that I knew would be most practical for me: A can of Coke. One less thing that I have to pack up and lug back across the ocean!
It's true that I miss the family and friends with whom I normally celebrate Christmas, of course. I had some pipe dreams of trying to actually call my parents today, but that simply cannot happen. I tried turning on my cell phone today for the first time, and obviously no signal can be found here in the West Bank. Another option would have been to use Skype to reach them, but with the internet connection here, that's out of the question. (On rare occasions, some guys here have been able to pull off Skype, but that's precisely why it's been so hard for the rest of us to access the internet during those times. I can't do that to my brothers.) In fact, I'm once again in the midst of a stretch in which I haven't even been able to access e-mail for the last three days. This LiveJournal site continues to be the only site that seems to be able to open up.
And so my celebration of Christmas Day in Bethlehem has come to an end - but my celebration of the Christmas season is only just beginning. I have all the way from now to Epiphany, and I am so blessed to be able to experience it here. Merry Christmas to everyone back home whom I love... I'll see all of you soon enough!