I remember standing in the crypt of a small church in Bethlehem. We had driven in an Arab bus with Arab guides through the shuttered Arab towns that lay between Jerusalem and Bethlehem to one of the central shrines of the Christian world, the place where Jesus, the stories told, had been born. In the public square, Jewish soldiers sat in jeeps mounted with machine guns. There was passion on both sides and sullen determination everywhere. These were foreigners in their own land, both the Arabs and Jews.

I looked across the hillsides that surrounded the village and the church. I tried to imagine David and his sheep, a young man and his pregnant wife, a band of angels andLet the solders stomp through life. Let the cold winds blow. Let the birth points of all our lives be drowned in obscurity. Let the days seem mundane and fruitless. This place in Bethlehem, cold, dark, small, worn down by years of discovery, justifies them all. Jesus had been here before us. Bring on the days of our lives. We have a God who has already walked them and found them holy-making.

We knelt on the marble floor, the sticky August day steaming around us, and we sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem” slowly and softly. “The hopes and fears of all the years,” we sang with new conviction, new understanding, “are met in thee tonight.”

Jesus had been born into the very world in which I, myself, was living. And weathered it and loved it and changed it. Whatever the difficulty of any other dimension of belief, this element was obvious. No historian had ever doubted it or contested it or challenged the truth of it. Jesus had been born. They synagogue took issue with him. The state feared him. The people saw in him a figure like no other. Clearly, the face of God had shone upon us. What else could I possibly need to live my own life more fully?

A Blessed Christmas and New Year to All of You