I remember standing in the crypt of the small church in Bethlehem. We had been driven in an Arab bus by 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. Now the streets were empty, the shops closed, the window displays covered with metal blinds. Roadblocks were set up at strategic points along the road to check Arab cars, Arab trucks that plied their way back and forth along the route between work in the Jewish city and home in the Arab villages.

Arab children popped out of doorways or peeked around street corners to watch us go by. The city had been empty of tourists for days. 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 the Jews. The Arabs had been there forever and were now displaced. The Jews, after hundreds of years, finally had themselves a country—in which they were not welcome. Every muscle in my body was tight. This place could explode at any moment.

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 and a human birth. Of all of them, it was the thought of the human birth that stirred me most. The angels and the stable, the donkey and the sheep, the census and the inn I did not care about. What affected me deeply, however, was the thought of the birth.

Somewhere, somehow, Jesus of Nazareth had been born here, in the same kind of environment that existed here today—into a culture where people were strangers in their own lands and soldiers walked the streets to control them. It was a political insight. It was a deeply, disturbingly human one. If Jesus was born into this, and brought the presence of God into its midst and changed attitudes in the heart of it, then so could we. So must we.

The candle that hangs over an embedded marble star illuminates a point on the earth where, tradition says, God took the initiative to make humanity more human. We remember it always with lights and tinsel, with bells and incense, with parties and ornaments. We forget the political impact of it, the psychological demands of it, the spiritual implications of it.

We live unconscious of the fact that Christmas is a movable feast, a feast that changes in meaning as we move through life growing more and more aware of its real significance for us. We were born. Jesus was born. What Jesus did to survive life, to bear life, to create life, to become life, we can do as well. Or better: What we do to survive life, to bear life, to create life, to become life, Jesus did before us. Our struggles are not new. Our questions are not senseless. Our burdens are not unbearable.

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. The 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?

—from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister(Liguori Publications)