As a Christmas Eve message, it isn't any more proper than to focus in the most famous landmark associated with this day of preparation and reflection. In more than one sense, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (Palestine) is significant in today's convoluted preservation scene. It illustrates vehemently the process of the Palimpsest: it has been "written" repeatedly over time, built, unbuilt, rebuilt; its current shape may be far from classic canons of order, hierarchy or overall symmetry, but it mirrors the evolution of our view of Christ's Nativity as Christianity's most sacred moment. It is fitting that the landmark that sits upon the site of Jesus's natal manger cries change and gradual transformation all over its facades and interior spaces. The Church reflects properly the history of religion and the way that the Christianized West has seen this basic moment of birth and regeneration, shared with many other unrelated faiths and central to the theologies of all of them.
Colonnades and plain volumes, rich iconostases and simple walls, galleries and passages, spaces with no seeming human logic (but the divine logic is evident!) are all evidence of this monument's rich history. It is a truly collective product of humanity in its quest for trascendence and linking with the world of the sacred!
The most important place of worship tonight should an example of collaboration and tolerance, as it is maintained by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem along with the Franciscan Roman Catholic religious order and the Armenian Church. All operate in a difficult protocol, that is above all a cry for a consensus that makes collaboration between the faiths a necessity, no matter how much intolerance they display against each other, here and elsewhere. This temple has also been in the possesion of Moslems previously.
The Church is, sadly, in the World Monuments Fund's 2008 One Hundred Endangered Monuments List. The WMF aptly comments that this monument to human and divine collaboration is endangered by the current Israel-Palestine conflict. This intractable war over the so-called Holy Land, the venue of Biblical events that have shaped our worldview, has repeatedly threatened this place scarcely five miles (8 km) from the Sacred City of Jerusalem, holy to three competing faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - that somehow hardly tolerate each other. We should view the Church of the Nativity, more than for its deceptively simple and erratic architecture, as a symbol of humanity in seemingly perpetual conflict, contradiction and change; even so searching for the beacon of peace, and a yearning for a better world.
With this message, I wish the best of holidays to all my H&S readers.
Jorge Ortiz Colom, owner of the H&S (Heritage and Society) blog
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