The Holy Land

The Infinite Value of Those Stones

The Grotto of the Nativity, the house in Nazareth, the hole where the cross was inserted, the stone at the door of the tomb. For two thousand years, these have been safeguarded holy places to Christians. The danger today is that Christians, the poorest people in Israel, may disappear from those places

By GIANCARLO GIOJELLI

There are not only pilgrims and devotion and the holy book in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke with his friends, and there is not only the wax of thousands and thousands of candles that have burned over two thousand years. There are not only the rather heavy and baroque silver objects of the Orthodox tradition, and all that marble sheathing the walls, with the icons darkened by the smoke of centuries of censers, and the damp glow of the steps reflecting the swinging light of lanterns.
There is something more in that grotto, as in other grottoes and the ancient walls of houses, and in the trunks of thousand-year-old olive trees.
There is something more than pious memories, aroused by the emotion and the dim light and group suggestion and the touching fantasies that are attached to those images we bear within us from our earliest childhood. The Grotto of the Nativity is not, only, the icon of a thrilling and touching fantasy, of a yearning desire that won’t go away, of a powerful expectation of fulfillment.
All of this would not be enough to explain why so much destiny is concentrated right there, right in that place, or rather in those places.

Witnesses of a fact
Christians have never had any doubt that these precise places witness to a fact. That point of the cosmos, those points of the cosmos have been the subject of careful, almost maniacal investigation and research, and there have been wars lasting for centuries in order to give the Christian people the right to free access to those crumbs of the universe.
This is because those crumbs of the cosmos are the theater of a scene that happened, those stones saw something that happened, that grotto is the witness and evidence of a fact.
Those stones are not the sign of a pious desire, the documentation of a hope. They are the site of something that was accomplished. The site of a certainty.
Bethlehem became a part of the war chronicles in recent weeks not certainly and not only because of its religious value. And yet, we cannot explain what happened by limiting ourselves to a report of the siege, to the adventure of thirteen Palestinians, the thirteen soldiers whom Israel accuses of terrorism, and the other two-hundred combatants and the thirty or so civilians and children who sought and found refuge for thirty-nine days in the Basilica, taken in by the forty Franciscan friars, nuns, and Orthodox monks.
It is not enough because everyone had to deal with a place that is not like any other place on earth.

The grotto where He was born
Humanitarian reasons are not enough to explain the wave of emotion; the tension and suspense of the siege and the wait to see how it would turn out are not enough. There was something else involved that for an instant was perceived and then immediately forgotten.
What is the value of that place? Are we worried about the persons–and certainly a person is worth more than any stone or is there, in any event, something else? Perhaps there is something that recalls Someone, something that we cannot afford to lose.
The answer was clear enough to the friars who were inside, perhaps somewhat confused by fear, which is very human, as real heroes do not have super powers and bullets kill more than Kryptonite does.
For them, there was only one answer, only one possible answer: we have to stay because this is our place. We have been entrusted with the custody of the Holy Land and the task of guaranteeing to mankind free access to the places of Memory, the places where man’s Destiny was fulfilled-to the manger in Bethlehem and the house in Nazareth, to Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher. We are safeguarding these places so that it may be forever clear that something really happened, and happened here, and happened to a Man whose house we know as well as the streets He walked and the place where He died.
Origen, in 248, refuted the heretics who questioned the reality of Christ’s human nature by pointing out that “in Bethlehem, the cave where He was born is shown, and in the cave the manger where He was wrapped in swaddling clothes. And what is shown is so well known in these places that even outsiders know that Jesus was born in a grotto.”

Eliaj Frej
Hereabouts, in the caves nearby, St Jerome came to live. He spent a good part of his life translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin, getting a rabbi friend of his to bring him the scrolls of the Law at night. He suffered greatly at not being able to see the manger, buried under the stone and stucco and gold and silver of the two basilicas: “If I could see that manger where the Lord lay! Now we Westerners, as though to honor Christ, took away the manger of mud and put one of silver. But the one that was taken away is more precious to me. Gold and silver are for pagans; the mud manger is more suited to the Christian faith.”
The love for places is certainly no different from love for people; it is dangerous to make demagogical statements on this point. Whoever says, “Let’s save the people; the stones don’t matter,” is wrong, because it is the Memory and Presence to which those stones testify that give strength and dignity to the Christians of the Holy Land.
Already ten years ago, the aging Eliaj Frej, the Christian and Palestinian Mayor of Bethlehem, warned against the danger that the Christians might disappear from the land of Christ. They are among the poorest people there; they receive no aid either from the Jewish government or from the world Islamic fund. They are viewed as outsiders by many Arabs and Jews, and yet they are Christ’s earliest witnesses, the earliest Christian community.

The flight of the Christians
Now Frej’s prophetic fear is coming true: the Christians are leaving; young couples marry and have to emigrate. They cannot find a house or a job. Western Christians ignore them, thinking that the Arabs are all Muslims, and do not wonder, except very superficially, what happened to the disciples who believed the earliest preaching. Thus, they view the stones with the curiosity of archaeologists, and it may be that those who do not meet the living stones, the Christians from here, cut themselves off from a good deal of knowledge and feeling. It is easier to follow one’s own fantasies about the young, blond, blue-eyed pre-Raphaelite Nazarene talking from the boat, than to look into the face of someone who is the living sign of His presence.
The Christian Diaspora explains, at least in part, also the spread of fundamentalism, both Islamic and Jewish. In the Holy Land, like in the multi-confessional Lebanon before the war, all the villages were inhabited by Christians and Jews or by Christians and Muslims, and the Church was the point of contact for dialogue between believers in one God. Then things turned out as we all know.

Hic Verbum
Thus, places, people, and above all freedoms were intertwined over the centuries. The love for these places was so great that pilgrims coming into Turkish Jerusalem were forced to pay enormous offerings in order to be content with looking from a distance, through a dense grille, at the stones of Calvary and with capturing a glimpse of the slab of the Sepulcher.
And the journey lasted, and was worth, a lifetime-a life that could be lost, and for many, was lost.
But it was worthwhile to take the risk, in order to see the spot where the Word was made flesh: HIC VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST is written on the house in Nazareth. What a privilege to see the star in Bethlehem that marks the spot where Jesus was born and the manger where His mother laid Him and the shepherds adored Him; to touch the stone where He was laid and where the mysterious energy of the Resurrection was released; to feel again the impact of what Fr Giussani recalls feeling on Calvary: “The most impressive thing was seeing the hole where the Cross was planted, the place where Christ died, where He was in agony. Seeing that spot, imagining the lack of understanding and the lack of recognition on the part of all that crowd standing there watching, we understand that the world’s evil must be a terrible and huge thing if God accepted a sacrifice like this, a death of this kind. What we bring away from these places is the desire, the yearning for people to realize what happened. And instead, it seems that today it is possible to erase what happened just like we rub out a letter in the sand with our foot, a letter in the sand of the world. But this comes about precisely because what happened is a proposal to man’s freedom and so that it may be clear that the power is God’s.
“Today, all the rest, politics, the economy, seems more important and greater… than this event that can so easily and cheaply be identified as a fairy tale. But the concreteness of that event is so human, seeing those places, that one cannot return from Palestine with the doubt that Christianity may be a fairy tale. Putting yourself in the natural, logistic conditions where Christ Himself was, the landscape He saw, the rocks He stepped on, the distances He walked, everything works together and compels you to understand the truth of what happened.”