Long Night

In your rented Fiat, the size of a roller skate, you can drive south from the heart of Jerusalem and be in Bethlehem in fifteen minutes. It also makes an attractive walk—two gentle hours, no real climbing and the compact town, strung out on its ridge as your visible goal through the clear desert day. That winter month, a dry December toward the end of the eighties, I drove south a dozen times alone. Because I’m a licensed architect who veered into writing years ago, I was there to plan a commissioned piece on the Church of the Nativity, the town’s great magnet. That big dim good-smelling warren of a place is the oldest continuously used church in Christendom and has a good deal to be said for it still as a showcase of middle-eastern architecture from Constantine onward—a depressing good deal. The lines and pillars of the oldest church shame the Catholic and Greek Orthodox additions, a boatload of jimcrack pictures and lanterns—the eunuch Babe and his boneless Mother in cancer-causing pastel inks.

The beating heart of all that weight is a limestone cave. You walk toward the altar, then start down one of a pair of steep stairs. Twelve feet later, you’re inside the cave. You look overhead, or steal a glance behind leather wall-hangings, to see the live stone. It’s very much there, despite two millennia of chiseling pilgrims. And trustworthy records that date to less than a century after Jesus’ death say that here he was born, that simple a fact—a low space not as long as a school bus, that served as dry shelter for livestock and overflow guests from the nearby inn.