This past week has me thinking of Bethlehem. From dusk till past dawn, the whirr of the propellers on the wind machines put me in another place. The cold, the danger of damage to the citrus crops, the vulnerability of people, animals and plants to this arctic air delivered free of charge by the jet stream's meanders overhead - it all just re-adjusted my priorities without warning.
At the market where I work I see the cold's effects on the faces of the pickers when they come in at dusk for groceries. They're working overtime to bring in the fruit before it gets frostbite. I hear the sounds of congestion building in their voices, feel the roughness of their hands as I drop their change into them. The women packing the fruit come in just before closing for tonight's dinner, tomorrow's lunch, determined to get through it. A man who runs wind machines through the nights shared the prayer he offers each time he starts a machine, standing directly below the blades.
Why Bethlehem? you ask. The need for shelter on a cold night for people not from here, sojourning thanks to some imperial force, whether that be Herod or the free market - that's one reason. But the Christ who was brought into this world, whose birth story is triggered by the name of that little town in countries around the globe, is another.
He was brought into the world to upset the apple cart between rich and poor, where the rich put their apples into the cart and the poor haul them to the cider mill, where the fruit will be turned into juice for export. At least that's what some people think. Most people like to think he was brought into the world to save us all, which he was: he came to tell us about the eye of the needle and the problem of getting through it if you're a camel.
One author, Reza Aslan, in his new book Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, makes a pretty sound case for that point of view. Unfortunately for me, he also suggests that the Bethlehem story was created by the writers of Matthew and Luke to cinch Jesus' identity as the Messiah to the Jewish prophesies in the Old Testament. The Bethlehem story, where we get our notion of Christmas as being about the gifts of God doing the impossible in a world much in need of repair, may be like the creation myths of native peoples, where we explain as best we can what we believe but will never know.
So Jesus was probably born in Nazareth, a village occupied by illiterate rural peasants and day laborers serving the construction cravings of the urban Jews and Romans. As a place, Nazareth has a distinctly different feel than Bethlehem in our minds, as in "What good could come from...," disparagement earned by the low class and vulnerability of its residents. Try replacing Nazareth with Poplar or Plainview or a hundred other little Valley settlements, and that all-too-human geographic prejudice won't be hard to recognize.
It is against this prejudice that Christmas was born. May we feel its true spirit this year.
(Author's note: This piece was written the morning after a night where I caught myself being judgmental, arrogant and rude to a customer because of her new-immigrant appearance.)
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Trudy Wischemann is a soul-seeking writer in Lindsay. You can send her your thoughts on Christmas % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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