Tonight I went with my cousins to a live Bethlehem nativity reenactment at a large local church. I was expecting, and looking forward to, some heartfelt cheesiness. I really love Christian kitsch. I love its sincerity and bizarre repressed humor. So I was expecting your basic Bethlehem set-up with bright blue polyester robes for Mary and possibly some plasticky gold trim on the wise men’s outfits.
I was surprised by what I found. It had a certain sincere pathos, to be sure, but it was the sort of theatricality that comes with a living history museum rather than a Christmas pageant. The sets were beautiful, the costumes carefully thought out, and in some ways the setting was stunningly accurate. I overheard one guest who came from modern Bethlehem say he was shocked by the authenticity of the set. Tons of sand had been trucked in and spread across the ground, and life-sized buildings, inns and shops had been erected.
When we first arrived, we were immediately met by a group of Roman centurions in red capes and silver breastplates, who yelled at us and ordered us around. They shouted at the kids, waved their spears in our faces, and seemed to be having a whole lot of fun. These guys had clearly missed their theatrical calling and were fully owning their parts. Flaming torches and fires lit the walkway into the gate of the city, and the centurions ordered us to follow the rules or face the consequences. Beggars pleaded at the city gates and accepted suggested donations.
The street resounded with traditional music and booths full of people. A blacksmith forged out a sword and complained about the Roman soldier who owed him money. Caesar Augustus ordered that a census be taken. Women carded wool. A teenage actress in a baking stall just wanted to go home and rolled her eyes whenever her mother said anything, which just added to the authenticity of the display. (Teenage girls have always been too cool, even in the year 5 AD.) Bakers and grocers sold food that was accurate to the time and place. The whole dramatization was very carefully researched. It was an echo of history, made all the stranger by the current Israel-Palestine conflict. Nobody mentioned it, but it was there, an unspoken shadow over the actors and sets.
Some women showed us how to make purple dye out of shells. Another group showed us how to weave a rug and make pottery. A menorah was lit for the first night of Hanukkah and signs were written in Hebrew. The whole place was packed with spectators, pushing in and lifting their kids up to see. With crowds like that, it’s no wonder the inn was full.
Soon the nativity performance began. The actors either read their lines in a stilted and anxious way, or they were emotive and operatic, waving their arms about and shouting. The innkeeper and his wife played for laughs: the wife was pushy and shrill, the innkeeper henpecked and bumbling. Mary was much more serene and placid than any laboring mother I’ve ever seen. Joseph was good looking in a lumberjack sort of way.
They rode on a brown and white speckled donkey, and we shambled after them to the stable. Mary sang a song and then they went in. And suddenly there was a baby. Ta-da! No muss, no fuss. Pre-wrapped and bundled in a manger.
They used a real baby, who was not happy outside in the cold. The temperature was hovering around 50 degrees, and we could all see our breath. Mary sang a lullaby while the infant screamed his lungs out in a truly realistic fashion.
Joseph asked Mary if she was all right. She said, “Yes, I feel blessed by God.”
I turned to my cousin, a new mom herself, and asked, “Is that realistic for someone to say who’s just given birth?”
She laughed and said, “After the baby is born, yes. It’s the part before that’s a problem.”
The shepherds showed up, shouting and waving their staffs around and causing a nuisance. One of them yelled something that sounded like “hold my wig!” though I’m not sure I heard it correctly.
The wise men arrived on real live camels, preceded by dancing girls in spangly outfits and boys looking like Aladdin in flowy pants, little vests and fezes.
Then we all sang Silent Night, and the stable door closed. A teenage girl got up and shared her testimony about finding Jesus, and the show ended.
It was like a Biblical Disneyland. Having worked behind the scenes at a church, I wondered what sort of petty dramas and squabbles and administrative flukes happened behind the scenes. Did the Angel of the Lord secretly have a crush on a shepherd? Was the facilities manager mad about all the sand? Was one of the dancing girls desperately jealous of Mary? How many people had given up a dream of acting and valued this as their one creative outlet every year?
What’s it like to play this story over and over again, night after night? Does it lose its magic, or does it leave the actors with a bit of divinity? I’ve always believed that high school plays provide sanctified, liminal spaces where the divine makes contact with the lost, lonely, freakish kids. I imagine that this performance could have that same effect on the adult actors.
The nativity story was as powerful as it always is, for the same reasons. It’s the story of a homeless woman forced to give birth in a barn while the occupying soldiers shout in the background. It’s the story of the Most High God choosing the most painful and powerless entrance into the world. Whether we’re celebrating Christmas at Sandy Hook, Ukraine, or the Gaza Strip, the story is the same. The massacre of the innocents. The savior born. A thrill of hope. The weary world rejoices.
One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Coventry Carol. You’d recognize the melody, but not the lyrics. It’s usually played instrumentally, and for a good reason. The lyrics are all about babies dying.
That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”
The song is sung from the perspective of the mothers in Bethlehem after Herod murdered all of the children under two years old. The first written record of the song was written in 1534 in Coventry, England, although it may have been sung for hundreds of years before its transcription.
There was a moment in the pageant when Joseph told Mary, “Look at his tiny little hands. I wonder if those hands will someday be the hands of a carpenter.” Everyone in the audience shifted a bit awkwardly, suddenly remembering that this wasn’t just a happy baby story. Sure, there would be nails involved, but not in the way Joseph hoped. Instead, a nail would go through the wrist at the juncture of two bones to ensure maximum suffering before death.
The Coventry Carol went out of fashion for many years for obvious reasons. Nobody liked thinking about the killing of toddlers. In theory we know that the Holy Family fled to Egypt, but we don’t really want to think about why.
The song came back into common usage in the year 1940, during the Coventry Blitz. In November of 1940, the German army bombed the city of Coventry, killing around 568 people and destroying 43,000 homes. Around 868 people were severely injured. The munitions factories were the primary targets, which caused explosions and fires across the city. Bombs also hit the largest water main, making it impossible for the firefighters to extinguish the fires. This tactic was so effective, the Nazis invented the phrase “Coventried” to describe a city that was completely obliterated. The explosions were so intense, a tram was blown clean over a house and landed in the back garden, its windows still intact. Children were seen attempting to claw through solid brick in an attempt to drown out the noise.
One of the most noticeable losses was the destruction of Saint Michael’s Cathedral. The cathedral had been built around the end of the 14th century and was one of the largest churches in England. It was reduced to rubble.
On Christmas morning of 1940, the surviving citizens of Coventry gathered in the crumbling remains of their cathedral. They didn’t sing Silent Night or Joy to the World, because there was no silence or joy left where they were. Instead, amidst sirens and distant artillery thunder, they stood in the wreckage and sang about the murder of their children in the hope that maybe somewhere there was a God who understood.
This year, the city of Bethlehem is dark and empty. The local government has canceled all traditional celebrations, for obvious reasons. The inns aren’t full: they’re shut down completely. A curfew is enforced. While Bethlehem, located in the West Bank, hasn’t suffered the same level of destruction as its neighbors in Gaza, the citizens have been hit hard by the loss of jobs and their constant fear of violence.
The live Bethlehem reenactment at the Baptist church didn’t mention Herod’s massacre of the innocents. I understand that it’s not a very joyful or triumphant event to dramatize, but we were all thinking about it.
Though there are differing reports on the Palestinian death toll in Gaza as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas, there’s estimated to be at least 22,000 dead. In November, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Gaza “a graveyard for children.” As of this writing, the Palestinian Ministry of Health estimates that over 9,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the Gaza Strip—one out of every 120 children, approximately. Human Rights Watch reports that 33 Israeli children have been killed, and around 40 taken hostage. Whatever your beliefs on Israel and Palestine, the undeniable fact is that children are being ground in the teeth of the war machine.
What am I to do with this information? How am I to hold it? How can I go to a living Bethlehem reenactment when so many people around modern Bethlehem are suffering? I don’t know. It comes back to that old question, “how does a loving God allow this to happen?” Boy, if I had the answer to that, I’d be set. I almost feel worried about asking the question, because it implies that there is an answer. It’s the question that makes or breaks us, the one that turns comfort and joy into fear and disgust. We have to either live with the weight of the mystery or decide that it’s too much of a black hole and walk away. Scholars and preachers and philosophers have debated the question everywhere from the Vatican to the bunkers of Auschwitz, and there is no answer but to wait and hope that it might someday make sense.
The crazy thing is that this was the world that Jesus was born into. This was the place where God decided to visit, naked and cold and incontinent. Jesus was born in the middle of a children’s graveyard.
The older I get, the more I can understand how the revolutionaries like Barrabas, or the Zealots, or even Judas, were frustrated by Jesus’s passive resistance to their oppressors. Sometimes I want to shake Jesus and say “WHY CAN’T YOU BE A WARRIOR GOD?” I wonder if the mothers of Bethlehem resented Jesus. After all, his birth instigated the murders of their children.
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m like Job, howling questions in the storm. Someday I hope I have an answer that is sufficient.
But until then, we stand in the wreckage of the world and sing about the murder of our children, in the hope that maybe somewhere there is a God who understands.
Sophia Aust is a writer and painter living in San Jose. She is completing her MA in Creative Writing at San Jose State University.