Day 2: An angel points the way
This morning we visited the Shepherds’ Fields, which commemorates the place where anxious shepherds heard about the birth of Jesus. An angel above the doorway of one of the chapels announces the Holy Birth by pointing upward to the round star window of the Church of the Nativity, visible opposite on a distant hill where that same window depicts the birth of Jesus—the infant, the crèche, Mary and Joseph in a green field. Christians believe that Christ is born in Spirit when two or three gather in His name.
The round star window of the Church of the Nativity
In the afternoon we met with Dalia Qumsieh, a Palestinian land-rights advocate who spent nine fruitless years fighting in Israeli courts against the building of a section of the annexation wall through the last green valley spaces in Bethlehem. Today, a massive concrete wall blocks 58 Christian farmer families from their fields, and they have lost their livelihoods. And a new multi-lane highway, which Palestinians cannot use, now runs across that valley to join illegal Israeli settlements.
We talked to two of those Palestinian farm families. One keeps in his mind his vision of the fields he remembers from his childhood. “It was heaven,” he said. “I tell my kids, ‘One day this wall will come down.’” “Document what you see here,” he challenged us. “Then go speak. This helps us.”
Like that angel always pointing to the Birth, Palestinian farmers and lawyers do not lose hope that God will make a new just world for them some day.
*About the author
Bill Butt is retired after writing for CBC Television, teaching at Western University in London, Ontario, and thirteen years as Overseas Personnel for the United Church of Canada, based primarily in Angola and Mozambique. He is a member of the CFOS Communications Committee. Along with a dozen other Canadians, he participated in a Solidarity Pilgrimage, November 11-21, 2024, hosted by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Each day of the pilgrimage, he wrote about his experience.