In her book For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes this about her experience in the grotto of the Church of the Nativity:"I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.
Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God's presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto. The ugliness of the blunt and bumpy silver star impressed me. The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps--some human's idea of elegance--bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.
'Every day,' said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, 'the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement'."
Without diminishing the significance of the silver star in Bethlehem, Dillard is right: "any patch of ground" is holy land. Any place can be a site of encounter, as Jacob discovered one night. After his dream of the ladder to heaven, he woke and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it!" (Genesis 28:16). And any encounter, with God or stranger, can be a meeting that transforms (as Jacob also discovered with a night-time wrestler, as told in Genesis 32). Perhaps I read too much of a universal import into those narratives. Even so, it strikes me that I am often resistant to "the glory . . . ready to emerge," especially when that glory appears in the shape of the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable.
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Lerma Olayres.
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