INCREDIBLE REALITY

             After an eight-hour flight from Chicago to Paris, a two-hour layover at the airport outside Paris, another 4 ½ hour flight to Tel Aviv, and an hour-long bus ride from the airport, 32 members of the Mundelein Seminary Class of 2015 and our three priest guides arrived safe and sound to our home in the Holy Land around 8:00 in the evening.  Dinner followed and then everyone immediately disappeared into their rooms.  The following morning, starting around 3:00 a.m. or so, guys started to re-emerge, unable to fall back to sleep.  A few hours later we were at the Church of the Nativity where Jesus Christ was born over 2000 years ago. 

            A sentiment shared by most if not all of us is that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of this place we suddenly find ourselves in.  On one level there is the strangeness of going from the seminary environment to this surprisingly dense, somewhat chaotic, less than tidy city (no longer a town) in the West Bank, thousands of miles from home, in less than a day.  And on a deeper level there is the significance of what Bethlehem, the City of David, means to us:  this is where Mary delivered to the world its Savior, Jesus Christ, where divinity meets humanity.  Yes, this is what our faith teaches us; and we have known about this place since the earliest years of our lives.  But it is a very different thing to be in the very place where Jesus came into the world, to see for ourselves the network of caves where the Holy Family took shelter, to look out at the hills just outside the city that they likely would have crossed. 

            And just as our minds can’t quite comprehend just how amazing it all is, so too do they fall short of grasping the reality of our faith.  For our finite human brains can only strive to fathom the infinite.  They can reach for it but never quite attain it.  How can anyone say they fully comprehend the mystery of the Incarnation, that God entered into his creation, that the infinite made himself, so to speak, finite?  That the all-powerful God would choose to become a helpless baby?  We can meditate on this mystery all our lives and still come up short when asked to explain it.  For all our striving to reach God, we can never do it on our own.  But in his love for us, God comes down to us, to lift us up to him.  Visiting Bethlehem gives us a sense of this truth in a more concrete, more incarnational way.  We hope that our ten weeks here in the Holy Land will help us to keep reaching up to God, and make us more aware of how, out of love, he is always reaching down to us.