Bethlehem is a dry place. The bus skids along dusty roads looking like a prop from American Graffiti. Harried fowl squawk in the back rows every time it hits a bump. Between them and the stale heat, the town arrives on a cloud of anti-climax.
The Church of the Nativity crouches in one corner of Manger Square, announced by hastily built shops and hucksters' stalls where you can buy a Holy Family fridge magnet or squeeze-me plastic collectibles of lowing cattle. Glow-in-the-dark baby Jesuses huddle on shelves beside fluorescent Marys or stolid, boring Josephs that get you discounts if you pay in dollars. Only a Dub could catch the nuance of the nearby cafe called "King of Juice".
The biggest story of two millenniums and you'd never know from the church's entrance portals. Yellow-pack architecture without a hint of Goth and with soldiers leaning against its walls dangling guns and cigarettes. A virtual Disney ride of different chapels greets you inside: hooded monks from obscure Christian sects turn nasty if a rival tries to sweep their patch of floor.
Embroidered rooms give way to the plainer symmetries of post-Reformation religions and in turn to the cornetto-style decor made for Roman Catholic Mass.
Christmas 1999, and the nativity story is reduced to kitsch. Artists can't make great art about it, poets find enough pain in the present. The image doesn't resonate from freshly designed Christmas cards, or speak to a First World culture more interested in the work of Joseph the fashion designer than Joseph of Nazareth. If you didn't know better, you might think it's time for a new Messiah. Marketingwise, at least.
Back in Bethlehem, a metal star marks the natal spot. It doesn't resemble cribs back home. That fat, blond, cherubic Jesus in the chapel couldn't have been born here: more like dark skin, dark eyes and a mop of thick black hair, judging from the people living nearby. Most call themselves Palestinians, living as uneasily with their political masters as their ancestors lived with Roman overlords 2,000 years ago.
The image of the crib still makes sense for Third World economies that share its visual message: rural life, harmony with animals, homes built of clay and being at the mercy of other people's power, but not for the First World. Folk here can easily buy into the blow-out festival of Saturnalia on which Christmas is built, or borrow their favourite bits of light-gathering symbolism of Hanukkah a few weeks earlier. Otherwise, the outside story of the Nativity is bleached of meaning, consigned to older people's memories of child-hoods long ago.
No wonder the old crib on the hall table stays mute. Bits of cotton wool laid lovingly to cradle the tiny Jesus can't match the range of bed linen accessories available for Baby Born. Children may rearrange the crib figures when the old cardboard box is taken down, or point out light-up mangers in the Pound Shop window.
Even in the deep mid-winter, tales of being born in the hay, or warmed by cattle, are almost too fantastic to believe. Riding donkeys happens only in zoos or old cards from John Hinde. Little figurines of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and those happy animals whose breath gave baby Jesus what we'd call central heating are less coveted than tiny Pokemons or Barbie's newest friends. Why did the Three Wise Men not come by air?
The image of the crib fits the culture loosely as an old shoe, even apart from the effects of a multi-cultural world. It doesn't speak to the inheritors of the Christian tradition by measuring the everyday rituals with which they mark their lives. It's not that shopping centres are the new temples, or multiplex cinema the dreamscape of the future. The crib has lost its context, and from the outside at least, fails to inspire as it did.
Judge the resonance by what is being produced: tacky, sentimental objects too kitsch for a lifestyle shop. Tea-towels sold 20 years ago at Knock could still make a connection with the symbol of crib. One, preserved on the wall of a Mayo pub, addresses itself to the "Lord of all pots and pans and things . . . Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates".
Relevance, resonance, contemporaneity - such are the yardsticks that make artists and people tick. Images of the manger where Jesus Christ was born fed Western art and culture because it caught all three. His nativity was the story of stories, superseding all the older myths about gods, goddesses and the astrological forces it takes to build a good omen. Glittering on flat Byzantine murals or through the glorious pigments of Giotto and Michelangelo; whirling through the white-hot spirituality of Dante's poetic intercessions to the Virgin in his Paradiso or sounding in the strains of Tom Tallis's serene musical scores. Empires were conquered, nations formed and fractured, all in the wake of that story. Good and evil acts were done in the family's name.
Illiterate medieval peasants viewed shining blue tones in the folds of Mary's cloak and understood the economic value of that sky-goddess colour, made as it was from crushed lapis lazuli imported from far-off Afghanistan. Blue is the colour of a top 10 song this Christmas. It means "depressed". Who now writes of Mary as "the lovely sapphire that dyes the heavens blue", in Dante's words? Can anyone translate the 12th-century Latin that speaks of her breasts as "more fragrant than wine; their whiteness whiter than milk and lilies, their scent lovelier than flowers and balsam wood"? Would anyone want to?
The twin motifs of human dignity and human debasement came together in the nativity tale. Oppressed peoples heard the revolutionary message that equality was a birthright. Poor men, women and slaves were promised parity of stature with their secular masters and over hundreds of years, grew to believe it could come true. But that's the inside story. Taken over by institutions who became pragmatic about its uncomfortable questioning of establishment values, it stretched like long elastic bands between the needs of those who were overwhelmed and the demands of those who oversaw them.
The inside story shouts to people who are still "groaning and weeping in this valley of tears". Yet homeless, poor and dispossessed of country, they have an image problem of their own. When contentment is the dominant cultural aspiration, old rural pictures of having it all by having none of it simply don't make sense.