By Silvia Holgado

It is true that the expression “Fifth Gospel” may already sound like a marketing slogan for trips to the Holy Land. However, the experience of walking this land hand in hand with Scripture—of uniting geography and Salvation History—is an inexhaustible source of spiritual life. That is what happens to me after having lived one Christmas after another for more than six years in the Holy Land.

The lights, decorations, and garlands are present, of course, as in many other places. But all of that fades before the moving experience of descending at midnight into a grotto and remembering that it was here that God made Himself visible to us with a human face.

That moment in which we make ourselves small together with the small Child has, in some years, been somewhat tumultuous due to the great number of pilgrims who traveled to Bethlehem at this time. In other, more recent years, only the bare Hope being born in Bethlehem allowed us to continue looking around with confidence in the future.

But geography speaks not only in the grottos of Bethlehem. In the hills of the nearby village of Beit Sahour (which we could translate as “the house of the watchers”), our eyes fill with the sight of flocks of sheep and shepherds who once slept under the open sky. On several occasions we have celebrated Christmas Eve Mass there, and then “run to Bethlehem to see what has been announced to us.” On that holy night, many people also walk the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem (about 9 kilometers), renewed in strength by the joy that “today a Savior has been born for you.”

Christmas in the Holy Land is not a book, nor a photo album, nor a guide to “must-see places.” It is our own feet, our own hearts setting out toward an encounter with our God and Lord, with the certainty that it is He Himself who has come here to meet us.