Patina of Longing
Patina of Longing
Preston Pouteaux
Bethlehem was empty on the day I first visited. A clash in the West Bank ended in the standard police practice of closing off places like Bethlehem and Jericho from visitors. Restaurants and coffee shops with Western-like names like, “Stars and Bucks” were usually full, but a burning tire in the street was about all we could see of the chaos that swept through hours ago. For our driver, this was home. A great-grandson of Bethlehem who exchanged a shepherd’s staff for a bus, he knew these hills. “I grew up here, I know where to get past the blockades, I’ll show you,” he said, both hands on the wheel. Through a rocky field and past some goats we bumped along, covertly weaving closer to the manger scene: the ancient Church of the Nativity.
We ducked low through the door and into the quiet. Incense billowed up and over storied stones and across thick beams, a sooty lacquer of layered prayers. Deep into the church and below the altar is a set of stairs leading down into a cave, this is the place of the nativity. Visitors will find no Christmas tree or LED lights to mark the way, but only stone steps glossed with the feet of a million hopeful shepherds and long-travelled Magi that lead into the sacred cove. Here lambs and oxen are replaced with textured brass lamps and thick wall hangings. In the floor below at one end, underneath a kind of sacred lintel, is a silver star inlaid into the marble floor. This is the place where umbilical cord was cut, where blood was wiped, and where milk calmed the cries of God made flesh. This is where Jesus was born.
Most picture books have the nativity story in an open wooden barn, but Bethlehem was a community of rolling fields and hewn out cave-like dwellings. A stone home was sometimes connected to a grotto - a perfect place for keeping animals, grain, and even a labouring young mother, safe and warm. Justin Martyr a few generations after Jesus wrote, “Joseph could not find a lodging in that village, he took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village.” Sleepy towns remember these sacred moments and since the second century this particular cave was where the locals would gather to worship. It was, they said, the place where the Creator of the world was first touched and held by those he made.
I ran my hand along the star in the floor, then along the stone manger. There is a unique haptic experience in touching the same stones made wet with the ecstatic tears of St Francis of Assisi, or kneeling down before a surface met by the lips of a thousand bowing monarchs. Each visitor joins in the Advent story of a world in flesh, longing for the God made flesh. Oils from fingers, minerals from saliva, and sappy soot from frankincense form the patina of our longings stretched back to a moment in time.
Far from the manger scene and a world away I drive through my neighbourhood and eventually pull into the parking stall. Today is grocery day. The pandemic hand sanitizers intended to clean seem to add a tacky film to the handle of my grocery cart. I lift my girls into the basket and push them along. A person whose name I forget offers a passing hello. My fingers meet some dry residue left by previous shoppers - bumps on the handle of the dairy cooler. At the cash register a rubber touch pad is darkened from the approval of a thousand purchases. These traces left by the domestic rhythms of my own neighbours in search of their daily bread is a patina of longing. We need something we do not have, and so we reach.
Beside the cave where Jesus was born is another cave that is less known, but you can visit it too. It is off to one side and has the patina of a different story. It is close enough that the neighbours who once lived there might have heard the labour groans of Mary, the first cries of her baby, and the celebrations of visitors. These neighbours, also likely relatives and heirs to the same promises, may have wondered at the surprising arrival of the shepherds as they gathered near to bow in worship. It is in this very cave where St. Jerome, some 350 years later, spent 30 years translating the Hebrew text into Latin; the Vulgate. From this place he would have translated the longings of God’s people repeated through the ages: Noli timere; Sion: Non dissolvantur manus tuae. Dominus Deus tuus in medio tui fortis, ipse salvabit: gaudebit super te in laetitia. “Do not fear, Zion; do not let your hands hang limp. The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you,” (Zephaniah 3:16-17).
My inner life is a cave of prayerful longings that have taken shape with contours of their own. Some unmet prayers are left hardened and mineralized. I have places worn smooth with repeated asking. Still other corners bear evidence of sooty praise, greasy hands of thanks, and dried salt stains to mark my tears. The patina of longing for God is layered in my soul.
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This is the great mystery of our longings for God. The world continues to spin with or without us, and the natural world will not miss our touch or existence. Mountains and stars do not care about me. As Paul J. Griffiths writes, “The more we meditate on it, the more alien to human flesh the world seems.” We reach out and the patina-laden stone of our longing is merely disappointing and cold. A spoon, glass, or touch-screen carries the mark of our contact, but they do not reach back. Our reaching out to touch and hold with fingers and palms is foreign to this world that shows no response. Our longings seem in vain, unless perhaps if our touch is met.
But here in the Christmas cave I am met by God who, all along, in some great reversal, has been longing to touch me. From the first burst of creative light, and since the great-hovering-over-the-deep, God had been drawing up a beautiful meeting story. God had long prepared to reach, and finally, to touch. Our longings for God found their first haptic resolve in God’s longing for us. This is a meeting not in the spiritual heights of distant mountains and stars. No, the moment unfolds first in a neighbourhood, a home, and finally in a swaddled embrace. The longings of my soul are met, it seems, in a beautifully domestic, proximal, and tender way - in the meeting of another reaching human.
St Jerome must have set down his pen in awe when he translated Isaiah 7:14, et pariet filium, et vocabitur nomen ejus Emmanuel, “She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).” There in those ancient caves the longing of Isaiah for the touch of God was met in Immanuel. Jesus came to touch. Not just his mother, but all. Griffiths writes, “The Gospels mention Jesus being touched by and touching the flesh of others at least twenty times. He is circumcised, baptized, hugged by Simeon, has his feet anointed by Mary of Bethany and wiped with her hair, is bound and whipped and crucified, is kissed, washes the feet of others, caresses children, and heals the flesh of others by touching it.” God with us.
We cannot mistake the layers of sweat, blood, and tears that soak this longing world as anything less than that of God’s own constant touching and caress of love for us.
The patina of longing.
The patina of Immanuel.
Preston Pouteaux
Neighbourhood Pastor & Writer
Preston has been published in Faith Today & The Chestermere Anchor and the author of The Bees of Rainbow Falls & The Neighbours Are Real
Photography by Krisjanis Mezulis