When I visited the Saxum Visitor Center, I was struck by the timeline: on vertical panels it traces the most significant events in the history of salvation, interwoven with milestones of universal history. In the same outdoor courtyard, a map laid into the floor marks the main places – the routes – that allow visitors to walk in the footsteps of Abraham and Moses.
I was deeply impressed by the historical synthesis presented in simple geometric coordinates: events sequenced and linked to others that occurred in the same period but in different places.
Timeline of the Bible, Saxum Visitor Center
Months later, I attended the Catholic Christmas liturgy in the Shepherds’ Field at Beit Sahour, about two kilometers from the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. There, at midnight on December 24, the very same history displayed at the Saxum Center came alive once more—those same events, now recounted, indeed sung! a cappella, in the ancient Christmas Proclamation that announces the Nativity, with the liturgy breaking through the linear timeline in order to relive, to live anew, the event that changed the course of history.
The Proclamation states thus:
“When ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created heaven and earth, and formed man in his own
likeness; when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace;
in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees;
in the thirteenth century since the people of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt;
around the thousandth year since David was anointed king; in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel;
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;
in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the foundation of the city of Rome;
in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus; the whole world being at peace,
Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since his conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man.”
That night in Bethlehem I understood once again that there are different ways of apprehending reality, ways that illuminate and complete one another: science and faith, reason and emotion. And the extraordinary capacity we all possess to let events touch us deeply, and to share them with others. Next to me, a Mexican friend was trying to describe what we had just experienced: “Here the reality I had known since childhood, the one that returned every year with its rituals of cork and clay, silver paper and moss, is transformed; my eyes have been opened to a new light that was unknown to me until today.”
In the end, perhaps the most important thing for truly coming to understand is to free ourselves from prejudices and to look with simplicity and purity of heart at everything around us.
By Carmen Rodríguez Eyré