The 2000th anniversary of the Nativity
William Dalrymple is not an Orthodox Christian, but nevertheless his book From the Holy Mountain is one that all Orthodox Christians outside the Near East should read. In it he follows in the footsteps of St John Moschos, who wrote The spiritual meadow. In AD 578 St John Moschos set off from the monastery of St Theodosius near Bethlehem accompanied by his pupil Sophronius the Sophist, and went on a pilgrimage to collect the wisdom of the desert fathers, and travelled around most of the Near East. It was a time when Christianity flourished in the region, but not for long. In AD 614 their home monastery was burned to the ground by the Persian army, and all the monks put to the sword. Twenty years later most of the region had been conquered by Muslim Arabs. A little over 1400 years later Dalrymple visited the same places, and compares the past and the present. The region he visited is covered by four of the ancient Patriarchates -- Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. For Western Christians, this may be merely a historical curiosity. For Orthodox Christians, it is the home of our faith.
In spite of being second-class citizens, during most of the intervening 14 centuries Christians continued to live there. But now, Dalrymple notes, the Christian presence is threatened as never before. In the final weeks and days of the twentieth century, Christianity seems likely to vanish from the place where it began.
With such a gloomy prognosis, is there anything to celebrate this year? The more apocalyptically minded might see it as a sign of the closeness of the end of the age, and of the coming of Antichrist. The more prosaic and cynical might see it as a fitting symbol of the decline and ineffectiveness of Christianity -- if Christians are unable to celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the founder of their religion, its failure is obvious. The message of "Peace on earth to men of goodwill" was a hollow one to begin with. There are no more men of goodwill now than there were 2000 years ago.
And yet if we travel back to the beginnings, things may have been even more hopeless than they are now. The Hope of the world was born in an out of the way cave. There were not thousands of pilgrims, just a few shepherds and some rich tourists who had seen
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