"A hard time we had of it."

The spare line from T.S. Eliot's "Coming of the Magi" resonates when the ambiguities of our common human journey strike hard, and even in our day-to-day rounds when we come upon stories like Father Stephen Coulter's in the Dec. 20 issue of the local "British Weekly."

Father Coulter, an Anglican priest from Dorset, England, banned the singing of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" after experiencing the desolation of Jesus' birthplace where he had gone on his recent Christmas pilgrimage.

"We cannot," he says, "sing 'How still we see thee lie' when Bethlehem's population is decimated, its economy in shambles, its holy sites disconnected one from the other, families tracing their origins to the Shepherds are forbidden to travel. And the Israeli security wall, 25 feet high in places, surrounds the town on three sides."

The reality is that Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Prince of Peace, has survived the ravages of war, and will live on. Today's raging Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one more sorry witness to the madness, the near hopelessness of being human, of trying to keep us humans from slaughtering each other, from pretending to be human without the God of love.

My own pilgrimage to Bethlehem many years ago was literally wonder --- full. I stayed awake day and night just to savor every moment of its peace. Even now I can feel something of that peace as I relish the memories: celebrating Mass in the grotto of the Basilica at three in the morning after I had kissed the star marking the spot where Jesus was born, and walking around the little town beginning with the Shepherds' Field which --- as I noted in my book, "Tourist in His Footsteps" --- St. Jerome had "calculated to be a thousand paces from the Grotto."

Of course, as I pointed out, there will always be some doubt about the exact identity of Biblical sites, but in the Holy Land you are never far from the Holy Places or the apocalyptic events that took place within its borders.

Every Christmas, among other things, I read my own account of Bethlehem and its Christmas associations. But with Father Coulter's reminder of the sadness of today's Bethlehem, I instinctively turn to T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" for its broader perspective and less comforting realism.

Eliot depicts one of the Wise Men in his old age recreating the journey to Bethlehem. A companion's recall might sound less disappointing, but Eliot's gifted narrative confronts us with the mystery of Faith, with the human journey. The journey which Jesus, the Son of God, began in the little town of Bethlehem, lived - for us - in the narrow confines of the Holy Land, and consummated on the cross of Golgotha four miles from Bethlehem.

In "The Journey of the Magi" Eliot, the poet and convert, echoes his own trying Faith journey, with the doubts and frustrations that are part of all our lives and with striking overtones of Jesus' life and death:

There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night fires going out, and the lack of shelters
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn, we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vineleaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death.
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

My pilgrimage to Bethlehem will remain among the dearest, sweetest memories of my life. I would do it all over again.

And though I cannot help sympathizing with Father Coulter, even at my age I need to be reminded of the inseparability of birth and death. We die daily to our old ways only to be born again --- birth and death. A pilgrimage to Bethlehem without a visit to Jerusalem, Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection would be incomplete.

Msgr. John Sheridan, ordained in 1943, is pastor emeritus of Our Lady of Malibu Church, Malibu, and for many years has contributed columns to The Tidings.