Article: The Christmas story; behind the garish trappings of the shrine at Bethlehem, a traveler discovers the true meaning of the Nativity.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY

The Holy Land is full of history, written in stones, and with the faces in the streets for alphabet. Yet it was not history I found there, but some other deeper and more exhilarating truth that lay beneath the stones, the faces, and all the hubbub and the fraudulence.

I remember the precise moment of illumination very well. It was in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I was sitting in the crypt waiting for the time when the public were excluded and we could begin to film. Earlier in the day we had been filming in nearby fields where, reputedly, shepperds were tending their flocks when they heard the tidings of great joy, that ...

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