Light Tour God Round: Bethlehem at Night

Looks like there are spontaneous tours and excursions happening outside of the planned Light Tour. We’re calling these “God Rounds”, named after the optional late-night processes at PAT Trainings and Living in Grace, where some people stay after the end of each day to get that extra hit of energy and ride it all the way—100%. And as J-R has said, 100% is God.

Our first God Round is a night trip into the Palestinian-controlled West Bank to the little town of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. We come back from a whole day of touring in the desert heat and sun, around 4 hours in buses, arrive at our hotel at about 10 pm, and wild-man Jsu Garcia is waiting in front of the hotel asking me, “Want to go get into a taxi and go to Bethlehem?”

I flip through a whole series of reactions in a few seconds. At first it’s, “Are you nuts?” The answer to that is obvious so there’s no need to even ask the question. Zeus has never claimed or even pretended to sanity. My second reaction is, “I need my rest,” which I know is a lie because being on these trips, in this kind of proximity to the energy Source, is a whole different world from the world of sleep, food, comfort, etc. I feel like we’re as far away from that world as we are from Los Angeles—even farther, actually, because in this world it’s as though Los Angeles is a city that we’ve read about in history books that was bombed to smithereens a few centuries ago.

My third reaction is trepidation because we’re going into an area of greater poverty, more violence, fewer rules…and it’s nighttime…and there’s been a lot of Palestinian-Israeli fighting lately. But we’re as far away from the world of fear as we are from the world of sleep and comfort, so the trepidation vaporizes in a few seconds, and I put as many of my valuables in my room as possible, go back downstairs, and get in a cab with Jsu, Nathaniel, and Rick Ojeda.

Our Israeli cab driver can’t go into Palestinian territory so he has to leave us at the border, then we’ll walk through the checkpoint, and get a Palestinian cab on the other side. We get his phone number so we can call him to come pick us up on the Israeli side when we leave. He says they’d kill him if he tried to drive in there in his Israeli cab. That makes me start thinking about my Jewish genetics, (and people very quickly and intuitively size up genetic types over here) so I tell the other guys, half-jokingly, to make sure they say I’m Italian if anybody asks. (Of course being American is totally different from being Israeli, and they’re accustomed to tourists there, with lots of them coming in the daytime.)

After a short drive we leave our Israeli cab driver at the checkpoint, pass the soldier with the machine gun, go through the series of gates and turnstiles that creates a pathway through the walls, turrets and barbed wire, and exit into a kind of seedy film-noir setting—poverty, a feeling of darkness and hopelessness, trash all over the streets. A stark contrast to the clean, well-lit streets just a few feet away on the other side of the wall. We’re definitely in brown-people-world and we’ve left white-world behind. We get into a cab and ask to go to the Church of the Nativity, which marks the birthplace of Jesus, and take some pictures.

It’s near a square, a nighttime scene of young guys hanging out, kicking a soccer ball around, a mosque on the other side of the square. (No women around of course.) Too late to get into the Church of the Nativity. So we drive around, ending up at the famous wall, and start thinking about how J-R put a “light-worm” in the Berlin Wall a short time before it came down. No political commentary intended here, or any kind of taking sides. Just a knowing that we’ve met the enemy and he is us. And we’re him. And in the friction of the two a creativity is ignited that expresses itself in some great graffiti on the wall, which reminds us again of Berlin. We take some shots which include two works by the famous graffiti artist Banksy. (The dove and the girl patting down the soldier that you see in the slideshow are his works.) The wall is a kind of museum, but it’s a brown-people museum that isn’t wealthy, comfortable, or indoors. Definitely worth the trip.

After that we’re just another car full of males looking for something to do in the deserted streets in this male world on this warm middle eastern night. We stop at the 5-star Intercontinental Hotel, a scene out of Casablanca, and get some Turkish coffee. We look for food and go to a kebab place but the big TV on the wall with three muscular terrorists in black masks making some kind of pronouncement in a foreign language with Arabic subtitles doesn’t seem too inviting.

We end up at the “Stars and Bucks” café where some young entrepreneur has imitated the Starbucks logo and decor and created his own little coffee shop.

Nothing else to do so we head for home and phone our Israeli cab driver. But when we try to go through the checkpoint all the doors to the Israeli side are locked. It’s a deserted barracks-style metallic building with bolted doors and gates and zig-zag barriers for herding Palestinians. After going back to the soldier at the checkpoint and then back to the barrier-maze, and yelling and banging on the echoing steel doors for about 20 minutes, we start to feel like we’re in a scene from the movie “District Nine”. We wonder if we’re going to be spending the night sleeping on benches until some guards arrive. Eventually somebody walkies someone else, there are loud, disembodied voices on speaker systems telling us which door to go to (“the last door” which we can’t find, and which is inevitably locked, just like the last “last door” that we tried).

All through this, though, it’s like we’re in the J-R bubble where there’s no seriousness, no real danger, no thought that the ending will be anything but a happy one. It’s quite odd, as though someone with great authority has told the childlike part of us, “No harm can come to you.” It’s a slight tweaking of the normal emotional reactions that would be disconcerting if it weren’t so familiar in so many situations where we’ve been immersed in the spiritual energy. The realm of our baptisms in our angel-suits earlier in the day seems like it’s weeks in the past, but at the same time it’s still present.

Then after we’ve been there for what seems like half an hour, a door slides open, and some guards, who apparently have been playing cards and who are looking irritated at being disturbed, allow us back into our safe white-people world, where there are well-kept streets, money to handle any discomfort, and women to tell us what is right or wrong, clean or dirty.
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