Twinning

What British town might best be twinned with Bethlehem?

Musing on this I feel that perhaps a city twinned with Bethlehem ought to be - well - holy and perhaps very old. We might think of St Albans, with a history going back to Roman times and architecturally dominated by a great Abbey Church and Cathedral honouring an early martyr of Christ. Not very Middle Eastern though.

The most obvious place to twin with Bethlehem has, in a sense, already started. It is a little Carmarthenshire village once known as Dyffryn Ceidrich. The village chapel was (not unusually) called Bethlehem and such was the overwhelming nature of the spiritual revivals experienced in the area and the smallness of the village that somewhere in the mists of history the village stopped being known by its original name and took on the name of the chapel. Hence Britain has its very own Bethlehem, complete with nearby sheep.

However the truth is that just one British place is twinned with Bethlehem. I confess to a whiff of pride as Diane and I are former residents of that place. On the other hand, even as I write this article, my head continues to involuntarily shake from side to side in a kind of deeply disturbed bewilderment. For the British city now twinned with Bethlehem is....

Glasgow.

Yes, that Glasgow. Rangers and Celtic, Billy Connolly, Barlinnie Prison and a homing device for Atlantic low pressure areas. Whether I was climbing over a sozzled seasonal celebrant on the underground, fighting the wind and rain between shops on Sauchiehall Street, queuing in a launderette full of students or sitting in a bleakly dark and forbidding kirk, thoughts of Bethlehem rarely surfaced in my student life in Glasgow - even near Christmas!

Yet thinking on, Bethlehem and Christmas are all about incongruous twinning.

I don’t know what angelic heralds do after a major performance - do they get straight on with heavenly ministry or do they take time out? If the latter then surely, as the shepherds made their expectant way down to Bethlehem to see the Christ-child who was Lord of glory, one of the heavenly chorus muttered to another, "I just don’t understand why He would twin with them"

King of kings, yet born of Mary,

As of old on earth He stood,

Lord of lords, in human vesture,

In the body and the blood;