Julian Borger
`If ‘im come here, ‘im see the world not so bad a place after all.” Sitting in the shade of an almond tree, waiting for morning Mass, the brothers and sisters of the Moravian Church had been discussing the possibility of a Second Coming when Sister Joyce offered this radically optimistic interpretation.
She cut short all the gripes about rising prices and modern youth with a silent glance at the deep-green, island scenery sparkling in the early sunlight of a Sunday morning in Bethlehem, Jamaica.
The two dozen faithful around her murmured their agreement. Most have spent their long lives raising yam, pumpkin and hot pepper up in the Santa Cruz mountains and selling the surplus to the Bethlehem Teachers’ College. “We wouldn’t change it for the whole world,” Sister Gwendoline says with decisive finality, raising another round of affirmative noises. After all, someone chipped in, Hurricane Mitch had passed them by, thank the Lord.
Most of their children have swapped the rural calm for the excitement and job prospects of Kingston and Montego Bay, but their generation had fewer expectations. They made a pact with the red clay soil, treating it with respect in return for enough sustenance to see them through to a peaceful old age. The earth has kept its side of the bargain.
According to the Jamaica Tourist Board, it is the eighth-healthiest place on Earth. The board does not name the even healthier seven, but it is hard to imagine any of them boasting such a concentrated dose of physical beauty and such a resonant name.
In the last century, wealthy Brits risked the sea crossing and endured the steamy trek uphill to convalesce here from their northern European complaints. To make their stay as comfortable as possible, they built a string of grand stone villas along the Santa Cruz ridge.
>From the main road that runs from Kingston to Black River across the south of the island, the settlement looks close at hand. But it takes a good half-hour by car, twisting and turning through banana trees and the overgrown remains of old coffee plantations, to reach Malvern, a market town that plays both host and needy dependant to the 165-year-old Protestant mission.
The Bethlehem church, teachers’ college and school are set on a pair of hillocks above the town, along a road lined by old stone walls, and eucalyptus and pine trees. The 50m drive leading to the church is shaded by poncianna trees which turn flaming red in summer and in winter drop 30cm- long seedpods that local children use as makeshift tambourines to give Christmas carols a punchier rhythm.
Lucinda Peart first came here as a teenage student 40 years ago. She married the resident preacher and has become the driving force behind the church, playing piano at Sunday Mass, organising outings, festivals and Christmas celebrations. “In all this time, I never got used to it, I never took it for granted. Just standing here, your eye is carried right up the road by the colours and on to the fields,” she says, pointing out a ragged line of poinsettia bushes, whose outer leaves turn scarlet in time for Christmas.
Peart is preoccupied with orchestrating Christingle, the annual pageant of Nativity plays and carols put on by Bethlehem’s schoolchildren. The high point is a night-time procession of singing students, each carrying a candle implanted in an orange. According to Sister Doris, another churchworker, the procession used to wind its way through the streets of Malvern, “but the rudeboys from town grabbed all the oranges, so now they just go around Bethlehem”.
Christingle, the brother-and-sister appellations, the Moravian denomination itself – these are all historical debris left by a chain of accidents linking this Jamaican hilltop all the way back to a 15th-century church in Prague, the Bethlehem chapel, where Jan Hus launched one of the first assaults on the corrupt Roman Catholic hierarchy. The radical preacher was too far ahead of his time, debunking Rome 60 years before Martin Luther nailed his manifesto to a German church door and his revolutionary grass-roots vision left him vulnerable. He was burnt at the stake in 1415. But many of his followers, the Hussites, survived and fled to Saxony, where they became known as Moravians (after their home province) and where they declared independence from the Church of Rome in 1457.
Their church went on to flourish in the 18th century under the patronage of a certain Count von Zinzendorf, a wealthy do-gooder, leisurely touring the known world with one eye open for noble causes. Fatefully for the Moravian Church, he stumbled on one such worthy venture on a visit to Denmark in 1722: he met a former slave, who told him of the terrible inhumanities inflicted on captured Africans in Denmark’s colonies in the West Indies.
Greatly moved, Von Zinzendorf quickly despatched three Moravian brethren to the Danish territories, latterly known as the Virgin Islands. The clerics established one Bethlehem on St Croix, and then went island-hopping until, in 1754, three Moravian missionaries (two Englishmen and a German) sailed into Black River port on Jamaica’s southern coast, and moved north to establish their first Jamaican mission, New Carmel, in the alligator-infested malarial wetlands of the interior.
Randolph Watson can see the site from his office window. The extraordinary, sweeping view is one of the perks of the principal’s job at Bethlehem Teachers’ College. He can trace the progress of the Moravian founding fathers with his outstretched arm, as if they were praying, converting and sweating with fever even now in the flat, green valley floor 750m below. “They almost died out down there from malaria, before they came up to the high ground.”
So they headed up the Santa Cruz ridge, named 340 years earlier by
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Christopher Columbus, and founded
their new Bethlehem. The mission’s founding fathers had set out with the idea of combating slavery, but, at some point – probably when they were at their sickliest – they were seduced by the idea of free labour, and acquired slaves themselves. In the words of Seedtime and Harvest, a history of the Moravians: “The vision had become a mirage”, leaving a stain on the church, which it overcame only recently with the purging of its colonial character.
“For me, the greatest achievement of the past few years is that, when I came, all the lecturers at the school were expatriates. Now, we are all from here, except one from Japan and an African,” says Watson.
These days, Bethlehem seems 100% Jamaica. Inside the austere, wooden- roofed church, the Sunday service was musical and free-flowing, and guided almost entirely by children from the Moravian school. They led the hymns and performed the readings and solo recitations of hymns and spirituals. At one point in the mass, a young man in a torn, green T-shirt, who had been muttering and giggling to himself throughout, got up and paced the central aisle shouting “God!” A few in the choir giggled but most sang on.
A former teachers’ college student, Mike Catand, a junior version of Watson in steel-rimmed specs and clipped goatee, had returned from the big city to preach the sermon. He said over and over again how glad he was to be back in Bethlehem, an oasis of calm beside the lawlessness of Kingston. Why, the other day a bullet had come through the window of his favourite pattie shop. The sermon went on, reverberating from the church’s wide-open doors, down the dirt track to Bethlehem’s graveyard, full of 200-year-old stone slabs, long ago robbed of their inscriptions by rain and moss.
Down the road, the local men were having a beer at a kiosk-sized bar called the Base. The radio reggae blocked out the sounds of the church, but it was easy to imagine Bethlehem pumping goodwill like balm over the banana fronds and zinc roofs of Malvern’s single-storey homes. “Christianity is the key to everything, every time, every time,” Rollin Christian, an off-duty policeman in T- shirt and shorts, said philosophically.
The Bethlehem mission not only serves as the town’s main source of regular employment, its benevolent presence apparently acts as a shield against crime. There has not been a murder in town for more than 10 years, and even then an outsider was blamed. So Christian spends much of his effort keeping track of drug shipments that follow the country roads in an attempt to avoid the law.
It’s mostly ganja going from Cockpit country to the coast, but there’s also increasing amounts of cocaine, to supply the island’s hedonist tourists. Christian lets the dealers drive through, and then phones his fellow officers with the information at the beach resorts in Black River and Savannah-La-Mar. Trouble at the gates of paradise, but just passing through.
The dark tides swill to and fro outside the gates of Bethlehem, but the mission has so far managed to keep them out. This Christmas, the children’s procession, with its trail of illuminated oranges, will go only as far as the low stone walls. Inside, Peart will be passing around sorrel tea with ginger to the teachers and the old people of the parish. “When I’m driving back from Kingston and I see Bethlehem all lit up from a distance, I know I’m home,” she says. “That’s how I see this place, a shining city on a hill, and its education shedding light on Jamaica.”
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