Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, Forbes Breaking News, Dec. 24, 2025.

A couple, three weeks ago, I began an ambitious set of Advent reflections based on something called a personal mission statement. I was asked to craft one in a parish self-assessment and strategic planning workshop, and it turned out to be a worthwhile exercise. Mine came out like this.

Personal mission statement: To use my gifts in the time I’ve got left to do what I can to repair the world (tikkun olam).

A hopeful statement for what I like to think of as a hopeful time of the year, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. (That rather pretentious Hebrew quote of mine deserves a blog post of its own. Which I fully intend to get back to. Sometime.) For now, it’s enough to say tikkun olam means “repairing the world.”

And, man oh man, does the world ever need reparing!

Anyway, there was plenty there to keep me thinking. When I ran the draft mission statement from the workshop by my spiritual director, she suggested I ask myself three questions to guide my thinking. So I started journaling. Here they are:

  • Who or what am I working for? That one was easy. Why, sure! Social justice. Love thy neighbor. Do justice. Be kind. Walk humbly with God. You know, the basics.
  • Who or what am I resting in? How can I answer this without waxing academic? A Finnish theologian named Tuomo Mannermaa finds the presence of Christ indwelling in the faith of the believer. But, for me, I find it in music, ranging from Lutheran chorales to American shape-note folk hymns and “Africa-lachian” roots music that blends African and southern Appalachian traditions.
  • Who or what am I living for? That led me back to the beginning. You know, the basics I mentioned above. I’m kind of a spiritual mutt, But my early formation was Anglican, and I keep returning to an Episcopal table grace: “Bless this food to our use, and us to thy service, […] and make us ever mindful of the needs of others.” That, for me, sums up everything from the Eucharist to the Golden Rule.

Good questions! I got a good start journaling on them around the first of December. (Click HERE and HERE; Spoiler alert: I’m probably not going to finish them.) It takes me a while to think through these things; since I was released from the pressure of daily newspaper deadlines. I’ve become a great believer in novelist Flannery O’Connor’s maxim: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” And in order to say it in the first place, I’ve discovered I have to think it through.

But then, just when I was beginning to relax and reflect on how sacred music grounds me (in question #2), President Trump changed the subject.

It happens all the time. We’re going along with our daily lives, and BOOM! We’re all talking about tariffs all of a sudden. And a few weeks, even days, later, BOOM! The National Guard is on the streets of Los Angeles. BOOM! It’s ICE on the streets of Chicago, no, it’s not ICE, it’s the Border Patrol (and no has the time to sort out how Chicago got to be on the border). Then BOOM! The feds are in North Carolina, or is it Memphis? And BOOM! Are we going to war with Venezuela now?

Monday, Dec. 21. And that’s about as far as I got with this post, which was going to be the third of four planned meditations. And wouldn’t you know it? BOOM! Trump’s in the headlines this morning appointing a “special envoy” who promises to “make Greenland a part of the US.” This understandably upset the foreign ministers of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

But maybe I’m learning to cope a little. I would never, ever attempt to psychoanalyze the president of the United States — especially this one — a Wikipedia article I consulted on attention-seeking behavior suggests “tactical ignoring” can be an effective behavioral management strategy.

So, to pick up my story where we left off, I’m meditating along about what an 83-year-old can do for social justice (plenty, I hope), and finding inspiration in the music of the season. Especially of the Magnificat, Mary’s song; even in the sonorous (but archaic) cadences of the 1928 prayer book I grew up with:

    And his mercy is on them that fear him * throughout all generations.
    He hath showed strength with his arm; * he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
    He hath put down the mighty from their seat, * and hath exalted the humble and meek.
    He hath filled the hungry with good things; * and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Then, BOOM! In mid-December actor, film producer and social activist Rob Reiner is murdered, apparently in a tragic domestic conflict, and Trump takes to social media blaming Reiner’s “raging obsession of [sic] President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.”

Which led to this observation by Monica Charen, a center-right opinion writer I’ve come to respect lately:

The post is deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No human adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. To have them at all is evidence of a twisted soul.

Charen, who was a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan and has devoted her career to conservative causes, broke with the Republican Party when Trump was nominated in 2016; now she provides an old-school “family values” GOP perspective to The Bulwark, a flagship publication of Never Trumpers who believe the president is an existential threat to small-d democracy.

As a capital-d Democrat whose values were formed by growing up in an all-electric “TVA town” built as a “model of cooperative, egalitarian living” (in Wikipedia’s words) in a “planned community,” I don’t always agree with Charen. But in September, she listed Trump’s failings in a 16-point bill of particulars, from “the summary execution on the high seas of boaters the president simply asserts are drug traffickers” to “undermining the availability of vaccines, the greatest boon to human health since clean water.” BOOM! BOOM! How could I not agree?

Charen — or a Bulwark copyeditor — titled her article “Everything Is Awful. And It’s Changing Us.” It came out during the high holy days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I’m not Jewish, but it hit home. Charen explains:

When we Jews ask God for forgiveness, we do so as a community, not as individuals (at least during this holiday). The liturgy specifies a long list of sins that we recite as we symbolically beat our chests. “We have lied. We have scoffed. We have committed adultery. We have gossiped.” The list goes on. The rabbis weren’t concerned about brevity. Among the worst sins is “baseless hatred.” It’s so easy and satisfying to hate—especially when we fear a person or a group.

There’s a lot to unpack here. In my (Lutheran) faith tradition, we have a similar practice. We confess our sins, against God and against our neighbor, before we receive communion. And Holy Communion, by definition, is something we do as a community. The very word atonement — a 16th-century coinage made up of “at one” plus “-ment” — is all about reconciliation, with God and our neighbor, with each other.

As Americans, I think we have to remind ourselves about that second part of atonement — to ask forgiveness, as Mona Charen reminds us, as a community. At least, I had to remind myself as I read on:

Trump doesn’t hold a monopoly on baseless hatred, but he and his fascist enablers have elevated it to a place of centrality in American life. They are using the full power of the state to intimidate, to punish, to silence, to exile, and even to kill. Is America still a free country? Less so than at any time in memory. It’s not too late to reject the fascists, but it’s damn close.

One of Trump’s most egregious failures as a leader is to make everything — always and only — about himself. But if we fall into that trap, if we make everything always and only about Trump, we lose our hope of redemption.

After all, we elected him. If we forget that, we fail ourselves.

Dec. 24. It’s about 11:30 a.m. (CST) in Springfield and early evening in Bethlehem, where Reuters and other international media are already livestreaming the Christmas Eve festivities. It’s time to wrap up this Advent meditation before Advent is over!

This year’s public celebration is the first since Oct. 7 2023, when Hamas terrorists killed 1,219 Israelis and Israel retaliated with a two-year invasion that displaced most civilians in Gaza and destroyed the Palestinian enclave’s civil, educational and medical infrastructure. In solidarity with the people of Gaza, Christian authorities in the West Bank called off the annual Christmas celebration in Bethlehem in 2023 and again in 2024.

This year, they decided to resume the festivities, albeit on a reduced scale. On Dec. 6 (a date that coincides with the feast of St. Nicholas), the traditional Christmas tree lighting took place in Manger Square, next to the Christian shrines. And through the afternoon today, youths in Palestinian Scout pipe bands (a legacy from the British mandate in Palestine) marched again.

At midnight, Christmas services would begin in the iconic sixth-century Greek Orthodox Basilica of the Nativity and the adjacent Latin (Roman) Catholic Church of St. Catherine. Arriving during the afternoon of Christmas Eve and speaking to the faithful in Manger Square (beginning at 1:50), was Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa.

It’s worth listening to Cardnal Pizzaballa’s remarks beginning at 1:50 in the linked video from Forbes Breaking News. “You are the light,” he said, pausing for some back-and-forth in Italian and Arabic with the audience. “No,” he added, smiling, “we are the light.” His prepared remarks, as recorded on X (Twitter) by the Catholic Sat satellite, cable and streaming service, mae for quite a homily on the state of Bethlehem, of Gaza where he had just visited the remaining Christian community; and of the world:

Brothers and sisters, Merry Christmas Today I see in Bethlehem is real Christmas! And today you are giving not just to Bethlehem, or the Holy Land, but to the whole world, what is the meaning of Christmas; I’m sure we are not out of all the problems, but oday in Bethlehem I see light. Not just the sun, but you the people, I see the light, you are light, we all together are the light, because you decided to be the light. And the light of Bethlehem is the Light of the World. […]

I bring to you the greetings, the prayers, and hugs, of our brothers and sisters in Gaza. I saw in Gaza disaster there, the situation is really catastrophic, but I saw there also the desire for life. In the midst of nothing they have been able to celebrate with joy despite everything, and they remind us that it is always possible to rebuild even in all the devastation we are seeing. So it is possible once again to celebrate in Gaza, it is possible to celebrate in Bethlehem, we need to celebrate not just today but everyday. We will rebuild everything, but we build within life and today I saw life. Merry Christmas!”

And now, if I discipline myself and don’t tinker with too many unnecessary edits, I have just about enough time to wind up my Advent meditation while it’s still Advent and get ready for the Christmas Eve service back in Illinois.

Links and Citations

[Completed — finally! — and uplinked, Dec. 24, 2025]

Unknown's avatar

Published by Pete Ellertsen

2 thoughts on “‘You are the light [of Bethlehem]. No. We are the light’: An Advent reflection in a time of oppression, hatred and distraction”

Leave a comment