Cardinal Pizzaballa in Bethlehem, Forbes Breaking News, Dec. 24, 2025.

Editor’s (admin’s) note: Lightly edited copy of my email in advance of this month’s appointment with my spiritual director, giving her a heads-up on what I’ve been journaling about (or, in this case, why I haven’t been journaling much) and, more to the point, helping me focus over time by archiving the emails on Ordinary Time. This one riffs off of an Advent meditation I posted yesterday (the very last day of Advent!), but it goes further into the question: To what extent are we responsible for acts of our government that violate our personal moral and ethical standards? It concludes with a shaft light in the darkness from Cardinal Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem: Where there is life, there is hope; and where there is hope, there is life.

Hi Sister —

Merry Christmas and a happy new year! I’m going to try to get this monthly email to you today, so it doesn’t come crashing into your inbox like usual at the very last minute. 

I’ll just link you to one of my journals. It’s a *horrible* piece of writing, really disconnected, but it keeps coming back to issues I’ve been wrestling with. (Or maybe it’s the other way around — the issues keep coming back!) Anyway, after last month’s Zoom call, I launched into a three- or four-part series of journals on that exercise where I tried to draft a “personal mission statement.”

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that I didn’t follow through on those plans, but I think the mission statement — “To use my gifts in the time I’ve got left to do what I can to repair the world” — holds water. And the questions you suggested I ask myself were thought-provoking. I want to sit with them quite a while longer, but I came up with some tentative answers that I think are worth recording.

I’m sharing excerpts with you from a Dec. 17 post I titled “‘You are the light [of Bethlehem]. No. We are the light’: An Advent reflection in a time of oppression, hatred and distraction” (linked below). The quote is from Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and I’ll also link to the Forbes Breaking News video that covers his Christmas Eve remarks in Bethlehem:

Here, for convenient reference, are the three questions, with my tentative answers:

  • 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 I grew up with: “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.

 I think those preliminary answers will stand, and I’m far from being done with them. But, then, BOOM!, Trump barged and changed the subject — whatever else you can say about the man, he’s a master of distraction. I wrote:

[…] 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 one 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?

This, in turn, led me to a column by Mona Charen, a conservative “Never Trumper” pundit who discussed the president’s failings in the context of the Jewish high holy days, especially the Day of Atonement, and concluded as a community, “it’s not too late for us to reject the fascists, but it’s damn close.” To this I reacted:

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. […]  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.

Then, at the very end of Advent when I should have been putting the finishing touches on my Advent meditation, I went off in another direction — although it follows naturally from thinking about atonement, my role (either by commission or omission) in electing a wannabe fascist dictator. It came when I watched a news video of Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Catholic patriarch of Jerusalem, in Bethlehem. He had just returned from the Holy Family parish in Gaza City, and he offered a message of hope I’ve been looking for at such a dark time, not only in America but everywhere.

So it got me off-topic, but it did two things for me: (1) It reminded me how important — even perhaps life-changing — our tour of the Holy Land has been to my own formation; and (2) it gave me a slightly new, and I think more constructive, way of thinking about Gaza, Trump, “Genocide Joe” Biden, my complicity in the current state of affairs, and a hope for atonement, if not redemption. In Manger Square, just outside the Church of the Nativity, Cardinal Pizzaballa (beginning at 1:50) said:

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. 

And, BANG!, as I sat with this, replaying the video of Pizaballa’s remarks (beginning at xxx) to get the words right, some of the things I’ve been troubled by started coming together. Where there’s life, there’s hope. And hope, to quote another Palestinian Christian, isn’t what we believe, it’s “what we do. Hope is what we do today.” (I’ll link below to the video of the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, emeritus pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem.) Where there’s hope, there’s life. It works both ways.

Long before Trump came along, I felt complicit in the Biden administration’s bankrolling of what have been credibly described before the International Criminal Court as genocidal acts of war in Gaza. I haven’t felt particularly betrayed by Trump — frankly I never expected much of the man — but I voted, however reluctantly, for “Genocide Joe.” That makes me complicit, no matter how much I try to explain it away, makes me complicit in

I do think Biden’s failures were unintentional; I think the poor old guy got bamboozled by a hard-right Israeli regime, but I’m old too. I can forgive him.Nor am I in a position to lecture Israel on the laws of land warfare, even though my ta dollars helped pay for the bombs that rained down on civilian populations in Gaza. I can’t even influence my own government, and my complicity ends, as they used to say, at the water’s edge.

All of that said, I’m still conflicted, and I’m not yet ready to give up all hope for the future. Where there’s life, there’s hope, as Cardinal Pizzaballa reminded us all yesterday in Bethlehem. And where there’s hope, there’s life.

Links

[Uplinked Dec. 25, 2025]

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Published by Pete Ellertsen

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