The Blessed Madonna Instagram – I have said the word, “Bethlehem” in every Christmas pageant I was in from the time I could barely speak. This place will be on the lips of every single man, woman and child reading the Christmas story tonight. I’m probably like a lot of people. For all the times I invoked this place, I never thought about where it really was or what life was like for the people who lived there until I visited on an artist’s retreat and found myself staring Bethlehem in the face, or I should say, staring into a wall: in Palestine. The reality was stark and changed me forever. I’m a recovering Catholic. I struggle with what I think it means to be saved. I don’t have the faith of a child. I have the faith of a conflicted, angry, sad adult. I don’t think being saved means we get to go to Disneyland when we die. I don’t think it means God will always spare us from man’s inhumanity to man. I think if God is real, he can handle my anger and grief tonight when I think about what is happening in Bethlehem. As best I can reckon being saved means to be saved from what I would do to others. If I am saved, I’m saved from my own anger and wrath. If I’m saved, I’m saved from overlooking what we would do to the least of us. “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” In Bethlehem, there is no celebration in manger square at the Church of the Nativity for the first time in the modern era. This is almost nothing but grief and genocide. I know deep in my heart, I have to be a witness to this. We have to see it. I don’t have anything complex or deep to say. It’s very simple. There is not one person who would not be made better, who would not be saved by a ceasefire. Saved from violence and from the sin of violence. Saved from trespasses and save from those who would trespass against them. Tonight there are untold women like the Mary in our nativity plays with nowhere to give birth, hospitals across Palestine in rubble. This has to end. #ceasfirenow Peace. 🕊️