This past year has been for me a “Terrible Beauty.”

For many months I have been in contact with Palestine - the West Bank and Gaza. Each Sunday, for weeks, I have been seeing and listening to medical doctors in Gaza. They are witnessing a Genocide.

As a student in Germany and later living and working in Europe I have visited the death camps of the Holocaust. The bishop who ordained my a Deacon on my way to the priesthood spent 2 years in Sachsenhausen and 4 years in Dachau. He was made a bishop in 1947 in Munich. He is now buried in Dachau and I would visit his grave often as I passed though Munich. On a memorial wall in the camp is written “Never Again."

Given these last few months I am brought back to the time I celebrated the Christmas Eve liturgy in Shepherds Field, Beit Sahour. I received a letter recently from the Mayor of Beit Sahour - Dr. Elias Iseed. He is deeply concerned that his small city is being approached by “illegal and violent settlers.” The U.S. ambassador to Israel says there is not such place as Palestine only Samaria and Judea.

This Advent as a preparation for Christmas, I have been drawn to the witness and lives of both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothee Soelle. Both were members and theologians in the witness of the Barmen Declaration. I have also been reflecting on the Magnificat of Mary as found in Luke 1: 45-55. Her song of praise is worthy of reflection. Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis in 1945. He called the Magnificat “the most passionate , the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. . This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world.”