An excerpt I read from a letter reflecting on the heartache in the Middle East. The quote is from Thomas Merton:

When the whole world is in moral confusion, when no one know any longer what to think and when everybody is running away from the responsibility of thinking, when people make ration thought about moral issues absurd by exiling themselves entirely from realities in the real of fictions, and when they expend all effort in constructing more fictions with which to account for ethical failures, then it becomes clear that the world cannot be saved from global war…

Even those who want to negotiate out of goodwill and do something about peace, will in the end be the most mercilessly reviled, hated, crushed, and destroyed as victims of the universal self-hate of humanity.

We fall to see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our free, our self-righteousness and our tendency to anger and hypocrisy.

We must try to accept ourselves, whether individually or collectively, not only as perfectly good or perfectly bad, but in our mysterious, unaccountable mixture of good and evil.

Instead of loving what we think is peace, let’s love people … and God above all. Instead of hating people, think of the own frustrations and failings of your own soul. Learn to self-exam rather than blame others for the issues going on in the world.

There is repentance in all of us that is needed before we get mad at Israel or Hamas. This is the way home.