Tis the holiday season. Amid all the preparations, we reel from the ongoing attacks by people intent upon forcing their way of worship onto the greater mass of humanity. The awful events from around the globe – Beirut, Paris, Afghanistan, California – regale us with images that haunt our dreams and create fear in our hearts. Reacting to that fear, some among us advocate for policies that will throw us back into history, force us to retreat from our empathy and understanding into bigotry and hate. I am reminded of the story of the First Christmas, when a Jewish couple, Mary and Joseph, sought shelter, and the promise of the coming birth of their son evoked a similar response.

King Herod, fooled by the magi regarding the birth of the child long prophesied, “ordered the massacre of all the boys two years old and under in Bethlehem and its environs, making his calculations on the basis of the date he had learned from the astrologers.” (Matt. 16, The New American Bible) And so it came to pass that slaughter of the innocents marked the flight of that family into Egypt. Our Christian history, intimately connected to that of the Jewish people, acknowledged in the ongoing history of Islam, presents us with a Christmas horror story that is echoed in the awful events we witness today. Fear, it seems, is always with us. What, then, can we do with this tendency to act upon that fear, this knee-jerk response that sees us flinging away our belief in the fundamental rights of others and espousing actions that we have vowed never to repeat: internment, religious testing, torture, war?

The three great western religions have, at their core, very similar tenets: do good works, care for others, atone for your sins, worship. Especially during this holiday season, those things which we have in common ought to be stronger than the differences that separate us. Think of the use of food as a gesture of hospitality and respect, light as a beacon in the darkness, gifts as a tangible way to show how we care for others. Compassion for others is a hallmark of God/Jehovah/Allah’s presence in our hearts and in our lives. Whatever explanation you choose to follow on your own spiritual path, the similarities are so much stronger than the differences.

As a mother and a grandmother, an educator and a writer, I long for one clear explanation for the horror of a massacre like the one in San Bernardino. There is no place in my heart to explain how a mother and father abandon their six-month old child to a grandmother’s care while they murder co-workers, friends, fellow inhabitants of this fragile earth we share. I cannot understand strapping a bomb to my chest and blowing myself up to harm innocents shopping or eating or simply living their common, solid lives. I cannot imagine stabbing a starnger on the street as a way to draw attention to my hatred. No God I seek, no prophet or messiah, would promote carnage for its own sake. Somewhere in this vast mine field of conflicting fanaticisms there must be a moment when even the most radical of warriors sees the light, when the blood already spilled becomes enough, when the spark of wonder and curiosity that informs the human soul prevails over destruction and death. This is my prayer…that the carnage stop, that compassion rule and that common sense reassert itself as we work together to bring this current crusade to an end. For it is a crusade – of light against darkness, of good against evil, of truth against deceit.

As the season unwinds, I wish for all of you peace, as I wish it for myself and my family and for the world. Can we not start now, today, to make such a wish reality?