Posts Tagged ‘God’
The Middle of Hope
This morning’s worship service caught me off guard.
The reading was Micah, chapter 4—the vision of swords beaten into plowshares, nations unlearning war, people sitting unafraid beneath their own vine and fig tree.
It is a beautiful passage.
Almost too beautiful to trust.
Which may be why it has endured.
As the words were read aloud, an image returned to me—not as memory, but as presence.
It was an image Beth kept close.
A poster she chose.
A prayer she lived with.
At its center: a battlefield grave marker.
A helmet resting on the butt of an inverted carbine, the rifle stabbed into the earth.
Dog tags hanging quietly from the stock.
The sign of a soldier buried where he fell.
Nearby, the words:
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I first saw it in 1972.
I was young, unsettled, and already committed to enter the service of the United States Navy. The war was unpopular. The country was divided. And I was trying to make sense of my own decision to serve.
There were nights when I wondered whether duty and peace could inhabit the same body.
When I first saw the image, I took it as affirmation.
My service was sacrifice.
My sacrifice was a pursuit of peace.
I did not think that belief was naïve.
I still don’t think it was simple.
Years later I realized, Beth chose that image—not as endorsement, but as prayer.
She did not display it to resolve the tension.
She displayed it to live inside it.
This morning, Micah 4 reopened what I once thought settled.
Micah does not offer reassurance.
Micah offers an end that has not yet arrived.
Before plowshares, there is judgment.
Before fig trees, there is disarmament.
Peace, in Micah, is not imagined.
It is adjudicated.
Violence is not denied.
It is named—and then relinquished.
Suddenly, the image Beth loved no longer functioned as approval.
It stood as witness.
The rifle in the ground has not been transformed.
It has only been stopped.
Silence is not the same thing as peace.
Sometimes it is only what remains when the carrier is gone.
The weapon is quiet not because the world has learned peace, but because someone paid the cost before it did.
That realization did not undo Beth’s prayer.
It completed my hearing of it.
Blessed are the peacemakers names the way.
Micah 4 names the end.
The grave marker names the cost in between.
Hope has a middle.
And the middle has graves.
Standing there in worship, grief did not isolate me.
It did not collapse into memory.
It opened into communion—mediated, costly, and real.
Not nostalgia.
Not recollection.
Communion through what she loved.
Communion in the way of seeing she inhabited.
The call that came with it was not loud.
Live this way.
Do not turn aside.
Do not lie about the cost.
But I left accompanied.
Let All the Earth Keep Silence…
“Speak only if it improves the silence.” Courtesy of Chantelle Says
A friend perished tonight; I want to say ‘faded’. She faded from view. Or maybe I want to say, “she passed”, as they say in the part of Georgia where I came to know a bit more of God than I bargained for. No, just faded. Faded like the sun sinking below the horizon only to rise like the sun from another. Fading out, fading in. Setting and rising; borrowed images that, tonight, belong to others. They make me want to pray.
In her short book, “Help, Thanks, Wow”, Anne Lamott declares that prayer should be simple. I agree, but I want to add, it can still be beautiful. The question is, in whose eyes should such beauty be held? Is it possible to perceive beauty most properly when our hearts are tuned to a pitch heard only in darkest nights, or greatest joys, or deepest yearnings; a beauty encountered in the midst of mystery? Is it probable that what often passes for beauty is noisy and as likely to carry prayers ‘aloft’ as a blossom might drift into the sky borne on the backs of gilded bricks? I need more than bricks tonight.
I want to pray. I want to let a stream of yearning flow from my heart to Another’s. Sometimes words of any kind get in the way of prayer. Of all the prayers I have uttered or heard the most profound was the extended silence that followed when Dr. Raymond H. Bailey halted, mid sermon. He had just declared that we should remain silent that God might speak; the following silence provoked hope in some, joy in others, and (perhaps) surprise. In silence we held our breath and our words. We listened and our hearts found the pitch; we simply and silently prayed. What could be more beautiful?
A friend perished tonight. Her family must surely struggle to find something lost in the shambles; in the midst of their grief I pray.
“But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.”
– Habakkuk 4:20 KJV
On a whim... 