Peace – A Thread You Follow

Grounded

People do not want conflict.
They want peace.
Bring on the peacemaker, then.
And only then.
Pacify and peace dance together.
Each comes from the same root
where all breath comes from.
Curious that you have been sent to us.
Listen to what grows out of the silence.
Hearing and seeing, using all the senses,
make the strangeness recede
behind the cacophony stored
in a separate room apart
from all that is vital to life.
Though the spirit works and moves best
in a synthesis of differences
we must learn to strengthen
the cords that keep us on the ground.

“I make peace and create evil.” Isaiah 45:7

Surely the desire to create evil comes
from some crooked past untouched by the divine.
Or, does this line join all the other buried texts
that make us uncomfortable when standing
before the burning bush and with each other?
One does not mention the nature of the whims of God
in polite company seeking to drink tea in peace.
Is it any wonder that redemption then waits
for us on the other side of how we spend our time
passing each other over with our judgments
that come from some tiny space inside our hearts?

enthusiasms

enthusiasms atrophy 
with diminishing interest
and become unrecoverable 
energy lost to the null
so time too becomes late 
for consoling conclusions
to be given to or withdrawn
from those petitioning for
a way to shape something
from the nothing which never
really existed anyway and
kept us from grasping
a peace that refused to arrive

Peaceful Pointing

Peace is a nice goal and all
but does not help making peace for all.
A Minister of the Word stepped down from the Pulpit,
bowed his head as if to Pray and began to cry.
     They didn't get it from me;
     Faith formation starts in the family.
The Bible is just a little tale of tension between
Creation and human ways of de-creating.
God points to the Man.
The Man points to the Woman.  
The Woman points to the Snake.
The Snake, with its tongue, points to God.
Nothing new under the sun.