How can we hear one another if both of us are shouting?
How can we understand one another’s meaning if we twist the definitions of words to suit the moment?
Let us remember, that harmony may be found in silence, and comprehension in stillness.
May we strive softly, step by step, to work our way across the divide; treading gently on the bridge over the chasm between us. Let us not spend time gauging the distance or looking down into the abyss, but co-operate, encouraging the movement of one another’s feet, until we can calm our voices, look into one another’s soulful windows, pause and smile. Let us remember we are kindred, however distant our hearts and opinions may feel.
These towers we have each built, rising tall and precarious, are mere Babel babbling and squabbling tiers. They have sloping rooves of insolence, tottering on their stacks of towered teacups all the way down to their unanchored plinths in the sinking sand below.
From such heights, may we see and agree now that we were better off on the ground, searching for the Rock of Ages that might have called us sisters and brothers and bade us shake hands?
For some kind of reckoning must now begin, if we are not to collapse in heaps of broken shards of hearts and crockery.
Sensing this, and the holiness of our not speaking, may we both look down at our splintered feet and find our wooden bridge is a bloodied and wondrous cross. Here is a footing on a Word worth its salt, where our conversation might begin. Humbled hearts, bending knees, these might, please God, come back to earth and communion, and make an urgently holy beginning here in these foolish heights of our own making.
Amen.
