We too often misunderstand, I think, what it means to become like God.

We build our towers, our satellites in the sky, posing as heavenly bodies, the better to crater and control the earth.

We rain down judgement as though it were wise, and fragments of pity as though they were manna.

We remember the Flood instead of the rainbow.

We remember the Exodus without its cost, not only in the lives of the Egyptians we discount, but in generations spent in the wilderness, the period of God’s mourning for our enemies, made in the very image of the living God.

The image of God whose property is always to have mercy.

The image of God who was born in humility, who lived with love, who died because we too often misunderstand what it is to be like God. Whose life destroyed death, not other lives.

Too often, we think that God is in the rushing wind that rips through the air that we have torn apart to let God in, instead of in the silence, the sheer stillness, those moments suspended as though out of time, before the baby begins to wail again, like a siren, like a warning, like the child of God.

I commend to you this letter from the Archbishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem:

Image: The Tower of Babel, print, Anton Joseph von Prenner, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, via wikimediacommons