By the time you read this, I hope that the war will be over. But as I write, weeks have passed since the war between Israel and the United States and Iran began, a war that has drawn in surrounding countries. I try to see these days of devastation from God’s vantage point. Girls killed at school, a priest killed caring for his parishioners, children killed in a bomb shelter. Humans made in God’s image. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said it most plainly, decrying 1,100 minors already killed or wounded in “collateral damage.”
We are worn down after years of war. Like so many others, I live with the question of how to remain human in times like these, how to build a life, a family, and a faith in the face of such inhumane realities. In Bethlehem, where I am writing this, it is largely quiet, save for explosions and sirens in the distance. We mostly shelter in place, and I often remind myself to look out the window. On some days, looking out the window feels like a prayer. On others, it feels like resistance.
A line from Glimmerings, a recently published collection of letters between poet Christian Wiman and theologian Miroslav Volf, has stayed with me. “Attention enables God’s presence,” Wiman writes. “The life and love that are God are catalyzed by the life and love we expend in his direction, whatever form that expenditure takes.” Though I wrestle with “enable,” his words help me give weight to the choice to look out the window, to trust that something is at stake, and to experience it not just as gaze but as encounter. God looks back at us. God grabs hold of whatever space we are given and makes of it a world.
