About This Week's Prompts for Meditation

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

It's impossible to look over Jerusalem and not lament over her divisions. Has there ever been a time when this was not so? But Jerusalem is also the holy city. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote,“Even those who believe that God is everywhere set aside a place for a sanctuary. For the sacred to be sensed at all moments everywhere, it must also at this moment be somewhere.”

In Christian symbolism Jerusalem is everyplace and the ultimate place. Jerusalem is the conflicted city within our hearts and the hoped for heavenly city of promise. Jerusalem is Earth herself. We lament over the world and our continual warfare and our ongoing destruction of land and seas and air. We are the holy place that kills prophets, healers, sages and innocents in the complex chaos of our passions.

In this week's meditation, poets yearn for Jerusalem from exile (meditation one). A modern lament calls Jerusalem to rise to the challenge of her prophetic power (meditation two). Finally, we enter Jesus' own response, opening his arms in love and self-sacrifice (meditation three).

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May they prosper who love you. -Psalm 122:6

Let us pray for the peace of Jerusalem,
-Suzanne 

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill.
let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my hightest joy.

Psalm 137:5-6

Meditation Two  (insight)
key to Jerusalem

Who will fan and force the fire of truth to spread across the world, insisting that we are all one, that mankind is not an animal species but a fellowship of care, a covenant of brotherhood?

There is cursing in the world, scheming, and very little praying. Let Jerusalem inspire praying: an end to rage, an end to violence.

Let Jerusalem be a seat of mercy for all men. Wherever a sigh is uttered, it will evoke active compassion in Jerusalem.

Let there be no waste of history. This must be instilled in those who might be walking in the streets of Jerusalem like God's butlers in the sacred palace. Here no one is more than a guest.

Jerusalem must not be lost to pride or to vanity.

All of Jerusalem is a gate, but the key is lost in the darkness of God's silence. Let us light all the lights, let us call all the names, to find the key.

-Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907-1972
Israel: An Echo of Eternity

… Jesus won't be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first; which he does, as it turns out. He slides up on her one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakens them, they scatter.

She dies the next day where both foxes and chickens can see her -- wings spread, breast exposed -- without a single chick beneath her feathers. It breaks her heart . . . but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.

-Barbara Brown Taylor
 Christian Century 2/25/86