by Tilden Edwards

The volunteer actors left the stage in silence one by one as the flutist wailed a haunting melody. The organizer laid a single red rose at the feet of the lone musician. Tears rose to my eyes. For two hours I had heard poems and dramatic dialogue dedicated to the enduring holocaust in Bosnia. For over a year I have felt this tragedy with special pain. At first it was because my ancestry is half-Croatian. But over time my particular concern has grown well beyond that identity "hook." I have increasingly felt that God is shouting a warning and a hope to the world through this war (as in every war): "See what happens when you forget that you belong to one another as my offspring! You create idols of exclusive, narrow identity for your security rather than the liberating inclusiveness that comes when you open yourselves to me. I grieve that you fail to see yourself in your neighbors and that you fail to see me in them. You are all my love manifest. Open yourself to who you really are. Remember my prayer for you in Jesus: that you realize your oneness in me."

A prophetic voice consonant with these words had been rising from Bosnian soil for a decade before the current war broke out. It came from apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six children in the village of Medjugorje. Millions of people have flocked there from every corner of the globe to be present at this particularly "thin" place between earth and heaven. More important than the controversies over the authenticity and particular content of the messages received is Mary's overarching plea for hearts aimed at communal peace and a God-centered way of life. Medjugorje as of this writing has been spared devastation despite repeated attempts. Perhaps it is meant to remain as a sacred place to remind the world of the call to its shared life in God.

We all know from personal and historical experience the complexity and difficulty of a call to an enduring and just peace and to a shared sense of belonging together in God. But it is a call that does not go away. It comes from One who loves us all and who opens the way for responsiveness when we have ears that listen willingly and long enough. The way is opened outside and inside. Outside we are shown particular ways to aid the victims of war and structures for a just peace. Inside we begin to recognize how we are subtly part of the horror of "cleansing the different neighbor" in Bosnia through the ways we unforgivingly maintain enemies, lord it over others, fearfully keep what we have at any cost to others, and overly identify with exclusive groups. Such behavior numbs us to the truth that all are our God-loved kin. Whether we like them or not, whether we can live with them closely or not, they are always worthy of our prayer and hope.

God has many ways of helping us respond to the call to recognize our kin and let God's Spirit, through us, shape a humane way of life together. Contemplative prayer, I believe, has a special place among these ways. My experience tells me that when such prayer has the intent of opening to the inclusive Love that daily carries us, we have more freedom to realize very directly our mutual belonging. All our boundaried personal identities--sex, race, family, ethnic group, nationality, religion, personality type, occupation, and particular interests--become lighter when we are opened to God's mercy in open contemplation. As the vast/intimate mystery of God's love is shown to be our true center, our psyches lose their need to cling to such narrower identities as a means of ultimate security.

These identities are not erased but relativized to the larger Love that delights in such variety as long as each difference remembers its common divine ground. Our many particular identities are shown as avenues through which we concretely live the love shown us, but they need to be subsumed to our larger identity with the divine Love itself. Contemplative prayer as an arena of intent for God has a way of helping reveal that shared ground. We can find emerging a deep quality of soul that does not need to define and protect itself. It simply is being itself in the moment, which involves a capacity to spontaneously, appreciatively, compassionately be with what is immediately present. Everything present is felt as part of a larger, interwoven whole, in which we personally have a given yet fluid place.

We are rarely given such deep soul-full-ness in pure or sustained form; however, even if we only have a brief flash of such awareness in our prayer and daily life, that flash often shows us how life is meant to be, indeed, how it really is in God. It shows us something of the real Home we yearn for. It makes the forgetful, willful world of narrow fear and grasping that much more painful to bear, and yet we are drawn more than ever to bear it in God and to see God hidden within it. We are goaded to prayer for the fullness of God's shalom. We are energized to join with others to support what we have tasted and to care for God's love in the world.

As we heed the calls to deeper love that God shouts to us in Bosnia, with the help of contemplative prayer and every other means of grace God gives us, we can take heart from the ways love wondrously shows itself through the cracks in the walls of hate, fear, and brutality. We hear powerful stories from Bosnia of courageous martyrdom for the neighbor who is different, of compassion that adopts orphaned children and cares for raped women and legless wounded, of sacrificial sharing of food and shelter, of resolution to find a way to live justly and respectfully with those who are different, and of deeper conversion to a God-centered life. I'm sure there are countless other stories of Spirit-inspired beauty that have not reached our public view. God's loving energies flow ceaselessly in Bosnia, in us, in the world, through the worst of circumstances, inspiring us to be who we are in the divine image.