The Tower of Babel Falls Again

Poetry is not my first language when it comes to writing. I never even enjoyed it until college, which made me feel inadequate to be an English major. What I have learned, though, is that when I do have the urge to write it is to pay attention. Because it’s my way of expressing my heart’s deepest thoughts. Last week, I was contemplating God and my journey of faith, and this poem flowed out.

A Note on God’s Gender: I know many are still uncomfortable thinking of God as “she,” though we as Christians will admit that God isn’t really a gender at all. In fact, I believe that God is genderless, but as humans, we lean on understanding God in our terms and binaries. So while God was always referred to as “he” in churches I attended, learning to see the feminine aspects of God has radically transformed my love for and understanding of God. The first time I felt God as mother, I wept. I am a mother, and I know the love of a mother, and to feel that type of love wrapped around me was the most intense love I have ever felt.

The Tower of Babel Falls Again

My God used to stay hidden in pages,

And others claimed he’d remained the same through the ages,

So I worked hard to know this God who was frozen in time;

I built my tower of Babel and climbed to meet him above the skyline.

But when I reached the top, the languages were all mixed up,

And I found the floors crumbling beneath me, so abrupt.

“Hello! Do you understand me?!” I cried, but no answer came,

Surrounded by familiar faces but nothing was the same.

The rubble around me became my resting place

As I searched for God among the ashes and dug below the surface,

And here I found God all around me, but mostly inside me.

She’s a mystery who can’t be bound to a book or what the eye can see;

She’s living and active, a shape-shifter, an ever-flowing river.

No beginning and no end, she begs of us to follow her,

To throw off our shoes and our certainty and jump into her current,

Trusting the ancient flow will lead us faithfully where we are meant.