GENERATIONAL GOD: a wild goose poem

[I wrote this poem on a Friday afternoon, laying in my tent looking up at the trees through the screen door to the Smoky Mountains surrounding the campsite. I wrote it as I listened to my children playing with Legos beside me, as I remembered that through our ancestors, we learn how we belong to one another. I shared this poem in the OPEN Network tent on Saturday afternoon of the Wild Goose Festival.]

The God of our ancestors has spoken.

But not just the God–

the ancestors speak, too.

If we’re willing to listen,

we might learn

a little more about everything,

a million tiny lessons in a day.

They might warn us not to

be so loud when we speak,

or to speak less and listen more.

Others may tell us that they

were silenced,

and it’s our turn to break

that silence.

There is a reason

that we walk the earth

wondering who came before.

There is a reason we

dream dreams

and

speak history

intermingled

with

truth and metaphor.

Our ancestors,

whose stories still meet us

in the quiet–

our ancestors live in the spaces we make

for one another, today.

And in those spaces,

God speaks.

God moves, breathes, has being.

God is face

and story

and bones

and just as we cannot escape

our own histories and our own beginning,

we cannot escape the reality

that God is the constant good

that has always met us

through call and response,

question and answer

and more questions.

And if we do not deny where we’re going

and who came before to pave the way,

we will surely find that

God is a generational God,

and we are a generational people,

and our ancestors,

their souls far above and around and beyond us,

call us to remember

how good it is that

we are dust to dust,

story to story,

breath of God in flesh

to

breath of God in spirit.

Amen.