Where Can God Be Found?

Can God be found

          in the footsteps of pilgrims treading over ancient stones while black and brown boots trample and grind down the living ones

          in the gaze through a picture window inside a glistening, new room built illegally on lands stolen from a neighbor

          by rifling to the bottom of a six year old child’s school bag by a soldier at the far too routine checkpoints

          in the heat of a welding torch searing, sealing shut a family’s livelihood?

Can God be found

            in the endless

                        the countless

                                    the limitless

the seeming timelessness

            of the searches

                        the checkpoints

                                    the refusals

                                                the denials

                                                            the humiliations

            in the curfews

                        the invasions

                                    the demolitions

                                                the detentions

                                                            the prisons

                                                                        the tortures?

Can God be found

               in the murders?

I ask myself, where can God be found?

Can God be found

            by the eyes of towers piercing down from the four corners of this earth

            strung in the barbed wire ravishing pillar and post at all angles and at any height

             between the cross hairs, inside the pull tabs, within the canisters, atop the  bulldozer, contained by tanks

            aligned on one side of the segregated street or the divisive barricade or in the shadow of the wall cutting through the heart?

Where can God be found?

Can God be found

               in the hollows birthed by up-rooted 1,000 year old olive trees, in the black of their charred branches, in  the parched  earth watered only by the farmers tears or buried deep under the dirt of what was once a life-sustaining well

              in the dead silence of an old city at days end when things unforeseen lurk and threaten in the darkness

              in the ruins, the scattered, the half buried alive remnants of homes now lost to the desert

               in the terror raged by masked settlers, in their protection by the soldiers, in the delays and inaction of the police in the written apology of  judge claiming to being “powerless”?

 And again, I ask myself, where can God be found?

 Can God be found

             in the green I D card

                        in the blue ID card

                                    in the permit

                                                in the palm of an empty hand?

            in the crushing

                        in the bashing

                                    in the slamming

                                                in the brutality

                   in the complete disregard of the holiness of the human being?

Can God be found

                        in the silence?

 Or, can God be found

            in the grace and dignity

                      in the hope and resilience

                                in the endurance and in the prayers

                                                 of an occupied but not yet broken people?

Twilla Welch Mar. 18, 2011