When an ex Secretary General of the United Nations and an ex President of the United States are refused visas by Zimbabwe, the world is expected to be impressed by more petty power games of a corrupt regime.
But for the people whose suffering is intentionally orchestrated in the power-hungering and power-mungering across international borders, this is no game.
I turn to a poem by a Victorian Catholic, one of the finest peace poems in our language, I think. Hope and disappointment, longing and endurance, impatience and trustful waiting, the rebuke from the heart of the oppressed tempered by a hopefulness driven underground seeking means of survival, and finding it - believing that eventually, one day, peace will come.
The tyrant who causes other people's fear to hide his own insecurity, can't forever silence voices, crush human spirits, exclude hope. The Spirit of God needs no visa, is subject to no exclusion orders, and when He comes 'He comes with work to do'.
And so I pray, "When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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