At a difficult time I wrote out in thread the Hebrew script for 'Shalom'. It is a beautiful word, gathering into itself a rich cluster of other words - welfare, well-being, peace, harmony, health, contentment, security, goodwill. It presupposes friendship, or the wish for friendship, based on trust and sustained by faithfulness.
I often finish an email with my own version, "Shalom the noo!"
This morning the news brings this word back to mind, as a prayer, as a word repeated in the presence of God as intercession, in a world where intercession between nations seems to have failed and to fail again and again.
When I finished the script for Shalom I had no idea what would provide the background. Until I read again Isaiah 35, which has long been a passage that is itself stitched into my way of thinking. It's hopefulness and sense of purposes beyond our own, and a power beyond the political powers that shape so much of our world. The promise of streams in the desert, crocuses in blossom in the desert, and a path, indeed a motorway to travel towards shalom.
So that's what I stitched, a river, the first crocuses, a wilderness with 'recovered greenesse', and right at the heart of it those lovely Hebrew letters formed to spell out 'Shalom.'
So we pray for the peace of the nations, and if words are hard to find, offer the word 'Shalom', the desire of the heart for all that the word contains to grow into reality in our own times
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