reflectionsSee also commentary - prophecy |
 Contents: March/April 2002 |
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m e d i t a t i o nPassoverby Lynn Ungar
Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . . and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.They thought they were safe that spring night; when they daubed the doorways with sacrificial blood. To be sure, the angel of death passed them over, but for what? Forty years in the desert without a home, without a bed, following new laws to an unknown land. Easier to have died in Egypt or stayed there a slave, pretending there was safety in the old familiar. But the promise, from those first naked days outside the garden, is that there is no safety, only the terrible blessing of the journey. You were born through a doorway marked in blood. We are, all of us, passed over, brushed in the night by terrible wings. Ask that fierce presence, whose imagination you hold. God did not promise that we shall live, but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars, brilliant in the desert sky.
The Rev. Lynn Ungar is director of religious education at the Starr King Unitarian Universalist Church in Hayward, California. This poem appears in What We Share: Collected Meditations, Volume Two (Skinner House, 2001), which also includes work by Richard S. Gilbert, Bruce T. Marshall, and Elizabeth Tarbox. Available from the UUA Bookstore.
UU World XVI:2 (March/April 2002): 16.
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