waiting for words

Sometimes I mark time with a blinking cursor. Tucked into a quaint corner of the Europe that I love, I ponder what to write. What story could I tell?

I wonder how to express this moment that bares down on me like an IC train in full motion. All of my senses are engaged. This Europe is in my head, my ears, it covers and invades my body redefining what I wear this morning, what I eat tonight, and how I view my world.

This Europe interprets the never-changing God in different tones and nuances of historical perspective and propels my faith into new directions.

Earlier this morning, I merged into the quintessential expression of Europe; the train station. Budapest has Keleti, Déli, and Nyugati stations; each one uniquely defined by architecture and clientele, yet in essence they are the same earthy railway blending the connectedness of individual cultures into the decades o f human lives lived in shared experience.

After arriving in Auschwitz on a train, I cannot experience the impervious forward movement of metal on track in the same way. I am changed. My journey is somehow now linked to the sights and sounds of another woman’s last breath of freedom on this side of eternity.

But the ever-blinking cursor still winks at me as a co-conspirator in this effort. There is the kinetic essentiality of Budapest’s city bus operating like an umbilical cord. There is a Central and Southern Europe finding and re-defining itself in this century. Somehow, the beauty of their reality begs to be expressed.

I raise the coffee cup to my lips and search for my voice as old-world terra-cotta roofs yawn above an elderly, Roma woman begging for bread.

This is the dark side of Europe’s beauty; humanity squirming within the grasp of poverty and materialism in a silent, ear-splitting scream. A voiceless remnant; present but often unheard.

The cursor blinks waiting for words.

Where are the life-giving words that intersect the pain, the busyness, the relentless pulse of a silent, co-conspiratorial, human need to be part of a story?

‘I know such a story.’ I whisper with a wink ‘And it goes like this,’

In the beginning was the Word,                           and the Word was with God,                                  and the word was God.
In him was life,                                                   and that life was                                                  the light                                                               of men.