How do you say YHWH?

I mentioned in a previous post that I heard Rabbi Arthur Waskow from The Shalom Center over this past weekend during a conference that commemorated the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He delivered this spiritually delicious sermon on rendering unto God what is God's, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Which is funny, because I think that's a New Testament passage.

So Rabbi goes, "You know what happens when you place the face of Caesar on a coin? They all turn out the same. Caesar's image is the same a thousand times over."

Then he asked, "But do you know what happens when God places her image on a coin?"

He paused for a moment, looked around the room, and extended his hands out as he peered at each individual face in the crowd. "Each one," Rabbi said, "is more different than the next, but retains all the joy and wonder that is God's."

I was floored. But it didn't stop there. Rabbi made this beautiful segue-way into where we find God in our everyday lives. We find her in the trees, in the Earth, in each other, in the air. He added, "In the Jewish tradition, we write YHWH when we refer to God. But it isn't pronounced Yahweh, Jehovah or Yehovah."

He then challenged the crowd to say YHWH without any vowels. No one tried. Finally, Rabbi goes, "I've tried, and the only thing I can come up with is..."

And then he uttered the simplest breath into the microphone. Breath. Air. Years upon years of religious "scholars" claiming to have a lock on what God is, and Rabbi Waskow sums it up better than anyone I've ever seen. God is that quiet air that we take in, and give out.

Oh, you poor blog readers of mine. Sometimes I get on these religious kicks and just can't move on to anything else until I flush them out of my system. But Rabbi's words stuck with me all throughout the weekend, including a trip to the desert on Hiroshima Day, where in the pitch black sky of night I waited in the sand next to a candle. A quiet, warm breeze accompanied us throughout the night.

Rabbi's words reminded me that because God is everywhere, God must even be in the most dreadful of places. Below I'm going to steal a story from a colleague and acquaintance of mine, Rose Marie Berger, who is the poetry editor for Sojourners. I went on a delegation to Venezuela with Rose about two years ago, and this past Christmas she offered a reflection on some of these same themes. It's a story from a trip she took to Bosnia, shortly after their war with Serbia, when thousands upon thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed and many more displaced to refugee camps. I hope you enjoy this reflection as much as I did, and still do.

(I promise, no more religion after this for at least one week!)

It was 1999. There were 1,500 Kosovar refugees in this camp on the dusty outskirts of Sarajevo. They had come by bus, car, and on foot. First held in the expansive bottling rooms at the Coca-Cola factory, the refugees now lived in an old cattle barn, in tents, and on an open field.

We were invited into the barn's converted milking room and given the best of the plastic seats around a plywood table. Forty families live here in 6-by-8 foot cubicles separated by curtains. The men tell us that Serb soldiers (self-proclaimed Christians) herded them out of their homes. One asks us to find information about his brother, who he presumed was dead in Kosovo. Adem, the oldest man in the camp at 80, wears a blue wool beret and his weatherworn face glistens with tears. Thirty members of his family were killed by Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo.

The women stand around the ring of conversation holding children on their hips. They serve us coffee in chipped red cups. Harija, in her mid-30s, shot her words at us like fire. "How can I live with this pain that my neighbor - my husband shoveled snow from her walk before he even cleared our own - stood in our yard while I was hanging laundry and spoke aloud how she was going to kill me and my children because we are Muslim? She was trying to decide between mortar or sniper." Harija looked at us. "Did you come here just to stir up pain, or are you going to help us?" she said. Then she wept.

There was no doctor in this camp. The outhouses were overflowing. The only food available was bread and canned vegetables. The graffiti on the wall showed a young man with a gun to his head. We delivered watermelons to a few of the families. One man led me down a shoe-strewn hall. He opened the curtain and there, on the bunk bed, lay a 2-day-old baby boy wrapped in clean linens and a rough gray army blanket. The mother looked worn but happy in her torn T-shirt and dusty skirt.

I pray over the child, making the sign of the cross on his forehead. No one seems to mind the mix of religious symbols.

For Christ to come at all, he must be born in the lowliest of places.

-Rose Marie Berger, December 2004