Who is Israel?

are you the moon-worshipping nomad who ate lunch with the One who prepared the universe?

are you the son of two senior citizens laughing at your first word spoken―A-b-b-a?

are you the adulterous caravan who missed the right turn-off from Egypt 2078 times?

are you the amnesiacs dancing on the edge of a fiery furnace with thunder rolling down the hill?

are you the screaming refugees who raided the Middle-East deserts under constant shade?

are you the new tenants of twelve fully furnished states with instant crops and running cisterns?

are you the fat farmers who refused to let the soil rest insisting on a visible sovereign instead?

are you the mighty men fighting for a murderer who married too many wives in the end?

are you the silent singers crying rivers in a foreign land where you finally began to remember?

are you the seed from which all creation came who grew inside a teenage virgin?

are you the perplexed fathers who sat learning from a boy twelve months before His bar mitzvah?

are you the desperate followers of a vegetarian hermit who showed up from nowhere to preach?

are you the proletariat guarded by Latin mercenaries and Greek philosophy who saw the dove on His head?

are you the angry militia waving palm leafs and throwing rocks in the same week?

are you the faithful few baking bread and drinking wine while fighting over His crown again?

are you the generation who saw dead people walking around for three hours during an earthquake?

are you the group locked away on top of the roof dispelling rumors and seeing Him holes and all eating fish?

are you the enemies of the Roman State who made peace and order impossible to maintain?

are you the illegal aliens stowed away on ships between purple cloth and Turkish Delight?

are you the secret societies hiding in tombs and singing on the inside hearing Paul’s letters read?

are you the family who designed the world’s first printing press?

are you the tragic victims of the Reformers’ Arian insanity?

are you the brave chameleons blending in to every tribe and tongue across the globe?

are you the clever merchants, eating Chinese take-aways and pizzas once a week in New York?

are you the defending Rottweilers who were forced to become lap-dogs to Allied colonialists?

are you the unspoken envy of every aspiring scientist dreaming about apples and relativity?

are you the genius behind science fiction and merchandized action heroes?

are you the forgotten first-born who is running out of land?

are you the icon of hopelessness violated by journalists, archeologists and seminarians?

are you the point of my heart, the centre of their prayers, the choice of our Father?

Amen