They search from door to door.
Asking questions shaped by hate and suspicion.
They want to know how Christ entered those homes.
Did he enter brandishing weapons that struck terror?
Or did he wheedle his way into those homes?
Using guile and deceit.
They are brokers in the market place where power is sold to those,
Who can pay the price in violence and brutality.
How will they understand
That Christ entered the everyday routines of life
Through the gentleness of love.
They break the cross
And ravage the church.
They shatter the synchrony of voices raised in prayer,
With their chants,
Harsh with the savagery of bigotry and hate.
They crumble bricks and shatter windows,
Thinking that Christ is confined within the enclosure of walls.
They strike again and again,
Trying to reduce Christ to a rubble.
They do not know,
That Christ is an indestructible yearning
For the perfection of love.
They label faith,
List out Gods,
And bracket life into compartments.
They pattern intricate continuities,
Between Gods and religions and nations.
They draw boundaries through classifying the rituals of worship.
They do not know
That love smudges boundaries,
And makes divisions porous.
How will they erase that kinship patterned by the radical equality of love?
That love,
Which Christ proclaimed to the world.
They will kill and attack
And raise their voices in hate.
They will mark the altar
With finger prints of blood,
As an insignia of their power.
They will search for imagined crossings,
Where they seek for imagined people,
Who cross from one religion to another
As neatly and quickly as crossing a road.
And they will prop up regimes of mindless hate and terror.
They do not know that the God that we cradle in our faith
Is the shape of our longing for love and perfection.
They do not know that the God shaped by our imagination and desire
Is boundless and formless.
They do not know that Christ is the tenderness
That will sprout in them at a careless moment of forgetfulness,
When they forget to keep their vigil over hate.
When they experience that epiphany of love
They too will be converted to Christ.
Parinitha teaches in the Department of English, Mangalore University.
