We live our lives in tight little boxes
with high edges and sharp corners.
Or we live day after day,
endlessly,
w
ithout focus or aim.
And then,
in the middle of our boxes
and our randomness,
your presence
explodes us
and we must decide again about our lives.
You come to us
in poetic utterance,
in artistic sketch,
in revolutionary image.
You engage us by the way you dispatch your faithful artists,
old time prophets
and contemporary truth-sayers,
the ones who show us our deathliness,
the ones who imagine us
to anew life congruent with your own life.
By your spirit
open us to such ancient possibility
beyond our fear and beyond our pride.
Come good spirit,
come in utterance,
come in sketch,
come in image,
come in all the ways that seep through our certitude
our management,
and our self-importance.
Come, good spirit!
Walter Brueggemann, Cincinnati, 2011
[reproduced from Embracing the Prophets in Contemporary Culture]