Poets and Pastors
Eugene Peterson
Blessed are the peacemakers Huge cloud fists assault The blue exposed bare midriff of sky: The firmament doubles up in pain. Lightnings rip and thunders shout; Mother nature's children quarrel. And then, as suddenly as it began, It's over. Noah's heirs, perceptions Cleansed, look out on a disarmed world At ease and ozone fragrant. Still waters. What barometric shift Rearranged these ferocities Into a peace-pulsating rainbow Sign? My enemy turns his other Cheek; I drop my guard. A mirror Lake reflects the filtered colors; Breeze-stirred pine trees quietly sing. Anne Tyler, in her novel Morgan's Passing, told the story of a middle-aged Baltimore man who passed through people's lives with astonishing aplomb and expertise in assuming roles and gratifying expectations. The novel opens with Morgan's watching a puppet show on a church lawn on a Sunday afternoon. A few minutes into the show, a young man comes from behind the puppet stage and asks, Is there a doctor here? After thirty or forty seconds with no response from the audience, Morgan stands up, slowly and deliberately approaches the young man, and asks, What is the trouble? The puppeteer's pregnant wife is in labor; a birth seems imminent. Morgan puts the young couple in the back of his station wagon and sets off for Johns Hopkins Hospital. Halfway there the husband says, The baby is coming! Morgan, calm and self-assured, pulls to the curb, sends the about-to-be father to the corner to buy a Sunday paper as a substitute for towels and bed sheets, and delivers the baby. He then drives to the emergency room of the hospital, sees the mother and baby safely to a stretcher, and disappears. After the excitement dies down, the couple asks for Dr. Morgan to thank him. But no one ...
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