There are plenty of towers in New York City, a reminder perhaps that we can reach the skies when we work together (or apart). For me this fact as confusing as the diverse peoples who inhabit these towers – and indeed the fact of so many who don’t – because they can’t.
Sitting on floor 17 of one particular apartment, looking down, I don’t think that being in this particular tower brings me closer to God as some of the Babylonians might have hoped their tower did. In fact, if anything the further I am up this tower, the more there seems to be a barrier for me to connect with the people who seem so very far below me.
What connects us most fully to God is not trying to reach further and further to the sky - to create small gods of ourselves. Rather we find God when we really meet and encounter each other – at ground level, as equals. When we spend time together, when we look into the face of each other and listen.
Fr Steve Holton drew my attention to a passage in the Koran which resonates with this: ‘O mankind! We created you from male and female and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other (not that you may despise each other)’ (Sura Hujurat, verse 13). This really struck me – difference is created that we might know each other. Returning to the tower of Babel, what if God has created us to have different languages and dwell in different cultures and lifestyles, so that we might be different and so come together in order to know each other. What if by knowing each other – we are in fact brought into a deeper place to know God? Isn't this what the incarnation teaches us, as we spend time looking and living into the face of Christ?
We are changed by encountering difference – for better or worse. Within this we have the opportunity to know others and to know God far more deeply.
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