Headlines from Omaha and Colorado Springs are full of disturbing news, and illusions of our earthly security vanish once again to the sound of gunfire.  Meanwhile, Gordon Zahn, longtime laborer for peace, died quietly at 84.

Death approaches, suddenly and violently or slowly and quietly, but the Christian's task remains: to live together faithfully, as Christ gives us the grace to do.  Reading of Zahn's deaths among these others, I recalled something Richard Wilbur wrote for W. H. Auden, but I think it applies here, as we, the living, wait in Advent darkness for the light:

"I know now better that they were going to die,/Since you, who sustained the civil tongue/ In a scattering time, and were poet of all our cities/Have for all your clever difference quietly left us,/As we might have known that you would, by that common door."            

(Excerpted from "For W.H. Auden," in Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004.)

As we pray in our churches and our homes for the families and the injured, perhaps we will remember to pray as well for our own frail communal witness, that we, in this time of violence and death, may confess through our lives the Peace of Christ.