The Tower of One Voice

[Poem as Reading the Bible]

In the beginning
after the waters had forgotten
the shape of the flood,

the whole earth spoke one language,

one breath moving through every mouth,
one sound rising from the human family.

And the people said, Let us build.

Let us make bricks from the earth
and fire them hard.

Let us build a city that will not disappear.

Let us build a tower whose head will touch the heavens.

And beneath their hands the tower began to rise—

stone upon stone,
dream upon dream,

until human ambition began to mistake itself for heaven.

They wanted a name that would never be forgotten. But heaven was silent.

God came down to see the tower
the children of earth were building.

How strange— human beings climbing toward God, while God was already coming down to them.

And God saw what they could not see:

one language had become one ambition, one voice had become one desire, and unity without humility was becoming another kind of darkness.

So God scattered their language.

A word that once meant welcome became confusion. A voice that once answered another voice became distance.

Hands that had worked together stopped understanding
what the other hands were saying.

The tower remained unfinished. The city received a new name—

Babel,

the place where language broke apart.

And the people walked away in different directions, carrying fragments of the same dream.

Perhaps Babel was never only a tower. Perhaps it lives inside us—

whenever we build higher than love, whenever we seek a name greater than our neighbor, whenever our language becomes a wall instead of a bridge.

Still,

somewhere beneath all our different tongues,

I believe there remains one ancient breath—

the breath God breathed into humanity
at the beginning.

We speak differently. We pray differently. We carry different memories through different roads.

Yet beneath the noise, beneath the borders, beneath the broken words, the same breath is moving.

Perhaps heaven does not ask us to build a tower to reach God. Perhaps heaven asks us to come down, to kneel beside one another,

and learn again
the first language—

love.