My heart aches for Iraq.  It aches for the pain of the innocents caught in the current crossfires of sectarian strife, the people who are not about choosing sides but who simply want to live in peace.  It aches for the losses, personal, material, or both, people are experiencing.  Life seems to be crumbling before them.
     Perhaps the greatest tragedy in this debacle is that it is largely fueled by religion.  How decidedly unfortunate that an experience (and relationship) that can provide much comfort and meaning to us has become the source of tremendous hardship, suffering, and pain.  God, though not the God of those who are inflicting the current brutality, must feel awful.
     According to the Genesis account, after God created the world, he turned it over to his human creation.  Use it well, he told them, use it wisely.  Treat it with kindness, and cultivate its health and longevity.  Although God remains active in the world, he largely allows us to run it as we choose.  If we run it thoughtfully, if we treat it and ourselves well, we prosper; if we do not, we are crushed by the weight of our disenchantments.  So, as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five often opines, it goes.  Nonetheless, God's vision remains in force.  As to how it will move and grow, however, only he knows.  But it will.
     In that is our only hope, really.  Used thoughtlessly, religion will tear humanity's common fabric and rip it horribly apart.  Interpreted rightly, however, it will weave humanity together in community and cause.  Whether you are religious or not, hope, maybe even pray, for religion.  Hope and pray that the truest embodiment of God in the world, the personal and genuine experience of his love and meaning, will continue to prevail and make itself known, that religion will be allowed to be what it can most be.