Our work of making peace

We drove through a small town that has a quaint public square. A large war monument dominates – a cannon with plaques recording the names of town residents who died in far-away wars.

That’s all there was about the town’s history.

No mention of the town’s founders; or the first town doctor who visited sick children in the middle of the night; or those who started the town’s first school; or the wise and compassionate leaders who helped the town through its many challenging times.

War was remembered and monumentalized. Only war.

The town is typical of other small communities and big cities across our society and our world. There are many monuments to war. Wars and warriors get the pedestals and parades.

What about the makers of peace? Those who save countless lives by leading us away from conflict?

One of my favorite monuments to a maker of peace is in downtown Pittsburgh. Across the river from Fort Pitt – a place of war – is a statue of Mister Rogers.

Fred Rogers once said: “Peace means far more than the opposite of war.” It’s a spirit, a work, a way of life that we’re called to follow.

Our faith reminds us we’re called to be makers of peace. “Peace on Earth” is more than a feel-good verse; it’s the work given to us. It’s challenging and unpopular and counter-cultural work, but it’s our work.

Making peace means more than hoping and praying and wishing for peace. We must actively challenge attitudes about war and peace, reminding everyone we’re meant to love each other as siblings in God’s family instead of fighting one another out of self-interest.

Unpopular work, but it’s our work

War is the ultimate human failure: God’s children killing each other over land, religion, power, influence, wealth, supremacy. We destroy each other, what we’ve built together, and what God has created.

War must never be glamorized or romanticized. Instead, we need to lead our societies another way as makers and promoters of peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they understand what it means to live and children of God.

Making peace involves building and nurturing mutually beneficial relationship, which is the heart of our faith traditions and our scriptures. We’re called to put selfishness aside and find ways to meet others’ needs for food, housing, healing, and spiritual uplift. We do this not only in our collective relationships but in our individual ones as well.

Making peace involves a willingness to do the hard and unpopular work of changing attitudes and showing people that we can and must get along. It entails working for justice for all God’s children.

We need peace on our pedestals.

Creating peace requires listening, honesty, trustworthiness, and justice. It’s about seeing everyone’s needs as equally important to my own – love your neighbor as yourself.

Peace on our pedestals

Again, this isn’t popular work – never has been, never will be. Many “religious” people have rejected the summons to be peacemakers and instead embraced the us-against-them warrior mentality that we see raging in our society right now.

Wars never just happen. They’re the accumulation of many smaller moments of injustice and selfishness. And they always result from demagogues riling people up for combat, insisting they must attack others before they themselves are attacked.

Demagogues excuse themselves from any actual sacrifices, increase their power in the fog of war, then put themselves on pedestals as great warriors to be emulated.

And war follows war follows war …

We’ll always have war – it’s who we are as humans, one of our original sins – but we can and must create conditions for a more just, humane, equitable, and peaceful world. We can and must create more peace in our individual lives.

This is the work given to us. It’s our calling. May we be makers of peace in how we live and interact with one another. May we work for the justice and mutuality that create conditions for all God’s children to live together as we’re meant.

(Image courtesy of uwgbadmissions@creativecommons.org)

Where are the monuments to peacemakers?

The conversation about how we handle war monuments has been wonderfully diverse, interesting, and informative. It’s also raised a different type of question.

Why do we have so many monuments to war in the first place?

Where are the monuments to the peacemakers and the community builders who have shown us the way and pulled us together? Why do we have so many statues of generals in such prominent places, and so few remembering the many healers, teachers, and leaders among us?

Why are we so enamored of war?

I drove through a small town in southern Ohio this spring and was struck by their downtown square. The town is a quaint place. Old storefronts dot the square. In the center is a cannon — a war monument and a plaque with the names of residents who have died in wars.

And that’s all.

Enamored of war

I was left wondering: Why isn’t there a statue of the person who founded the town? Or something dedicated to the person who started the first school so children could learn about their world?

Perhaps the town could erect a statue of the town’s first doctor, the one who made house calls for sick children in the middle of the night and who delivered many of the early settlers into the world. Or maybe a reminder of a wise and compassionate leader who got the town through a time of division and showed everyone that there are ways to settle differences other than conflict.

It would be nice to see more tributes to those who remind us that we can get along if we really try. Sure, there are a few reminders of peacemakers in various places, but they’re far outnumbered by those dedicated to fighting. We’re far more interested in monuments to those who have waged and have been killed in wars.

Why is that?

This isn’t confined to small towns, of course. Great cities have even bigger and more expensive monuments to wars. Streets are named for leaders of war. Those who fought in wars are honored in various ways. There are parades for warriors, but not for peacemakers.

What about those who work to save lives by preventing conflict and war?

More than the opposite of war

There’s a statue of Mr. Rogers along the river in downtown Pittsburgh, right across from where Fort Pitt stood. I’m struck by the proximity — one place recalls war, the other remembers a spokesman for peace and love.

“Peace means far more than the opposite of war,” Fred Rogers once said.

And he’s right. Peace is a willingness to do the hard work to change attitudes and show people that we can get along.

A starting point is recognizing the truth that war is never noble or courageous. Noble and courageous acts occur during war, but war itself is always the ultimate human failure and must never be portrayed as anything else. War is the expression of our worst impulses — killing and maiming one another while destroying the many good things we’ve built together.

Put peacemakers on pedestals

War monuments ought to reflect that innate truth. We must never glorify war. Monuments must never romanticize it or make it seem like a desirable solution — it never is.

We must never put war on a pedestal.

So long as we worship war, we’ll never have peace. Peace can never come at the end of a sword or a cannon or a rifle or a rocket launcher. That kind of “peace” is illusory and temporary.

And perhaps part of changing that cycle is paying attention to what we honor with our monuments, the ones that define us and direct us.

We should make more of an effort to honor the people who work for peace and build communities. If we’re going to erect statues, let them honor those who bring us inspiration, healing, and wisdom. Let’s recognize those who show us how to wage peace in everyday ways.

Let’s put them on our pedestals instead.

A truthful 12-year-old

(Note: I wrote this exactly one year ago. In the past year, the only thing that has changed is the body count. We need to do better.)

I filled my foam plate with fruit, yogurt and a bagel from the hotel’s complementary breakfast, and then found an open table in the corner. I wanted to be far away from the big-screen television on the wall that was tuned to an annoying cable news station.

I was getting ready for another day covering the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. Several families with Little Leaguers were staying at the hotel. This was the morning that a television reporter and videographer were shot in Virginia, so that was the big story on the big TV.

Another shooting. Really? I just couldn’t deal with it emotionally. I tried to tune it out mentally while I spread cream cheese on my bagel with the flimsy plastic knife.

Instead, five boys got my attention.

They sat at the next table. They’d finished their breakfast and were acting their age – around 12 years old. Laughing, teasing, playing with their plastic forks and spoons.

When the cable news station went back to the shooting and said there was video, the boys looked up and got quiet. (The station didn’t show the actual shooting, thank God.) Their playfulness was replaced with silence. They looked appalled. Or scared.

“That’s crazy!” one of them said.

They watched until the station switched to a commercial. Then they switched back to being playful 12-year-olds, quickly moving beyond the moment.

Just like us adults, no?

How many times have we watched some shooting somewhere – a school, a theater, a workplace, a military base, a church – and felt shock and disbelief? We feel bad, post something on social media, say a prayer and move on.

I remember seeing the video of the shooting at the church in Charleston for the first time when I got home from work on June 17. I couldn’t sleep that night. I wondered how this could keep happening.

So when the latest shots were fired in Virginia, I was numb. If it’s going to just keep happening – new day, new place, new victims – then why even pay attention? Why become emotionally invested again?

I was tired of my heart hurting. Like those 12-year-old boys, I had to turn away. I’d lost my outrage that these massacres happen again and again, and we fail to do anything to prevent the next one.

And that’s when I realized I’d become part of the problem.

Instead of turning away, I needed to be like the boy who saw with eyes fully open and said: “This is crazy!” And then to say that this has to change. I have to do something about this craziness.

Why don’t we do something?

It’s daunting, I know. Our society is so saturated with violence, from our entertainment to our news. Weapons are seen as solutions. Even some churches give away guns to lure new congregants – certainly more attractive than reading passages about loving our enemies and turning the other cheek.

Our outrage has been co-opted, too.

We’ll get worked up over someone who says their rights are being compromised because they have to bake a wedding cake or issue a marriage license. But when a twisted individual takes away all of someone’s rights with one pull of the trigger, we shrug and say that’s just the way of the world.

And if we start to question too much, we hear: Don’t ask what we could do differently. Now is not the time to talk about it. Blame the shooter alone. We can’t save everyone from gun violence, so don’t save anyone. Let’s get back to talking about that person who doesn’t want to bake the cake or issue the license.

Really, how crazy is that?

And until we say it out loud, we’re part of the problem. You and me.

There was a time when drunken driving was an accepted part of our culture. Comedians joked about tipsy drivers. People insisted that they had a right to drink and a right to drive and everyone else should just leave them alone. But a courageous group of mothers who’d lost their children decided it was crazy that thousands were being killed by drunk drivers each year. They met a lot of resistance, but they wouldn’t relent. They insisted that we as a society needed to change our attitudes and our culture and our laws.

We have. Many people are alive today – perhaps you and me and those five 12-year-old boys at the hotel — because a drunken-driving accident was prevented. Because we finally did something.

Change begins when we say: “This is crazy and it has to change. And I have to contribute my part to making it change.”

Passionate people make a difference. Indifferent people perpetuate the status quo and enable it to continue. Nothing changes until we do.

 

More courageous than war

During the early ‘70s, there was a must-see show for anyone with a son of legal age. The Vietnam war draft lottery was conducted on television, providing surreal moments.

By the time I approached draft age, the war had reached its tipping point but more soldiers were still needed. So men in suits would load capsules containing the days of the year into a large, clear drum. They’d spin it and pull out a date. If your birthday was the next one chosen, you were next in line to be inducted.

That’s how the draft order was determined. A bingo version of Russian roulette. And the privileged were given opt-out provisions, including college deferments and assignments to branches of the military away from combat.

My dad was a wounded Korean war veteran and would watch the draft show with me. He stunned me one time by saying, totally out of the blue, that he’d support me if I chose to protest the war. He had no stomach for what the politicians were doing with the war, how many lives were being wasted.

Also, he didn’t want his son to experience the horrors that he’d experienced, the ones that left him fighting his own demons for the rest of his life.

We forget about that part – the unthinkable, unspeakable things that happen during war and leave everyone associated with it wounded in some ways. Things so awful that those who survive them never speak of them.

We honor the victims of our many wars, but we should never honor war itself. Courageous and heroic things happen during war, but war itself is never courageous or heroic. And that’s an important distinction.

War is always the ultimate human failure — politically, religiously, morally, culturally, collectively, individually. It’s the final step in a long sequence of fearful attitudes, ugly words and selfish choices.

We head off to war when we think that anyone who is different from us must be dangerous to us. When we talk about building bigger walls and more bombs because those people can’t be trusted.

Ultimately, war is a repudiation of our shared humanity, a rejection of our greatest gift. The creator gives us life and the responsibility to nurture it – all of life, all of the time. War is our way of telling the creator: We refuse.

War is always a choice, never an inevitability.

So is peace. It’s always an option, but it never just happens. We have to co-create it.

It starts with actually listening to those whom we consider an enemy. Getting to know them. Giving them the same respect and value that we give ourselves.

Waging peace means finding creative ways to bridge our differences. It involves paying attention to how our attitudes and our words and our choices affect others – other people, other cultures, other nations.

Waging peace means saying emphatically and repeatedly: We can do better than this. We must do better. The horror of war must never be considered an inevitable outcome.

Waging peace takes a lot of courage and a lot of sacrifice. It’s the most noble and heroic thing that we can do.

Far more heroic than war.