International Day of Peace
Yesterday, September 21 was the International Day of Peace, and being a good Mennonite I had all the intentions of writing a beautiful post in observance.
And then we had a doctor’s appointment, a counseling appointment, a church appointment, groceries, soccer game, kid complaining of a sore throat, antibiotics, a torn apart bathroom with cement that the cat walked in with paws that now needed to be cleaned. There were tears about classmates that are rude and make up nicknames for other kids and confusion about why good friends were participating.
As I drive during the chaotic day, I hear about contentious elections, billions in military aid, refugee camps and mass graves, climate disasters and starving children.
When I go to pack food for kids at our own school who don’t have enough on the weekends, I see what my daughter cries about at night—that all the staff are required to have the threat levels (code red, orange, yellow and green) and instructions on which type of lockdown these are on their ID badges, signaling all day that peace is not a promised thing. My kindergartener had his first intruder drill this week. He said he liked it because they got to go into the bathroom.
International Day of Peace, hardly.
And yet, I still find myself wanting to throw seeds of pixels into what feels like a barren world. I still long for God’s shalom—not just peace but wholeness and wellness and restored connections to God, to ourselves, to each other, and to creation.
In his beautiful(gorgeous and stirring actually) essay , “Poems for Peace,” Philp Metres shares, “Though our poetry has ably represented the traumatic and unmaking operations of war—from the rage of Achilles on to our present day—it has also often unwittingly glorified and perpetuated a culture of war. We have yet to give adequate attention to how our poetry also contains the seeds of other ways of dealing with conflict, oppression, and injustice, and how it may advance our thinking into what a future without war might look like.
How to imagine peace, how to make peace? In our conversations on the Peace Shelf [what books would we include on a bookstore shelf about Peace], three general subcategories emerged, though these were full of overlap and contradiction: Sorrows, Resistance, and Alternative Visions. It’s simple enough: we need to witness and chronicle the horrors of war, we need to resist and find models of resistance, and we need to imagine and build another world.”
Sorrows. Resistance. Alternative Visions.
Sounds a lot like the life of a Jesus follower.
Sorrows: When I see milkweed tufts, I think of war.
My grandmother tells a story of when she was a little girl during WWII. She and her brothers and sisters went through the fields collecting bags full of milkweed fluff to do their part in the war effort. Collection stations would send them to factories to stuff lifejackets for soldiers far away.
We’ve repeated this story because at face value it’s charming, unusual and a source of pride for my grandma. Only recently have I felt sorrow upon hearing it.
Instead of imagining seeds as fairies or angels or traipsing through meadows, war required children —it always requires children— to participate in, endure, and engorge bloated systems of violence. This only one of billions of stories to lament.
“My eyes fail from weeping,
I am in torment within;
my heart is poured out on the ground
because my people are destroyed,
because children and infants faint
in the streets of the city.
12 They say to their mothers,
“Where is bread and wine?”
as they faint like the wounded
in the streets of the city,
as their lives ebb away
in their mothers’ arms.
13 What can I say for you?
With what can I compare you,
Daughter Jerusalem?
To what can I liken you,
that I may comfort you,
Virgin Daughter Zion?
Your wound is as deep as the sea.
Who can heal you?
18 The hearts of the people
cry out to the Lord.
You walls of Daughter Zion,
let your tears flow like a river
day and night;
give yourself no relief,
your eyes no rest.
19 Arise, cry out in the night,
as the watches of the night begin;
pour out your heart like water
in the presence of the Lord.
Lift up your hands to him
for the lives of your children,
who faint from hunger
at every street corner…
20 “Look, Lord, and consider:
Whom have you ever treated like this?
Should women eat their offspring,
the children they have cared for?
Should priest and prophet be killed
in the sanctuary of the Lord?
21 “Young and old lie together
in the dust of the streets;
my young men and young women
have fallen by the sword.”- from Lamentations 2
Resistance:
Palestinian American writer Naomi Shihab-Nye’s poems have long been some of my favorites on the tension between the horrors of past and now and the hopes for the future. Her poem, “Jerusalem” is a powerful exploration of this:
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
—Tommy Olofsson, Sweden
I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.
Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddles: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Lately his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.
Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.
Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.
There’s a place in this brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddles: wind and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.
It’s late but everything comes next.
And in this space of awakening, of new spirit and seeds that will eventually grow, of creative acts of defiance and disruption, still this peace is a gift. One of my favorite songs from Soil and Seed Project is “For the Tired and Alone,”
For the tired and alone
And the far away from home
For the angry and for the afraid
For those who can’t fall asleep
The Shepherd will keep you
And loves you; you’re never alone.
Peace, peace God, give us peace
We cannot make peace on our own
Through the day and the night You will always provide.
You love us; we’re never alone
Lyrics: Seth Thomas Crissman and Greg Yoder, 2022 // Music: Seth Thomas Crissman, 2022 // Vocals: Spectator Bird
Alternative Visions: There are a billion stories we’ve probably never heard of how peace is pushing up through generations of violence. Of places where it is evident in tiny ways at first that “the kingdom of heaven is here.”
Mennonite Mission Network published a round-up of peace stories yesterday that can stir our imaginations as to ways Jesus followers are waging peace around the world. You can read them here.
Peace Insight highlights, maps and inspires with stories of peacebuilders in areas of conflict, holding a multitude of courageous, creative, and changing ways of transforming individuals and communities.
In The Next Worship: Glorifying God in a Diverse World, Sandra Van Opstal challenges the church to grow into a multiethnic, hospitable, mutual and connected place of worship, inside and outside its walls.
Shannan Martin’s Start With Hello makes the nebulous practical: how do we build peace by loving our neighbors? Like our actual neighbors?
The list could be endless.
Sorrows. Resistance. Alternative Visions.
Where have you had glimpses of these three paths lately when it comes to the intersection of faith and conflict, a hope for not just any peace but God’s? I’d love to hear from you what you’ve been leaning into lately?
May the peace of Christ be with you today.
