The making of peace

Muriel Lester, tireless peaceworker, wrote, “The job of the peacemaker is to stop war, to purify the world, to get it saved from poverty and riches, to heal the sick, to comfort the sad, to wake up those who have not yet found God, to create joy and beauty wherever you go, and to find God in everything and in everyone.”

Only that?

What a list. A bold, bald, truthful list of actions to take to make peace. It’s a recipe really and what it says to me is that the talents of a person committed to making peace are vast, varied and instantaneously available to morph into whatever situations require the making of peace, which, to my mind, are all situations.

How can I stop the war? How can I purify the world? How can I save the world from poverty? How can I save the world from riches? How can I heal the sick? How can I comfort the sad? How can I wake up those who have not yet found God? How can I create joy and beauty wherever I go? How can I find God in everything and in everyone?

There’s one action that anyone anywhere at any time can take to answer every single one of these questions: make the choice to make peace in every moment.

Evangelist Jim Wallis exegetes the words of Jesus of Nazareth, “Anyone can love peace, but Jesus didn't say, ‘Blessed are the peace-lovers.’ He says ‘peacemakers.’ He is referring to a life vocation, not a hobby on the sidelines of life.

I think this is what Ms. Lester meant as well. Making peace is an action and the most exciting thing about it to me is that it means something different in every single situation. This is why I find peace so intriguing. It demands every resource at my disposal and it delivers every good result in the world.

Making peace is “a vocation” because it calls me out of myself {find the root word of vocal in there} and my own smallness to take the bigger view of everything. It’s not a hobby because peacemaking doesn’t happen only in my spare time like so many hobbies. Nope, it’s fulltime work, and it’s really fulltime work that all of us need to keep doing.

Can I do all the things on Ms. Lester’s list in one day? Probably not. But can I do a little toward each thing every day? Probably.

It’s the probability of peace that keeps me interested in the making of peace.

Visit Susan Corso’s spiritual blog or subscribe to Seeds at www.susancorso.com.