Peace and Holiness: MEMORIAL DAY: REFLECTIONS OF A PEACE SEEKER

Monday, May 30, 2005

MEMORIAL DAY: REFLECTIONS OF A PEACE SEEKER

[Note: Portions of this entry appeared as a "Letter to the Editor" in the Indianapolis Star on Monday, May 30, 2005, Memorial Day]

"MEMORIAL DAY" VS. "VETERAN'S DAY." For anyone who might be wondering: Memorial Day (formerly known as "Decoration Day") honors all who have lost their lives in military service to America. Veteran's Day honors all living military Veterans who have served in an American war. Click here for a brief history/explanation of Memorial Day. I find it valuable to contemplate the likenesses and differences between these two national observances.

MEMORIAL DAY IS NOT A PRO-WAR DAY. Memorial Day observance is not synonymous with being pro-war. Nor do I think conscientious objectors, pacifists, nonviolence advocates, peace seekers, war resisters, or war protesters should yield their patriotism to anyone on such days. Whether or not I think a particular war is justified, or whether or not I think war is a valid approach to resolving international or intra-national conflicts, I can--and do--honor all who have died or served our nation in times of war.

PROFOUND RESPECT. For me, honoring the war dead or the living who have served does not "bless" war or condone violence. For me, it affords an opportunity to express my profound respect for those who have served in war--often involuntarily, often with grave reservations, often in the face of terrible options, often with little awareness of how they were being deployed and for what particular small or great objectives.

WE MUST FIND A BETTER WAY. Simultaneously, these observances afford us an opportunity to contemplate how far we have to go as a nation--and as a human family--in transforming our means of advancing liberty, encouraging democracy, and promoting justice. War--and those whose lives are snuffed out or haunted by it--gives us every indication that we have not yet explored or employed our best intellectual and spiritual resources for addressing conflicts. Every Memorial Day and Veteran's Day is an opportunity to consider: "Given the cost in these precious lives, we must find a better way, not just repeat the past again and again."

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PEOPLE OF PEACE

“What we set about when we began following Jesus was to become radically Christian persons linked in Christian compassion to a world of great evil… We really can’t find anything better to declare than ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding.’ His shalom can fill those who trust in Him with the spiritual resources which will enable them to wage war on war, and provide them with weapons which by their peaceableness partakes of the nature of the kingdom for whose coming they both pray and work.” -- Timothy L. Smith

FIND THE HABITS OF PEACE

"Christians are prohibited from ever despairing of the peace possible in the world. We know that as God’s creatures we are not naturally violent nor are our institutions unavoidably violent. As God’s people we have been created for peace. Rather, what we must do is to help the world find the habits of peace whose absence so often makes violence seem like the only alternative. Peacemaking as a virtue is an act of imagination built on long habits of the resolution of differences.... The great problem in the world is that our imagination has been stilled, since it has not made a practice of confronting wrongs so that violence might be avoided. In truth, we must say that the church has too often failed the world by its failure to witness in our own life the kind of conflict necessary to be a community of peace. Without an example of peacemaking community, the world has no alternative but to use violence as a means to settle disputes.” -- Stanley Hauerwas

PEACEABLENESS

"What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money." - Wendell Berry

THE END OF VIOLENCE

"Violence is immensely compelling. Those who witness spectacles of violence can be seduced by its logic even when -- perhaps especially when -- they are morally scandalized by it. Violence is labyrinthine. It turns back on itself in serpentine ways. The paths that seem to exist from its madness so often lead deeper into its maze. Violence is literally a-mazing. The traditional way of resisting evil causes the contagion of evil to spread, perpetrated by those who are most determined to eradicate it. How to resist evil in ways that prevent its spread is now history's most fundamental dilemma..... Both Christianity's scriptural sources and its creedal formulae pivot around a public execution, an act of official violence regarded as legally righteous by the political authorities and as a sacred duty by the religionists. The Christian Scriptures and creeds make the outlandish assertion that because of this public execution the grip of sin has been broken, the human race has been offered a new lease on life and, at the same time, placed in grave peril if it refuses the offer..... By moral effort alone one cannot free oneself from the grip of the sacred and the logic of violence. The logos of conventional culture consists of so pervasive a web of conditioned reflexes that we remain largely oblivious of its influence. If we are to be freed from it, something from outside the cultural mix must break in on us. Structurally and anthropologically speaking, there is only one thing truly outside this matrix: the victim whose expulsion brought the system into being in the first place, the stone rejected by the builders of all culture, the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world.... The spiritual and anthropological revolution set in motion by the crucifixion is a glacial process the driving force of which is the 'Spirit of Truth,' -- the Paraclete (John 16:7-8). It was to be the task of this Spirit of Truth to gradually 'accomplish' historically what was 'accomplished' in the hearts of Jesus' disciples at the crucifixion and in the days that followed it.... From the moment of the crucifixion onward, the Paraclete would be at work in the world, slowly giving the victim's voice the ability to sweep away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, and whatever contemporary myths might lend violence a momentary aura of righteousness. However formidable the structures of the sacrificial system might be, however beguilingly and discretely these structures might resort to their scapegoating mechanisms, relentlessly the Paraclete would 'show the world how wrong it was,' gradually leading humanity to 'the complete truth' (John 16:8, 13)." - Gil Baillie in Violence Unveiled