Blessed are the peacemakers
Happy are the peacemakers

Such a promise…. Such a challenge

The greatest gift I have carried over the years from the time I lived in Afghanistan (and especially ironic in view of the story of that place now) is of the simple act, scores of times each day, of touching my hand to my heart and saying to someone “Salaam aleikum” as we met. I could not do that without each time having a small reminder of Jesus’ words calling us to not just “believe” in peace in some warm fuzzy way, but to entirely incorporate it into the moments of ordinary life, to do what we can to make it happen.

Words are powerful. They can inspire, breath life into us. And in their power they can be dangerous too. They can lead, or mislead.

So we need to talk about peace with each other, greet each other on the street with “Shalom”, or “Salaam”, or just “Peace, man”—seek to fill the space about us with this word and its siblings, hope, love, gratitude, mercy, joy-- because other dangerous words are thick about us. The information in the past week about the great increase in Canada’s involvement in arms sales around the world, kept secret by the government, is a painful reminder of the strength of those other words that present a message that self-centredness and profit and comfort and pleasure are the real values.

So, thank you for this evening. We need to get together and talk more about peace. We need to read about it more. The media has room for stories about some pretty goofy stuff about the latest adventures of Paris Hilton, but seldom do we read about the tough dirty daring work going on in corners of the world and this city contributing to build peace. Two weeks ago I had the chance to visit the great march of thousands of poor farmers in India slowly making its way to Delhi to protest the move to corporate agri-business there, people daring to say things are not fair, walking a few kilometres each day and living out in the open along the asphalt highway on their way to deliver their message to the government. Last week I had the chance to sit and listen to a group of immigrant artists sharing ideas to create a piece of art to express their experiences in Edmonton. There are so many of these beautiful stories. But we hear too little of them. This is the raw material of making a peaceful world, of creating a true culture of peace.

There is no handy manual of how to do it. For each it will be a unique journey that arises from an individual life and experience. I was walking down the street recently and noticed a young woman in a jogging suit in front of me who had the word “Peace” in prominent upper case letters across her posterior. I guess for each of us that’s what peace making is all about—doing it by the seat of our pants.

Thank you Project Ploughshares for giving Edmonton this evening when we have a few minutes to focus our hearts and minds on this guiding principle of the good life. I am very aware that anything I might say about peace making here is preaching to the converted, you are the true practitioners of this work, but thank you for inviting me to share a few thoughts.

But more than just a guiding principle, this evening focuses us to notice that peace making is all about people, not theory. I have a shelf of books by insightful writers on peace, but mostly I have learned what it really means from the people I have met along the way, spray painting “No Cruise Missiles” on the railway overpass at the High Level Bridge 25 years ago, or walking and chanting along Whyte Avenue to protest the invasion of Afghanistan just days ago.

I know so many in this city who are models and inspiration to me of peace making, who deserve to be celebrated by us. That includes the previous recipients of this award, most of whom I have deeply appreciated over the years and see as the true wealth of this city of ours. And it includes the good friends who are active with Project Ploughshares, people like Bill and Rhyl Stollery, recognized this evening. And it includes many others of you who are sitting here this evening, in every direction I look.

Maria Dunn, whose music has grown out of sitting gently listening to ordinary good folks and then captured and honoured their lives and stories. Dave Hubert, who dares to challenge the Canada Revenue Agency to recognize a citizen’s right to support peace. Nancy Hanneman who has brought us such a rich menu of learning about peace over the years. Mike Tulley, literally providing the means for us to get our words out to the world and be heard. And the Women in Black, who teach us without a single word that peace can bring together people from every background in common cause. And on and on….

Part of me wants to just ask us to look around at each other, to remember others who are no longer with us, including very certainly Salvos Prelorentzos of course; not the “great” names in the history books, but the friends and family and lovers and colleagues who make up the cloud of witnesses who sustain each of us in our own stumbling efforts at peace making. That would probably be a better use of our time than me talking to you.

In fact I think we better take a minute to do exactly that. Enjoy a little smile or a gentle tear of memory as you focus your thoughts on one or two of those who have that place in your life.

So many stories we could tell each other to encourage.

But thank you for choosing me. I have felt a joy about it many times since I was first contacted to be told. If I have managed to even in a small way reflect some of the light I have received from many of you I will have achieved a great deal.

I hoped I would have some significant profound thoughts to offer about peace this evening. I’ve been waiting to sense that message over the weeks since Nancy and Mel said I would have an opportunity to speak.

And I’ve been getting more and more nervous as today drew nearer because my insight seemed to keep coming back to variations on Paul Wellstone’s words. Wellstone was the Democratic senator who spoke out against George Bush on the war in Iraq, who was killed in an airplane crash at the time of the last US election. He said “If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to admit we don’t really stand for them.”

I feel deficient somehow when I realize everything I believe about peace is this seeming contradiction of an idea, that we have to fight for peace.

I’m not sure how to deal with my own experience that often my response to those who are doing violence is to become angry, to want to throttle them. I am not proud of that, but I have to face this truth about myself, that often my involvement in peace activities arises from a fury with those who make war. Some of you have mentioned seeing a letter to the editor in the paper this week from me about the proposed Alberta homelessness secretariat. I wrote that letter because I was so indignant at the premier’s blatant political game-playing when people I know are sleeping behind dumpsters not far from here on this November night that I had to either write or throw something against the wall.

It worries me because at first it sounds a bit too much like the general I heard quoted recently about the occupation of Afghanistan saying, “It is a necessary war to secure peace.”

And those words were an eerie echo of Lyndon Johnson in another invasion saying “It is our best and prayerful judgement that air attacks on North Vietnam are the surest road to peace.”

Well, whether we say “fight” or “work”, the point is that peace is a choice we make to move in a certain direction, to get on with our life in a certain way.

I don’t have a very impressive personal story in relation to peace. But let me offer a few snapshots I find in the album of my memory of my stumbling journey to caring about peace.

Resentment might be the first memory. My father was in the RCAF during World War 2 and as a boy in the post-war years my friends were always telling stories about the heroic acts of their fathers in the war. When I would ask my father for his stories so I could join in the bragging he would gently decline to give me any. Once, after much pestering, he told me with just enough detail to make me feel sick to my stomach about a mission to retrieve the bodies of some of his colleagues from a plane shot down just off the shore of England in the Channel after it had been in the water several days, and told me that was what war was really about. So I continued to be forced to make up stories about him to keep up with my school friends, all because somehow he didn’t seem to think killing the enemy was something to keep talking about.

Fear of war, more than desire for peace, may be my next memory. I was sitting in school at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the air raid siren going off on the roof of the school to call us to practice getting under our desks was chilling to me, made me feel shaky all over.

That’s something that hasn’t really changed over the years. War is not good for children. After we came back from Afghanistan and were living in a quiet little village in northern Alberta I noticed that when an airplane would fly over, my own children would stiffen, a reflex that came from even the brief time of being in a situation where airplanes flying over had a more sinister meaning to them. It makes it easier for me to have a small sense of what the lives of many of the young people we connect with at Mennonite Centre for Newcomers, who have been in the midst of war all their lives, must be like, what they are struggling with.

I feel like I bumped into peace. Fresh out of high school I was registering at the University of Alberta in the autumn of 1966. Walking across the Quad with friends, talking about going to an information session about the fraternities, I found myself beside a table with a couple of pretty wild looking guys—bare feet, scruffy clothes, pretty hairy—and they introduced me to Students Union for Peace Action, SUPA. Even gave me a button that said “Make love, not war”. I still have it, after 40 years of wear and tear—and that still seems like a pretty good message, doesn’t it?

But more importantly some seed in me was nourished by that little group of folks I hung around with over the next while. They gave me poetry to read by Robert Bly and Walt Whitman, poetry like these lines from William Stafford: “we must find something forgotten by everyone alive, … crawl for some ritual up a rocky steep. The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.”

Years later as the junior half of the Alberta New Democrat caucus in the Legislature, Ray Martin, my boss, got to tell me what to do—and Ray, by the way, is a great teacher to have, a man whose own long faithfulness in challenging the powers that be in this province has helped me many times to find the energy for one more task when all I really wanted to do was take a nap--, so one busy Saturday he sent me to say a few words at an event by a bunch of folks here in Edmonton called Tools for Peace who were making peace by the practical act of filling a container with things to send to a Nicaragua that was being choked by the violence of the United States. I suspect a few of you here this evening were there that particular Saturday afternoon too. Not a lot of philosophizing—just hard work gathering and sorting and packing useful things for people in need.

It reminds me of one variation of the translation of that beatitude I started with that says “Happy are the people who practice cooperation instead of competing.”

I think that’s where my perspective seems to be settling as the years go by. Peace must be made. It is not going to fall from the sky or magically win over violence just because it’s a good thing. Many people, simple daily choices and actions.

I remember the joy of students in my classes years ago when I was a teacher. We would make it a project to fold 1000 origami cranes and send them to the peace memorial in Hiroshima and when the photo of them being hung there came back to our little rural community the story we had studied of Sadako would step out of the pages of a book and connect with their own lives, and I would feel like perhaps a few of them would make different decisions in their own lives as they moved on to adulthood, just because of those minutes folding bits of coloured paper and talking with each other about why they were doing so. Somewhere in them was a small experience that might lead somewhere…. But even if it never did, it was still time well spent I believe.

When low on energy or disappointed at yet another victory of the dark side, I fall back on a childhood rhyme many of you will know that says “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a rider was lost;” and goes on until for want of a king a war was lost. Well, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. But the concept is important—we never know which small act will be the one that finally tips the balance. We don’t have to be heroes, we just have to be on the job.

I’ve given up much dreaming of a New Jerusalem. I just know there’s no choice but to be standing with a few Karen refugee friends on the steps of the Legislature to call on the generals in Burma to stop their oppression; or joining in to sing with the Raging Grannies as the Peace Flag is raised in downtown Edmonton. If not me, who? As Paul Wellstone said, if we don’t, then maybe we have to question if we really stand for peace.

In every religion, every life philosophy, when peace making is presented it involves verbs, action words—it is about having an orientation of the heart that expresses itself in doing.

There’s an old bumper sticker that optimistically says “All that is necessary for world peace is for believers in God to quit killing each other.” Well, that might sound easier than it really is. The power of fear and selfishness is strong. Beating swords into ploughshares is hard, even dangerous, work. Don’t imagine this is a safe, tranquil, pacific, business! But the point is that it is necessary, so we do it.

And maybe it still won’t be enough. I often think of another line from William Stafford, the poet I mentioned earlier, that the darkness around us is deep. But Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, another recent peace maker, reminds us that hope is not the knowledge that things will turn out all right, but that things make sense no matter how they turn out. And peace to me makes great sense.

Let me say one final very specific thing as I finish, one thing I am certain is correct. As long as we are not determined to create a more equitable, a more fair, approach to living together, peace will be a very difficult achievement. The greater the economic extremes in a civilization, the further apart the rich and the poor, the more likely there will be violence.

I grew up on the Bible and am very aware that in more places than you could easily count the writers of those scriptures talk not about “helping” the poor, putting bandages on their injuries, but about throwing off the grip of the hands of the wealthy and powerful, about turning the tables upside down on those who are the oppressors. The message I’ve absorbed from years of reading that book is that we need to challenge the place of the wealthy and powerful, not celebrate them, and not surrender to them; that the affluence of some is nearly always at the expense of someone else. And unless we work to change that, peace will remain a bitter mystery for too many.

So there is a simple sequence that stays in my awareness each day: those with the least money have the least power, those with the least power live with the most fear, those with the most fear have the least chance of peace in their lives. And all of us have a duty to break this chain.

It used to be that to see the evidence of this terrible gulf between the rich and the poor we had to do something like go and cross from the suburbs of San Diego to the slums of Tijuana. Today we can take an ETS bus from Boyle Street to an Edmonton suburb and move from a neighbourhood where average family income is $38 000/ year to one where it is four times that, $148 000; from people living in makeshift tents to houses where elegant entrance foyers have more square feet than the whole apartments of most in the urban core.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during a great war, had a description of worship that I’d like to freely borrow and adapt to close:

My image of peace making is a spider weaving a web. Each single strand is so apparently insubstantial, but as day by day those strands are interconnected they create something powerful enough to do amazing things. So, let’s go out tomorrow and modestly patiently determinedly add our little bit of steel-strong thread to a weaving being created by countless courageous sisters and brothers in every corner of the world.

For what else can we do that matters in the long run?

Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.

Website created and maintained by Calypso Communications & Consulting. Please direct any questions, comments, or technical problems to the Webmaster.