March 2025 – Peacemaker Priestess

Emerging into Peace: Creating Peaceful Community

“Every moment is a fresh beginning.”
— T.S. Eliot

For the last 40 years, I have marked time with the turning of the seasons. These dates have become even more important since I claimed my dedication to Peace. My work now is to discern and accept each season’s invitation to explore its particular Peace… the Peace of the cycle, the spiral, the Peace in which we dwell. The constancy of the Peace of the seasons is a powerful encouragement to me that if there can be Peace in Earth, there can be Peace on Earth.

An Understanding of the Peace of Living and Dying in Hospital Settings

To everything there is a season…

As a Peacemaker, I am most focused on Peacemaking within communities. It is rare for me to focus on a particular group. Recently, as a hospital chaplain, I was asked to have a second-year medical student shadow me as I went about my day. During that time, I began to suspect that, in the ways we teach our young upcoming doctors about their responsibility for curing patients how great a disservice we do them and ultimately the patients they will serve. I realized that my Peacemaking skills might be useful in supporting these soon-to-be practitioners. Let’s start before the students arrive.