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.

Becoming Peaceful, Beloved Communities

Last month we commemorated The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. You may or may not have been around when Dr. King was living, however it’s likely that you have an MLK story. In my case, he was my first invitation to find an off-ramp on the Hatred Highway. He educated, he illustrated, he sang, he led, and he preached his way through hatred and long held beliefs of inequality and racism. He was not a perfect man. He was not the only incredible person on that journey. In fact, there were many incredible people with Dr. King on that journey, many whose names we were never taught and will never know. People who continued his work of Peace and the fight for Civil Rights.

Becoming Warm, Peaceful Communities

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the roles of Story and Fact and the way their roles in our lives intertwine as we examine the past and envision the future. Stories ask and try to answer questions in our lives. To be human, I believe, is to be driven to search for “Truth” and “Meaning” and answers to such questions. We long for facts to lean on. If we don’t have all the facts needed to build our story, we propose facts until we have more information. As humans, we like having neat, little, comprehensible packages. Each discovery allows us to alter our stories to include this new facet of Truth.

Becoming Peaceful Communities

You know that old joke about how everyone treats us like mushrooms: unaware of what’s happening, separated from our neighbors, and covered in compost? We misunderstood. Those mushrooms were connected by mycelium and never alone.

Mycelium are the roots of fungus, but they have other work as well.

It is only in the last five years that I’m beginning to understand that mycelium, tiny, hairlike connected entities, are couriers of the forests, supplying the much larger trees with information and sugar. Think of them as grandmothers — providing wisdom and remedies for life along with a casserole or a batch of cookies. It is this Peacemaking, community-building purpose that has much to teach us as we struggle to understand how we might best Pass Peace.

Becoming Peaceful Communities

“We are stardust
We are golden,
and we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.”

If you grew up when I did, this chorus of Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell, will forever bring a smile to your face. While I always smiled and sang along, it would be quite a few years before I understood the theology behind it — and certainly not any of the science. It is only recently that I’ve begun to see the possibility of Stardust’s being more than simply a Metaphor. As I pond building communities of Peace, I wonder what role might Stardust play?

Allowing Life’s Sacred Passages to Create Peace and Community

Many times, what I encounter in the hospital as a chaplain is challenging to deal with: life-threatening illnesses; abuse and neglect; falls and accidents. Add in the mileage walked and the days can be long and wearying. However, there are other days, when astonishing things happen — and, if you’re paying attention, you’re privileged to witness some of life’s most glorious passages. In such moments Peace is passed and community created.

Setting Down Our Swords for Peace

Despite all the provocation, we have not, in recent times, been able to come to agreement on ending, or even diminishing, gun violence. Just recently, at the same time our Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy announced that gun violence was a public health crisis, the Supreme Court struck down a request to renew the ban on bump stocks which allows a semi-automatic gun to fire cartridges in rapid succession.

Earlier this month our former president was shot with an AR-15 assault rifle. That night, we heard people across political lines decrying gun violence. We are in agreement; this violence is not acceptable. Maybe this time, I hope, we can make the changes that are needed.

Approaching the Good of All for the Good of Peace

A young mother arrived at the hospital with a family member whose heart had stopped. Fortunately, her husband knew CPR and was able to restart their heart while they waited for the ambulance. My job as a chaplain at this point was to be present with the family while the trauma staff attended to the patient.

The young woman felt helpless in this situation and yet powerful things happened as a result. Her children had witnessed the life-saving CPR and, as it would be for anyone, it was frightening and chaotic for them. “I can’t ever face such trauma again and be this unprepared,” she said. As we sat together, waiting on test results, we explored options on how she could be prepared for, and respond to, an emergency situation in the future.

The Courtesy of Peace

Recently I joined a friend for lunch in a small restaurant with tables fairly close together. The pleasant ambience was interrupted when a car began to back out into traffic from a space in front of the restaurant. The driver of another car laid on his horn, gesticulated angrily and drove the next 20 feet only to stop at a red light. Everyone in the restaurant turned to each other, wondering aloud, “what just happened?” “Why did the other driver need to be so rude?”? Heads were shaken, smiles were exchanged. But then the original car started backing up again, and proceeded into the opposite lane.