Seeking peace in life is one of the ongoing mysteries we grapple with each and every day. Seeking peace and justice is, for the Christian, the continuing discernment of God’s call to serve and offer our lives to the other in love. I pray for peace daily within my own life and in the world. It can often seem like a fruitless and hopeless task and yet daily in prayer, morning, noon and night the seeking of peace fills the different prayers in my life.
In a powerful way the prayer for peace presented itself to me through a video shared about the “White Hats” rescue team in Aleppo Syria. The great tragedy and failure of justice and peace is vividly and terribly presented to us each and every moment as we watch this once thriving city being slowly ground to dust beneath the bombings, the shelling and the death of so many of its residents. It can seem hopeless…but then there is hope. The “White Hats” have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This group, “White Hats,” are members of the Aleppo community who have chosen to place their lives at the service of their fellow residents to conduct the dangerous rescue work of seeking survivors in the rubble and destruction that is overwhelming their home. The danger in their work is very real and present to them each day, as over 130 members of their teams have been killed during their work of rescue. It is a work of mercy that they choose to carry out in love of both neighbor and enemy.
It is a choice to stay, to serve and to offer their lives that brings the hope of peace to my prayers and actions. Within the rubble of their town, the rubble of daily lives for those who remain the service of the “White Hats” brings the reality of peace to this violent place. Their work of peace in seeking the broken, wounded and dead amidst the rubble and destruction caused by hate and violence brings hope to those who see their white hats walking the streets moving towards the injury of life to homes that once were full with the vibrancy of life but now lie vacant and ruined.
How can our prayers and actions help? Many people would simply say that they cannot help. Others will say that the destruction will never stop so why even try. While others may think that the death and violence are somehow deserved. As disciples of Jesus Christ we must flatly and emphatically reject these answers and we seek in the words of Blessed Pope Paul VI, “For that reason we think it extremely important to have an exact idea of Peace and to divest it of the false concepts which too often surround and thus deform and distort it. We say this to the young first of all. Peace is not a stagnant condition of life which finds in it at the same time both its perfection and its death. Life is movement, growth, work, effort and conquest, things such as these. Is that what Peace is like? Yes, for the very reason that it coincides with the supreme good of man as he makes his way through time, and this good is never attained totally, but is always being newly and inexhaustibly acquired. Peace is thus the central idea giving its driving force to the most active enthusiasm.” (From the 1972 World Day of Peace Message)
Our invitation from Jesus is to go out and seek to plant peace, justice and life into the ruins of sin and destruction. To be agents of hope whose foundation is one of prayer and conversation with our Lord Jesus who calls us each to service of one another. Pray for peace.
God Bless
Fr. Mark