November 2006 - Blessed are the Peacemakers

November, 2006 - Blessed are the Peacemakers

From The Rev. Anne S. Howard, Executive Director

 

My phone rang at 7:15 this morning. “Look at the photo on the front page of the Times, Mom.” It was my son, calling home from med school. I heard in his voice the same note of shock and grief I’d heard when he phoned home from college five years ago, on the morning of September 11. “Turn on the TV,” he had said.

 

I went to my Home Page, www.nytimes.com. There, in one photograph, was the image of war: the face of a six-year-old girl at her father’s funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. On a woman’s lap nearby rested a folded-up American flag. This little girl’s face was not just sad, not just teary, it was a twisted grimace of grief, gut-wrenching grief.

 

No six-year-old face should look like that. No six-year-old should lose their father to this war we are waging, no American child or Iraqi or Afghani child. And yet so many have died, and continue to die. The headline with the Times photo essay, which included several images of funerals and coffins and grieving families was “A Most Violent Month, and Many Final Farewells.” We have not seen many images of funerals in these past years of our pre-emptive war in the Middle East. We need to see them, we need to take these images into prayer, and into the voting booth next Tuesday.

 

In my morning meditations each day, I recite the nine Beatitudes from Matthew’s gospel. I do this to ground my day, to keep in my mind and heart the radical challenge of the Jesus movement. Those Beatitudes were Jesus’ manifesto that defied the politics of imperial Rome. I say them each day as a manifesto in the face of our Empire today, and I say them as a prayer of hope for tomorrow.

When I say “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God,” that six-year-old girl will be in my heart. That little girl needs us to get serious about making peace. She needs us to become active, ardent peacemakers. She needs us, each one of us, to be a blessing.

 

This is what The Beatitudes Society is all about: being a blessing for our world. We want today’s seminary and divinity school students to become a blessing for our world. We want to give them the tools and resources they need to deepen their commitment to that radical agenda of Jesus: to attend to the needs of the poor, the mourning, the meek, the persecuted. We want them to be peacemakers.

 

Our students are indeed becoming blessings: check our new website to see what they are doing. Every day my email is filled with campus news from these committed Christian activists: The Boston Herald carried a story about the U2charist offered by The Beatitudes Society chapter at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. The convener of our EDS chapter, Chris Wendell, is our November Profile of the Month. At the GTU in Berkeley, students are creating a values voter guide (non-partisan of course). Students are joining our team of bloggers, led by our student “Blogmeister” Alexander Carpenter.

 

I am pleased this month to welcome to our Beatitudes Blog some outstanding Christian voices: Diana Butler Bass, Eric Elnes, and Nora Gallagher. Check out the blog site in the weeks to come and see what they have to say.

 

And our Big Event this month is all about building that Beatitudes World, One Day at a Time. Join us, in body or spirit, on November 13, for our first-ever Beatitudes Fundraiser. Be a blessing.

 

In Christ's Peace,

Anne Howard

Strengthening the progressive Christian network for justice, compassion, & peace