These first few days of the new year, my thoughts on war and peace have been coalescing, and I’m concluding that it’s time “Peace on Earth” became something more than pretty words devoid of real meaning, an empty phrase we mouth at Christmastime but never actually consider as a realistic goal.
In this new year I am here on a mission of peace — nonviolent resistance to the war machine.
Enough of sundered bodies and crumbled cities. We must learn to love one another. We must learn to live in peace with our neighbors and understand that all humans are our neighbors.
We need not be friends, although we may find we have more in common than we think. We can at least be neighbors.
We owe it to the spirit of life to be kind to each other. We will all be dead soon enough; why not live — and let live — while we’re here? It’s our debt to the fallen and the lost: We survived for a reason, and the reason begins with living.
I am angry, yes, I think “angry” says it best, at the idea of inventing implements to kill other people. Life is such a precious gift, and nature snatches it away from us so soon as it is. How dare we manufacture the means to speed the process?
I have no quarrel so deep that it merits taking the life of the one with whom I quarrel. Even an evil person who takes other lives — What good is accomplished by duplicating his crime and taking his life?
I am angry with the one who takes an eye, and I am angry with the one who takes an eye for an eye and by doing so continues the seemingly endless cycle of violence. Who will be the first to say “enough”? Who will refuse to commit war?
Do even I have the will to refuse? If violence is committed or threatened against me, will I have the courage to say, “No more of this, I don’t know if I can forgive you, but I will not respond in kind”? Am I defying human nature itself to suggest such a reaction?
My wife died six months ago, and now that I have known death close by, I am loathe to visit this depth of loss on another human being. Death visits us all; let us not be in a hurry, especially with regard to other people’s lives. As the song says, and I know I repeat myself now, “Only God has the right to decide who’a to live and die.”
The character in an “action” movie says, “Let’s kill them all and let God sort it out.” The statement itself acknowledges that the sorting is not our job, and if it isn’t, then neither is it our job to do the killing.
Death comes soon enough, let’s not hurry the process. Our duty, our mission, our purpose, is to live. Our obligation is to life — our best possible life. We have no right to take life or to delegate the taking of life to some monstrous entity or collective.
Now that we’ve settled that, what is this “life” of which I speak? In my belief we have two laws to live by — it all boils down to Love God and Love Your Neighbor, and even then people quibble over these simple laws. “Who or what is God?” The creator of the universe and all we see, an awesome and diverse creation beyond our meager imagination. The idea is to love this something or someone greater than all of us, who created all of this.
Dozens of birds are feeding on our back deck as I write, each of them a miraculous creation, pecking at seeds each of which is in itself a miraculous creation. Within my limited line of sight are thousands if not millions of miraculous creations, and there are billions of creatures like me on this planet each of us witnessing thousands of miracles, and this planet is one of an infinite number of planets in this universe. Of course I love the Creator. At the very least I am in awe of the beauty and vastness of creation.
And who is my neighbor? The person who lives one house over? The person sitting next to me? If I may be so bold, when considered in the context of a universe, every one of those billions of creatures like me is “sitting next to me.” I am obligated to love my neighbor, all 8 billion of them.
It’s an exhausting thought, the idea of loving every person I encounter, so exhausting that it’s hard to stay angry. The only energy worth generating, in the end, is love.
And so live and love. Live in love. It feels like the healthiest way to live. As I reach that conclusion, I seem to feel a weight lifting off my shoulders, and I see a road to life.
