Praying for Peace: It's All We Can Do

The Rev. F. M. Buddy Stallings, Rector of St. Bart's on Park Avenue in Manhattan, is an Associate of the Geranium Farm; his pieces run on the Farm's website page "A Few Good Writers".  This morning, what he emailed sounds exactly like what we feel about the two simultaneous awful-nesses that are impacting the world right now, the shooting down of the plane in eastern Ukraine and the fighting in Gaza.

We mourn the loss of some AIDS scientists who were traveling on the plane, as well as a member of the Dutch Senate, a nun returning to a teaching job in Sydney after a study sabbatical in Europe, and the numerous others traveling to Asia.  We learned that Ukraine was, until yesterday, on a major flying route from Europe to Asia; planes are apparently now being rerouted over Turkey.  How will the conflict over that region be reconciled?

We also wish over and over that the terrorism and the Arab/Israeli distresses could be eased.  We were in the World Trade Center on 9/11, so this is a very personal notion.

Those thoughts prompt us to respond here on Ways of the World, and we take the liberty of copying Buddy's comments so our own readers may see them.  

Nothing I had planned to write today seems weighty enough in light of the events of yesterday: the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner and Israel's ground operation into Gaza. . . .

And yet, each of us is required to have some sort of public reaction -- not a position piece for sure, but some orientation or perhaps world-view through which we process such events. Over the years I have in some ways hidden from many of the hard conversations about conflict and turmoil in the world by claiming that my positions are theological not political: peace over war, non-violence over violence, negotiation over action. Though lofty and pious, they also are not, as I have been told with some regularity, particularly practical or easily reduced to logistics about how we actually are to live together on an ever- shrinking globe. I almost envy the bellicose, who at every turn say in a million ways "there is going to be hell to pay for this; let's go blow somebody up," and the equally certain, who seem to know in every case the absolute moral decision to make.

I pray for peace; and though that seems pretty weak and small, it is all I have. Though God may clearly expect more, I am not sure what it is and at this point can only wait until I have further light.