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Peace is where you make it by Le Anne Clausen

5. Be who you are.
I spent thirty days in jail this year for participating in nonviolent civil disobedience against a U.S. government facility responsible for training most of the perpetrators of massacres and other human rights atrocities in Central and South America over the past 50 years. While serving my sentence, I didn’t expect to become a pastor to my fellow inmates. In fact, I hid my “real life” from them at first because I thought they would feel uncomfortable around me. But not only did they actually want to talk with a person they could trust, the younger women especially sought me out to talk about their lives. This was a real gift to me as a young woman in ministry because I truly learned to listen and offer support to those in need.


	School girls that Le Anne met in Iran.

6. Don’t go it alone.
One of the difficult things about peace work is that it can be isolating unless you find a good support group. Good friendships are in themselves a form of peace building. Friends and colleagues along the way have helped me to avoid burnout, and I have found that you can take turns resting when the work you are doing is particularly difficult.

7. Don’t get yourself down.
Peacemaking isn’t much fun when I am tired and start complaining about how bad the world is. Sometimes this kind of lament is needed, but set a time limit on it. Then start talking about what gives you hope. That will get you through and keep you going.

8. Encourage people around you.
Peacemaking takes all ages. When I was in Baghdad, at least half my colleagues were well past retirement age. The soldiers immediately sought them out as “grandparents” and could talk to them about how they felt about being in the war.

9. Be prepared for criticism.
Sometimes you will face criticism from people around you because they’re afraid of change, or of what might happen to you, or that you are “rocking the boat.” In times like these, I have discovered that the prophets and the Gospels as good places to find encouragement. Movies about the lives of great peacemakers (such as Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, or Dorothy Day) also help me get back on track.

So be the change you wish to see in the world. Ask a few friends for their help, even if it’s just joining you for coffee so you can talk through your ideas with them. And don’t get discouraged. Peace begins (and begins again) with every step.

Le Anne Clausen will graduate this year with a ministry degree from Chicago Theological Seminary. She hopes to continue building the Center for Faith and Peacemaking, as well as helping start an emergent church with an emphasis on global and interfaith peacemaking. You can learn more about her work through her blog, www.unlikelymonastic.net.

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Visit the study page for ideas for discussion and further reflection.

I suggest that negative peace is not the peace that Jesus is speaking of in the Beatitudes. Negative peace doesn’t require anyone to be a peacemaker; it only requires us to stay quiet, to accept things as they are, and to avoid noticing the tension that is bubbling under the surface. King contrasts this negative peace with positive peace: peace that is marked by the presence of justice. Positive peace does not come from ignoring injustice; positive peace comes from the presence of justice for all people. Positive peace requires us to be active peacemakers, making peace a verb instead of a noun. It demands action for justice. It calls us to name those places in our marriages, in our work, in our church life, in our neighborhoods, and in our cities where we have remained quiet, satisfied with an absence of conflict rather than an in-breaking of the peace of God.

But being peacemakers, being active participants in the positive peace that marks the life of Jesus Christ, isn’t easy. The Beatitudes provide no roadmap.

We live in a country that has been at war for more than 5 years. Millions of people struggle to find health care or to meet their most basic needs. A global food crisis is plunging more people further into desperate poverty. Many of us struggle to find peace in our homes and in our work. All too often our congregations are not places of peace but places of pain. Peace-making isn’t just difficult, it sometimes seems downright impossible.

So where does that leave us? The Beatitudes don’t make sense. They call us to be peacemakers in a world of violence. They ask us to rejoice and be glad in the face of persecution. They suggest that all the ways our world tells us to get ahead are far from the values of God’s kingdom. We are called to make peace even when what really makes sense is throwing in the towel. We are called to rock the boat for justice, to demand more than what the world will give us. We are called to work for the kingdom, to make a place for the kingdom, and to notice where the kingdom has already become a part of our reality.

Peacemaking is not left to the people we call activists. Jesus directs these words to all. But how do we do it? There are no easy answers, only the choice to try. We can choose peace instead of violence. We can choose justice instead of injustice. We can, even in the smallest of ways, try to make a place for the kingdom of God to be birthed in our midst. And we can keep going back to the drawing board, keep refusing to settle, keep hearing the words of Jesus and keep trying to live into them.

The Rev. Brooke Petersen serves an ELCA congregation in Chicago. _________________________

When you and your friends, classmates, or co-workers meet to discuss this issue of Café, try out the questions for reflection on our study page.