Peacemaking

Parishioner Donna Hicks is a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit the website at: http://www.cpt.org. Photos of projects may be viewed at:  http://www.cpt.org/gallery. 

As a reservist, Donna is committed to a three year period of service, and she serves on the team in Hebron, West Bank, Palestine, for three months each year. Reservists are also responsible for raising the funds to support their period of service.  Additional background on the work that Donna and CPT do in Hebron can be found in Donna's reflection from 22 November 2005.

Donna's reflections and meditations are posted here, both while she is in Hebron and while she is home in Durham.  The most recent reflection appears below, and links to past reflections are at the right below. 

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Volunteers along the railway

I often find myself on the fringes when I travel by train in the UK.  Coming into and leaving many stations, I see the backsides of cities and towns.  I see buddleias growing up along the railway line and fences, volunteers along the way, lavender and white blooms, purple blooms so dark they are almost black.  I am told that buddleias were volunteers in the piles of rubble left from the bombing of the UK during the Second World War. 

From 22-31 July I joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship in its peace pilgrimage to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops.  We set off from St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London after a service of prayer, repentance, and song and over the next three days walked parts of the Pilgrim's Way between London and Canterbury, after which more APFers joined us at the Friars in Aylesford for the annual APF conference.  On the Saturday we gathered at St. Nicholas', the old leper hospital in Harbledown and processed to Canterbury Cathedral where we prayed for peace in its Eastern Crypt and made witness at the grave of Dick Sheppard, a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, rector of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and tireless campaigner for peace.  Some of us stayed on to staff a stall at the Marketplace attached to the Lambeth Conference.

This Lambeth Conference was to be different from others:  there were to be no resolutions coming out of the conference, no pronouncements.  The bishops and their spouses were to work in their own intensive small groups.  It was to be about equipping the bishops and their spouses for their work in the world.

The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship prepared three briefing papers for the bishops in their work together: a review of resolutions regarding the Christian attitude to war made by the Lambeth conferences since 1930, an examination of the ethics of pacifism and just war in today's world, and an urgent call to recognize that peacemaking is the heart of the gospel. 

Lambeth conferences from 1930 through 1988 affirmed and reaffirmed that "war as a method of settling international disputes is incompatible with the teaching and example of our Lord Jesus Christ."  The 1988 conference "affirm[ed] that there is no true peace without justice, and reformation and transformation of unjust systems is an essential element of our biblical hope." This conference "support[ed] those who choose the way of non-violence as being the way of our Lord, including direct non-violent action, civil disobedience and conscientious objection."

This Lambeth conference, in its Reflections Group composed of a bishop from each of the sixteen indaba (an African method of conversation and listening) groups, in each of which about forty bishops had opportunities for reflection and conversation together on the themes of the conference, stated in its summary that the Anglican Communion should provide active support for peacemaking initiatives.  It also came up with ten statements of solidarity with different parts of the Anglican Communion suffering from persecution, hunger, violence, and other injustices.

Evelyn Underhill in her 1940 essay "The Church and War" called on the church to repudiate war.  She concluded, "Now, when the tragic failure of the world's methods is more apparent than at any other period of history, the Christian method in its nobility and costliness remains to be tried."  She names the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship as a "nucleus of realistic souls within the Church who 'perceive and know what they ought to do' in respect of peace and war, and are willing to accept all the penalties of that action to which they know themselves to be obliged as members of the Body of Christ."�  She "begs every practicing Anglican who is convinced that his communicant status involves unlimited brotherly love, and so the total rejection of war, to join [the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship]; and thus help forward a movement which, though it may seem in its beginning to be small and of no reputation, may yet be disclosed as an instrument of power in the Hand of God."

What, I ask, would happen, if every bishop, priest, deacon, and layperson, became a volunteer like the buddleias along the railway lines?  What if we planted ourselves in these barren and ugly spaces of persecution, hunger, violence and injustice in our world?  What if we declared no to war and all its parts?  What if we grew up in the rubble of the wars and violence of our world today and transformed it?  What would our world then look like?

Let us dream this dream of peace together and make it a reality.

20 August 2008
Inverkeithing, Scotland

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