On the Road to Peace

God of peace, to begin, a trove of gratitude. Thank you for the nonviolent Jesus, his arrival among us, his exemplary life of love -- a love that risked death, a love that raised him again to new life. It was a life, all told, that bespoke peace. He came to us in peace, for peace, as peace. In him we see peace first hand. And my heart brims. For in Jesus, our North Star, you have marked our way in a trackless world. A world of violence and inhumanity, chaos and distress. Because of Jesus, it lies within our grasp to know better now.

Last week after speaking in Baltimore, I spent the night at Jonah House, the long time peace community that embodies the Gospel message of love and nonviolence. They live it out constantly in the form of nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear weapons. It was a blessing beyond measure to share stories with my friends there, to pray through the Advent readings, and to experience again their community of hope and peace. Jonah House remains for me one of the brightest beacons of hope in the country.

Thousands of us gathered this weekend, Nov. 21-23, for the annual funeral procession at Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., there to call for the closing of the notorious "School of Assassins," where the United States trains the Latin American death squads that, over the past few decades, have killed thousands. We gather there each year around Nov. 16 -- the anniversary of the massacre of the Jesuits in El Salvador. This year, the sole Jesuit at the University of Central America to have survived the attack, liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, was our guest of honor.

This weekend, Barack Obama just freshly elected, I joined 2,500 Catholics at the annual Call to Action conference in Milwaukee. A spirit of hope hovered in the air. And in the air, too, was a general agreement that, the election notwithstanding, our work must continue. We need to keep pushing for an end to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. We still need to work to eradicate poverty, hunger, disease, corporate greed and environmental destruction. We still need to work for a more just society. Shortly put, we too have to be hopemakers, and carry on the hard work of making our hope -- a world of peace -- come true.

As the election approaches, economies worsen, wars go on relentlessly, nukes are poised on alert, and hundreds of millions starve and die in poverty, it's clear what's at stake -- the material world is tottering. But there's far more at stake than that, I submit. Peril is rippling through the waters of our spiritual depths. We have long been beset by our own greed and violence. And now our world, our beautiful creation, our very souls are at stake.