On Monday, October 7, we held a prayer vigil for Peace in Gaza, on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which Pope Francis called for a day of fasting and prayer for peace. Our friends at the Rechabite Catholic Worker in Lancaster joined us from afar at 6 pm.
Several members of Pax Christi gathered with us to meditate on the sufferings of the Palestinian people, particularly the people of Gaza, and to connect their sufferings—and all those marginalized, persecuted, and killed—to the sufferings of Christ’s passion.
Dorothy Day wrote often about the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ—which is a social doctrine, she said. If we believe that we are all baptized into Christ, that we are all “one of another” and the health of the body depends on the health of the very poorest, least, and hidden of its members, then how we structure our societies would radically change, Day believed. The sufferings of the men and women in Gaza aren’t far away or distant—they are close to us, because they are close to Christ.
At our vigil, another group, further down the steps, was praying for survivors and victims of domestic abuse. We connected our prayers with theirs, and it made me think about how large-scale sins like war, that may seem far away from us or disconnected to us, are connected to the violence around us, to the people who come to St. Martin de Porres frustrated, demoralized, traumatized, from abuse, homelessness, or violence.
One of James and my favorite quotes is from Dan Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who was part of the Catonsville Nine, who protested the actions of the U.S. Military during the Vietnam War by burning up draft cards in Catonsville, Maryland, with napalm.
In his book, No Bars to Manhood, Berrigan wrote:
“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.
‘Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.
There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
Dorothy would often say that God did not intend this life to be so hard. And that the goal of the Catholic Worker is to make a world where it is easier to be good. Where “normalcy” does not include so much violence and war, but more peace.
Berrigan’s words remind me of our Gospel this morning, and Christ’s words of division. In our parish bible study, Rev. Aaron Lynch has been leading us through a very thorough examination of Genesis. God—wisdom herself—creates the world through philosophy: the practice of making distinctions, of separating dark from light, night from day, knowing the difference between what is real and what is shadow and smoke, nothingness and void. God creates the world through knowing the difference between what is real (that is, good) and what is not-real (that is, empty or false).
But philosophy—or the love of wisdom—also consists of making syntheses, or connections, perhaps even between two ideas or realities that might seem opposed.
And I think of this when Christ says that his coming will divide families and neighbors against one another. “Families will be sundered and good repute will be lost,” as Berrigan put it.
If the Prince of Peace brings division, it is only because there is a new, surprising, and perhaps wholly unexpected synthesis—or community, a new Body—that he invites us into.