Waging peace at Christmas
How are you today?
Are you feeling full of peace? It’s Christmas right, that’s one of the things that Christmas is about? I am so full of peace at the moment, that I entirely missed the advent week reflecting on peace!
It’s interesting that a time that is associated with peace on earth, is also so connected to consumerism and busyness. It is so connected with not feeling at peace. It is so connected with noise and clutter. And this got me thinking about what peace is anyway. I put the word peace into Unsplash photos and got these lovely contributions:
By Colton Duke
They are gorgeous photos, but do they fully express peace?
In 2010, Shane Claibourne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okoro pushed a reworking of the book of common prayer, incorporating different themes and different styles of prayer from around the world. It was my first real introduction to liturgy and I go back to it periodically. Someone on my newsfeed recently posted a screen capture of their reflections on peace:
Waging peace
There is so much to unpack in that quote. Our views of action vs passivity. How we bring imagination and creativity into our actions and relationships. How we disarm evil without doing damage to to one who is doing evil (how do we bring that idea to today’s fierce social media debates and cancelling culture?). How do we bring our own bodily reactions, our own trauma responses, our own emotional and spiritual beings into the pursuit of peace. How do we find a third way? What does that even look like?
So as we head deeper into the Christmas season, how are you waging peace today? How are you interrupting injustice and taking part in the arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice? How are you bringing about a revolution of love?
What part of that quote speaks to you the most?
And to completely change the tone, here are some upcoming events/resources you might be interested in:
Kid’s Holiday Program
In January, the Walk Humbly Imitative is running a holiday program in partnership with Holy Innocent’s Anglican church in Belair, Adelaide. If you know anyone between the ages of 8-14 who would like to come, contact me for registration forms. Here’s some information
Lenten Study
My husband and I were also recently invited to write a contribution to a Lenten study for the Anglican Board of Missions. It is part of a 6 study series which is now available for pre-order as a physical book. You can find it here.
