The Peace PeopleLast month I had a long visit in Belfast with Mairead Corrigan Maguire, our newest Peace Councilor. That prompted me, as soon as I returned to the office, to read her book, The Vision of Peace. I was twice blessed.
This angel of peace connects to many places. In addition to her ongoing work in Northern Ireland, she told me about her recent trip to Iraq, her friendship with Aung San Suu Kyi and an encounter with authorities at the Burmese border, her forays for peace to the United States, and her preoccupation with justice, nonviolence, and the need for identity. Toward the end of the notes I was taking, I wrote, "She is a very impressive woman with an amazing grasp of many situations in conflict around the world."
With a preface by the Dalai Lama and a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (both fellow Peace Councilors), the book reflects the scope and depth of Mairead Maguire's care and work. Writing from "Fredheim," the Peace House on Lisburn Road in Belfast, she reminds us that "anything we can do to support the fragile network of friends and communities around the world working for a nonviolent human family we must do." The situations she describes and the places where she has gone to bring her message surely underscore how seriously she takes her own imperative.
In her many references to how hard it is for any of us to change she quotes John Henry Newman at least twice, " In a higher world, it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." As she speaks about the courage that was necessary to move from "exclusive" to "inclusive" in reaching the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, she reminds us, "Yes, change is painful, but when accepted graciously, it allows us to grow spiritually."
The need for change becomes complicated when "we fail to recognize that we ourselves are part of the problem. Change will come about only when each one of us takes up the daily struggle to be more forgiving, more compassionate, more loving..." Mrs. Maguire is quick to recognize that "the rebirth of humanity will not come without pain." But she also argues convincingly that a government's preoccupation with "order" rather than with "justice" is self-defeating and futile. It leads us to buy into the idea (or "lie" as she calls it) that the state can keep order even by taking human life. And that makes justice and peace impossible.
Her summary paragraph speaks volumes:
"Somewhere, somehow we have got things all wrong. We are all responsible. We all need to start again, to refuse the state's right to oppress and kill, to continue to cry out for life and justice, to give birth to a new world. We need to create societies where people in local communities learn to live together, acknowledging and celebrating their differences, without threatening or killing each other, without being held in a destructive cocoon of armed state protection and domination. Perhaps we can learn "community politics' where local people have a say in what happens in their own lives, in their own communities, thereby restoring their dignity, their sense of identity, and their importance to one another and the earth."
We can all be inspired and energized by the faith and hope with which people like this work. There is this constant witness that this is not an impossible task. Peace is possible. And it is true that this will require all of us to learn how to think in another way. But the prophets of peace who speak to our time, of whom Mairead Corrigan Maguire is most certainly one, are suggesting, demonstrating and modeling ways in which the task of peace can be engaged and begun. When all is said and done, "we can rejoice and celebrate today because we are living in a miraculous time. Everything is changing and everything is possible."
And what of success? Several times she raises the question, as though anticipating that those of us with less faith or hope might be asking it. But this work is not a matter of success or failure. It is instead how we live and how we respond to the world and the people we live with. We are reminded that "it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything." Drawing on the advice of Thomas Merton, she reminds us that the "inner change" to which we are all called makes the work possible and effective. Building human bridges between especially people who are alienated and think in another way paves the way to possibilities for creating a never ending process in which the process itself is the success.
The Vision of Peace, by Máiread Corrigan Maguire, published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York (published in 1999)