The Chair’s Corner:

Inconvenient Peacemaking

If I supported the war in Iraq, I would be disappointed with the American people. One year, one minute, people support the war; the next minute, the next year, they’ve tired of it – too costly, too complicated. American culture demands quick results. Americans like wars to be like fast food – quick, convenient, and cheap. We have the collective attention span of a mayfly.

If I supported the war in Iraq, I would be disgusted with tax cuts and corporate profits. In a time of crisis, everyone should share at least a thin slice of the sacrifice that we ask of soldiers. If others can risk their lives, their physical, emotional, and spiritual health, we ought to let go of our personal and corporate selfishness. Did many people really believe in this war enough to take risks, change their lives, and bear the cost?

What should concern us, however, is not how the flaws in American culture affect the advocates of war, but how they deform peacemakers. We live in the same culture. We suffer from the same limited commitment. I go to a protest if it fits into my schedule; I give money to causes, but how much or how little?

In an issue of Episcopal Peace Witness that celebrates the leadership of women, I think of Dorothy Day as a role model. Her witness was relentless. Her daily bread was to say “no” to injustice. She sought only to increase the sum total of goodness in the world.

She prescribed community to relieve the “long loneliness” of life, and self-scrutiny as a means of spiritual transformation.

She coined the word “precarity” - a word that sounds like Stephen Colbert, but a concept worthy of Jesus - to describe a Christian life dedicated to inconvenient truths, a life of uncertainty fulfilled in the faith that risk is the only way to blessedness.

Peacemaking, like truth, is inconvenient. Precarity makes us anxious. But the inconvenience and precariousness of peacemaking are the remedies to the acculturation that limits our commitment. Instead of believing in shock and awe and naked power, we take our stand by saying “no,” in small, daily steps, with endurance and perseverance.

I pray that we can overcome our own acculturation, embrace the inconvenience, and become better peacemakers.

Gary is the new Chair of the National Executive Council, Rector of St. Luke’s Church in Long Beach, California, Deputy to General Convention, and author of Becoming Bridges: The Spirit and Practice of Diversity.

Executive Committee of the EPF National Executive Council

Chair : Gary L. Commins commins@stlukeslb.org

Vice Chair: Linda Gaither lgaither@sonofyork.com

Secretary: Barbara K.Armstrong bobarmstrong@mindspring.com

Treasurer: Rex McKee rex.mckee@gmail.com

Executive Director: Jackie Lynn epfnational@ameritech.net