“A song of peace for their land and for mine”

The National Flower of Ukraine

Driving across the bridge, past Interstate Park and into Taylor Falls on my way to United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, I regularly passed a small group of people standing at a street corner with placards. Returning home the next day I would see them again. Always at the same spot. It looked like a memorial, all cement with a raised dais. Maybe there was a plaque at the top of those three steps. Maybe they had good reason for choosing this place to stand and sometimes call out to passing drivers. These few individuals were protesting an invisible war that leaders of our nation had decided to wage in someone else's homeland. Maybe that spot was a memorial to those who had served and fallen in a previous war. Their “never again.”

As I passed I thought, our nation’s leaders probably think they have good reasons for the war. But what I was learning, and would learn, while in seminary left me skeptical.

Until seeing a film at UTS recreating the “recruiting” of boys to serve in El Salvador’s civil war, until reading The Massacre at El Mozote and more in preparation for traveling there with a class of 14 others in January 2010, I had believed I was a pacifist. After that, I knew better. If my child was threatened, I would do anything to keep them safe. And for me, as apparently for Glennon Doyle, “There is no such thing as other people’s children.”i

To see 11-year-old children lying still and silent on the corrugated metal roofs of their homes so that recruiters would not claim them made my heart sick. To watch as each boy taken had to choose, while a gun was to the back of his head, whether or not to “serve” left me sick and angry.

Though I mentally supported those protesters I passed in Taylor Falls, I would forget them by the time I was climbing the hill on the other side of the river. My mind and my time were full. I was pastoring three churches while also attending seminary a couple days a week. I was parenting a teenager. I was... Well, isn't that the way it is? We have so many reasons to excuse ourselves from doing more of what we know is right.

Maybe my reasons were valid. I don't know. What I do know is that seeing those protesters – week in and week out – I committed to myself that I would never again sit silently by.

War is an affront not only to our faith but to our humanity. Like many others, I’ve struggled for as long as I can remember against the nationalistic notion that military might, soldiers, and war are necessary and even good. The only thing war is good for is the economy. (Remember that!) How could people support having such a huge military budget? Didn’t this make war that much easier? Sadly, we have been so inculcated by our society that we see war as the norm.

In 2015, Pope Francis was speaking to an audience of 7000 children (!) during an event sponsored by Peace Factory. “Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war.” Responding to a question from one of the children, he continued, “This is serious, some powerful people make their living with the production of arms. … It's the industry of death.”ii

Last week, a picture of the Dalai Lama came across my Facebook feed with these words:

“Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous – an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”iii

There is nothing remarkable about this way of understanding governments’ inclinations for mass violence. Such beliefs have been recorded many times through the generations. Men's words shouting into a void. Men's, because, though most mothers who watched sons leave for battle would have had some choice words, women's voices were seldom memorialized.

If the core of Jesus' teachings is about living in beloved community – and I believe that it is – then we must strive to build community with our worldwide neighbors. To claim the name of Christian and yet fail to do this is to reject Christ. Should we not be shouting from the rooftops about every abuse? Each act of oppression?

I do not say that standing by as a bully attacks another, innocent or not, is right. It never is. I don’t pretend to know what is the one, best choice for the current circumstance – if there is one. What I do know is that, for me, remaining silent was not an option.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.iv

i Glennon Doyle, Untamed, chapter title “racists,” 2020.

ii Many powerful people don't want peace,' Pope tells children,” RT International, May 11, 2015, https://www.rt.com/news/257545-pope-francis-war-arms, last viewed on March 2, 2022. Also, Jen Hayden, “Pope Francis: 'Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war,'” The Daily Kos, May 11, 2015, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/5/11/1384007/-Pope-Francis-Many-powerful-people-don-t-want-peace-because-they-live-off-war, last viewed on March 2, 2022.

iii The 14th Dalai Lama, https://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/the-reality-of-war, last viewed on February 28, 2022.

iv “This is My Song,” 2nd stanza, words by Lloyd Stone, 1934 as found in The United Methodist Hymnal #437.