Peacemakers
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
—Matthew 5:9
What does it mean for someone to be a peacemaker in the world today? For a long time, I thought that I knew. I am a textbook Enneagram 9 aka “The Peacemaker.” I crave peace in the deepest parts of my spirit. Yet for a long time, I confused peace with an absence of conflict. This approach can work in the short term, but it doesn’t often lead to any lasting peace. To make peace, to try to create some sort of place where there is flourishing for everyone involved requires more than being nice, sending good thoughts, or offering up prayers.
Niceness, thoughts, and prayers are good things. Yet to make peace out of strife requires something more from each of us. We have to be honest about where hurt lies and humble enough to listen to those who disagree with us. I have not figured this out, but this is my good faith albeit flawed effort.
No one should lose their life for what they believe or say in public. Full stop. It is a tragedy any time a person is a victim of gun violence. People lose their loved ones or, at best, watch them go through needless suffering. Lives that could go in all sorts of directions are cut short. What happened to Charlie Kirk, what happened to the students impacted by the shooting in Colorado, what happens all too often every day is a tragedy that we have gotten way too familiar with in this country.
And we should do something about it. What concerns me and angers me is that despite there being well documented support for some ways to curb gun violence, the government does not seem capable of taking even the most modest steps to follow through on actions that could literally save lives. I know that is beating a drum that we hear beaten every single time one of these tragedies happen. But I don’t know of any humane response other than asking why we do not at least try to loosen the hold that guns have on our country. So there’s that.
The other piece in all of this is there has been lots of talk about rhetoric in a way that seems to gloss over a deep-seated problem in this country. It is horrible to rejoice in the death of someone else. For followers of Jesus, one of his most clear cut commands is to love our enemies and pray for those who do us wrong. My heart hurts for any way that this time has been made more difficult for Kirk’s loved ones than it already is.
And we cannot pretend like he did not contribute to the heightened temperature of the rhetoric in this country. Again, Kirk did not deserve any of this tragedy. Yet my mind keeps drifting to the people that he belittled and denigrated from his prominent platform. My heart hurts for the people of color, those in the LGBTQ+ community, and others who have watched a man whom did not see their full humanity and dignity be lionized by many in the public sphere. I know some will flinch at that assessment, but his words are on the record as are the wounds that they have caused.
Where do we go from here? I think we have to continue to be honest about where we are in the world. We do not necessarily have structures above us—whether it be a president who struggles mightily with empathy or social media algorithms that feed us what we want to see—that help in peacemaking. We have to see the humanity one another and the capacity that hurts within ourselves. So let us be honest, open, and try our best to do no harm. We only get through this if we all put the work in together. That is at least a place we can start.