Posts Tagged ‘peace’

War is not the final answer

March 4, 2022

Irena has experienced the war in Croatia during the 1990s. Those memories flood her emotions as she now hears of the wars in Ukraine and thinks of her friends there. She knows that the horrors of war are not the final answer. She also knows that the dividing line between war and peace run through the middle of us all.

Excerpts from her essay, War and Peace (Comment Magazine, 3 Mar 2022)

The truth is that all the elements of life that mushroom wildly in times of war are the very same ones we experience in times of peace. War is not as distant, incomprehensible, and otherworldly as many of us who have not experienced it on our own soil think … because we already know the raw material. We are made of that material. It is inside us … If we do not understand this baseline of human reality, we will see those enduring the horrors of war as other than us …   This does not have to be so. We must comprehend the mystery of opposites coexisting in the same moment, in the same sacred space. Joy and sorrow. Pain and healing. Grief and hope. Life and death … The presence of war does not exclude the presence of peace, nor does the presence of peace exclude the presence of war … they always coexist. It is why, miraculously, one can be at peace while in the middle of a war. And it is why a seed of war is never fully absent during a time of peace. Until God’s kingdom comes.

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