Peace at work, in the midst of a chaotic stream
Yesterday I was convalescing with a cold. I started coming down with it on Friday and was determined, since I didn’t have much grading to do this weekend, to stop it in its tracks. So I spent most of the weekend on the futon watching “The West Wing” and doing crossword puzzles. And it worked. I barely even retained the nasal accent of a stuffy nose this morning.
At the exact same time, a friend of mine from college was being taken hostage in the Congo. His team was stopped on a bridge — three motorcycle drivers and their passengers: a translator and the two U.N. workers — and then they were gone, “missing” the reports say, like an edge piece in a puzzle, leaving a disconcerting hole. This is how we spent our respective Sundays: I was solving clues about winter constellations and tell-all memoirs from nineteen-seventy-whatever, and he was surrendering to armed men whom he had previously tried to win over for peace.
It almost seems, given the way I have set up this dissonant juxtaposition, that I am keen to shame myself for my petty concerns and self-indulgent use of time. And, truth be told, as I prodded the strangeness of this moment, I wondered about shame, but the shoe didn’t fit. My recuperation was not immoral, merely strange — merely disjointed — because he and I were once at the same school at the same time and were friends; we ate meals together, and now he is a captive. His body has been commandeered by armed and angry men (and likely boy soldiers, too, 12 or 14 years old), and my body is healing, throwing off the temporary influence of a minor virus and returning to total self-possession.
He was in the DRC with the United Nations, a peace worker. I don’t know the details of his job. To be frank, I had only casually tracked his career from Facebook — interested and impressed, but in general terms. I knew him to advocate for peace concretely. He went to the places where there were decisions to be made and leaned on the side of nonviolence and justice, as we were taught to do. We grew up Mennonite, he and I, and we were taught to love peace.
This dedication to peace is more than a tradition with Mennonites; it is our identity. Why do we love peace? Orderliness, perhaps? The pieces fit right; everyone has a place and a purpose and dignity. But, no, in reality, peace turns out to be something much more gradual, more cumbersome and more grand. It is resurrection, restoration, recreation. It is the eroding beachhead of resentment, the loose sand reformed into a new landscape with puddled reservoirs where sand crabs bubble. Peace is birthed from violence. It is the long-descended child of the precarious and entropic. Whereas violence is a calving glacier — ragged, disorienting, unpredictable — peace is a rolling moraine a hundred thousand years later, green and ancient ... arable after all this time.
And it does take time. I am checking the news every hour, though nothing is new. Neither the generating violence nor the descendant peace will be finished in hours or days. It will loop around the sun over and over, stringing garlands of effort in the empty space. We are working up momentum, not to sling ourselves out of orbit (for we would die instantly) but to nudge the path of the planet onto a safer, more just course. We have to stay here because this is where life is. A body, no matter how ill, cannot be healed by the body. We remain.
The miracle of the immune system is that it enlists us in our own healing. It pre-empts total collapse with pain, heat, infection. We learn to outline the difference between wellness and disease in a catalogue of aches and pains. The peace of a quiet weekend tunes my senses to the highway violence of racism, capitalism and nationalism. We know the signs of sickness because we know health, and we can strike for healing. Knowing peace, its enemy is clear. We must sit down in the midst of the chaotic stream and force a slow disruption. The resurrection to come craters in around the stubborn and immovable advocate of peace.
To do its work, I should warn you, peace may first appear as violence, and it may need to take your body. •
Three bodies were found in a shallow grave near where my friend and his colleagues went missing. They have since been identified as Betu Tshintela, Zahida Katalan and Michael Sharp, whom I know as M.J.