Two great modern teachers speak to us today and help us understand that the power to create peace truly resides within our own souls. When we can act in accordance with our principles and forgive our frailties and the frailties of others, peace will settle in us. And when it does, we will have an abundance to share.
Forgiveness
Maíread Corrigan-Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize winner and co-founder of the Community of Peace People in Northern Ireland said, “We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.”
Right Action
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves.
On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practice the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds!
We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice.
This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.”
Together we continue to pray the Novena for Peace prayer ritual.
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