The breath of peace: Praying through our wounds
“By his wounds you have been healed.”
1 Peter 2:24
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo invited people of all faith traditions from around the world to participate in the prayer vigil for peace, which was held on April 11 at the Vatican. During his homily, Pope Leo said, “War does not solve problems. On the contrary, it amplifies them and causes deep wounds in the history of peoples — wounds that take generations to heal. No military victory can ever compensate for a mother’s pain, a child’s fear, or a stolen future. Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.”
Peace is the gift that Jesus gives to his fearful disciples when he appears to them in the upper room. “Peace be with you,” he says. The Risen Jesus gives them the gift of peace and then “showed them his hands and his side.” Then he breathes on them and gifts his disciples with the Holy Spirit and the power to forgive sins.
The peace of the crucified and resurrected Lord, the peace he won through the wounds on his body and the blood of his cross, is meant to be given away. The gift of peace was given by Jesus to his disciples and to us to motivate us to be agents of peace in a world that stumbles arrogantly into war.
We see the results of how the first followers of Jesus received the gift of peace and put it into action. Throughout the Easter season, we read from the Acts of the Apostles how “all who believed were together and held all things in common.” Every day they shared what they had with one another so no one would be in need. They met together in the temple to pray and give witness to the resurrection, and then they gathered in their homes to break bread. So many were motivated by their peaceful witness that they continued to grow in numbers.
The gift of peace, revealed in the breath of the Risen Christ, offers us, in the words of St. Peter, a “new birth to a living hope.” Though we may be tired, filled with despair, and dying inside from all the violence and war, the scandals and savageries that surround us, that breath of peace stirs within us, awakens hope, and offers us a new birth, a new future.
“Prayer and meditation are, in the final analysis, a place of healing for our life’s wounds,” Tomas Halik wrote. I have found this to be true in my own life. Prayer invites us to go deeper in the wound. To explore the grief, the hurt. To allow it to assimilate into every fiber of our being. Meditation allows us space, quiet, to just breathe. When we breathe in, we expand our hearts. The breath of God’s spirit helps to take the sting out of the wound.
When we examine our wounds, we come to know we are in solidarity with all who are wounded and suffering in the world and with our wounded God. How God must be crying out in pain these days over the dehumanization taking place of people made in God’s image. Children killed in endless wars and by gun violence. People being deported without due process, denied health supplies, displaced, and denied their true self.
When we pray, we pray to be in solidarity with those who suffer, and in the words of Tomas Halik, we “pray for the courage and strength to help, and not to shy away, procrastinate, forget, not to turn a blind eye.”
Prayer is the furnace where our faith in God and our commitment to our brothers and sisters is forged. It is an opportunity for us to enter into dialogue with God who loves us and ignites within us the desire to change ourselves and our world. “Prayer is not a tranquilizing drug or an opportunity to snivel into God’s apron,” Halik writes. But rather to be “remelted and forged into God’s instrument.”
The resurrection of Jesus does not erase the scars of war, violence, retribution, and revenge. Resurrection does not eliminate the injustice and arrogance of power that leads to war. But when Jesus appeared to his disciples in that upper room and breathed on them, he showed us how to carry the wounds and scars, how to accompany the victims, and how to find hope and healing in the despair and death that affects our world.
When we pray through our wounds, we find our voice. There is a famous fable I used to tell when I was a young priest and traveling and teaching about Catholic Social Teaching and specifically the United States Bishops’ pastoral, “The Challenge of Peace.”
“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a sparrow asked a dove.
“Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.
“Let me tell you about the time I sat on a branch of a fir tree,” the sparrow said, “close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not a giant blizzard, no, just like a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say, the branch broke off.”
The sparrow flew away, leaving the dove to ponder the story for a while. Finally, she said to herself, “Perhaps there is only one voice lacking for peace to come in our world.” Is that my voice? Is it your voice?
Joe Nassal, C.PP.S.
Vice Provincial Councilor