On Pacifism

As one who aspires to embody a pacifist posture and life, I can easily be discouraged by the news of the day. For I am just one weak individual, who understands the appeal of justice through any means and if pushed could not say I would not respond in the manner of hate and violence.

It is only by the rising up of a people, a community, the Church that change might be possible – that together we might stand in the face of the tyrant and the bully to say -‘Enough! We will not play by your rules. We will stand with and join the voiceless, the broken and the innocent to take blows to each cheek and on our souls - to death if need be. For hate and violence do not have the last word, nor are they part of the true reality that is bursting forth here and now.'

Stanley Hauerwas reminds us that:

Christians have been offered the possibility of a different history through participation in a community which one learns to love the enemy. They are thus a people who believe that God will have them exists through history without the necessity of war. God has done so by providing them with a history through the church. For without the church we are but a scattered people with nothing in common. Only through the church do we learn that we share the same creator and destiny. So the world’s true history is not built on war, but that offered by a community that witnesses to God’s refusal to give up on his creation.