Peace in the Making

As I reflect on the month of January, where we celebrated the birthday of arguably the greatest civil rights giant this world has ever known, and we enter into the month where we celebrate Black history and love I thought I would bring you in as thought partners on a conversation God and I have been having about what peace really is and what it means to be a peacemaker. You see there are some things that I think popular culture, popular religion (especially Christianity) and revisionist history, miss about peacemaking. So I want to explore what peace is and what it means for us, as women of faith, to be peacemakers.

I am sure many, if not all of us, are familiar with the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew; the beatitudes. In verse 9 of this chapter, we have a blessing often related to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and those who engaged in civil disobedience as a tactic for social change during the civil rights movement of the 1960s in America – “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” I will admit that I think this fits. But I will also admit to my frustration about how the word peacemaker is used in relation to Dr. King and those who lead with him, and put their bodies in the way of chaos and violence.

Historian and theologians often misinterpret peacemaking. Peacemaking is really not passive nor is it non-violent. Peace as used here is the same as the Hebrew word, shalom. Shalom doesn’t just mean “peace”; according to Strong’s concordance it means completeness, wholeness, health, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfecteness, fullness, rest, harmony, and the absence of agitation or discord. To make means to create something that does not exist by pulling together parts and pieces and elements that do exist. Peacemaking, therefore is the act of making wholeness out of parts. Thus, peacemakers are those who go into places where brokenness, chaos and fragmentation exist on a mission to create something whole and beautiful out of pieces.

This is why, I have been asking God am I, as a woman of color, called to be a peacemaker. You see black women know something about making wholeness out of scraps. Ask our ancestors, forced into labor on plantations, who made the meals for the big house first and had to use the greens and pig parts left over to feed themselves. We know about making something from scraps. We know about working two or three jobs just to have enough money to pay rent and keep the lights on and then with the little bit left over how to make a pot of beans that will last a week, and how to shop the remnant section to make sure our babies have clothes to wear without holes. We know what it means to have to keep moving and pressing toward the mark with broken bodies and fractured spirits. While enduring the pain of being invisible or inaudible – even with our degrees and credentials and the same or better education and experience as our white counterparts. We have to be called to be peacemakers because how do we function as whole or help build whole families or communities or a whole world with just the scraps we have been given?

Let’s start by getting real about what it means to have peace.

When Dr. King, or Diane Nash or Fannie Lou Haimer, or any of the other nameless, faceless black women whose names we forget to call when we talk about the civil rights movement, went into a situation, you know they were coming expecting conflict. We want peace to mean that there is no conflict or chaos. In fact, peace necessitates conflict or chaos – you wouldn’t need wholeness if something wasn’t broken. You may live in chaos, but having peace means you don’t let the chaos live in you. Peace and peacemaking are the active, daring work of allowing the Holy Spirit to work through you to transform that chaos, and brokenness, and fragmentation into wholeness. Having peace means you have done the work of gathering the fragments and making something new from what remains in chaos’ wake. It’s important to pause here to let you in on what God told me about this particular point – you can’t do this in the world until you do it in yourself.

Women of color, who live with the triple consciousness of our color, gender/sex, and our status as citizens in a white world need especially need to know how to be peacemakers for ourselves. Come on - we are black in the academy, we are women in the academy, we are black women in the academy; we are black in the classroom, we are women in the classroom, we are black women in the classroom; we are black in the pulpit, we are women in the pulpit, we are black women in the pulpit; we are black in the boardroom, courtroom, bedroom, we are women in the boardroom, courtroom, bedroom we are black women…We are confronted all day everyday by people’s opinions and impressions and microaggressions, and if you are anything like me you are suffocating under the weight of the idea of having to work 10 times harder, be 10 times better to get half as far just because you were born into the body you were born into. Wholeness… how do we make wholeness out of those scraps?

Well we start by getting real. We start by being transparent. I told a group of sisters once that our transparency is the key to our transformation. I am not talking about being needy and using your brokenness as a crutch or playing victim. I am talking about having the courage to admit to yourself you are broken and then to find other sisters who you know will pray for you, who you know will support you and who you know will help you pick up the pieces and start to put them together. It means letting go of the things that are breaking you. Either you don’t need them or you are trying to do them in your own strength; either way, God didn’t intend it to be so. Those things don’t make us strong. Sometimes we think being strong means not admitting we have broken places. We want our portrait to look like beautiful colors painted seamlessly and smoothly on an uninterrupted canvas. Peace doesn’t look like that. Have you ever seen a mosaic mural? When you look at it from afar, you see a beautiful, textured, image. When you get a bit closer, you see that that beautiful image is made of cracked glass and broken tiles and held together by mortar or grout. That’s what our peace looks like; beautiful mosaic murals that we have gathered together with the help of sisters who love us enough to help us pick of the pieces when we are falling apart, held together by the cement that is the Holy Spirit…working to create something new and beautiful from the scraps.

#blackwomen #piece #peacemakers #wholeness