A HOPE FOR PEACE

Gratitude is the emotional response to the surprise of our very existence.

Diana Butler Bass
(Grateful, p. 43)

I am writing on Thanksgiving Eve of 2023 – Wednesday, November 22.

It didn’t occur to me until last night, as my wife and I were driving home from an interfaith Thanksgiving service, that it was sixty years ago, on this very day, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

If you were alive in those days, depending on how old you were, I imagine you still remember the day as if it were yesterday.

I have lived that day over so often that it’s remarkable that I haven’t written about it on this blog. But I did a search of all my published posts and the only reference was a brief mention a couple years ago on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus.

It was the fall of my sophomore year in college. I was leaving a psychology class on a Friday afternoon when a friend of mine entered the classroom and said, “The President’s been shot. They don’t expect him to live.”

My dismissive response was, “Oh, yeah, and I was born yesterday!”

It was utterly unimaginable, in my mind at least, that anyone would be so brazen as to shoot a President. It’s the stuff one reads about in history books. It has obviously happened – Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, come to mind immediately – but not in my lifetime. The President has Secret Service to protect him. Yet on this day, sixty years ago, his protection failed.

A few minutes later, as I walked across campus, a fellow student approached me and said, “It’s too bad about the President, isn’t it?”

I looked at him in stunned disbelief. “You mean it’s true?”

At that instant, my legs turned to rubber. I was paralyzed. Things began to swirl around me in slow motion. And almost as if to underscore the moment, the bells from the carillon tower began tolling. I was living a nightmare in real time.

Many tragedies have happened since that day. A mere five years later, this nation witnessed two more assassinations of public figures – Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the President’s brother, who was himself a candidate for the presidency. My thoughts at the time were that the country was going to hell in a handbasket in pretty short order.

And yet, here we are sixty years later, numbed to the idea of murder. Killings are almost a daily occurrence, not only of individuals, but of masses of people at any given time. So great are the numbers that we’ve lost track of the total. There are websites dedicated to documenting the data because it is humanly impossible to remember them all.

How insensitive have we become to the loss of human life? How indifferent to the misery of human tragedy?

My intention was to write something hopeful today. Something that would inspire us to think about gratitude as we prepare to gather with family and friends and celebrate our national Thanksgiving holiday.

So I turned to one of my anchor passages from Scripture from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonian Christians.

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”  

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Paul, as is usually the case, was writing to this community to address a conflict.

I imagine those times, ancient as they may be, were not unlike our own. The apostle himself was no stranger to despair. But what is most impressive is his almost irrepressible sense of hope. And that is what continues to draw me to this letter.

How, then, do we look forward to the future?

I wondered about that as we worshipped last night. I looked around the sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Canton and I was filled with hope. Here were people from several different faith traditions – Christian, Jewish, Muslim – but all gathered in unity of purpose. We were thankful and glad to be with each other.

We ended our service with the song, “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me

Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be

With God our Creator, we are family.

Let us walk with each other, in perfect harmony.

Let peace begin with me, let this be the moment now

With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow

To take each moment and live each moment in peace eternally

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me

– by Jill Jackson and Sy Miller

As people of faith, we know that we can live a life of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. As children of God, we were created for goodness. We were not put on this earth to destroy each other, but to care for each other. Therefore, it should not be a struggle to be more caring and gentler with each other in order to live in peace.

The choice is ours.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving!