Many years ago, I did what was once called the “Grand Tour,” most of a year spent backpacking around Europe. It was both and education and an escape from a stuck place, a reset button in the game of life. While there, I discovered a particular jest, often in the form of coffee mugs and t-shirts, that went something like this:
In heaven, the English are the police, the French are the chefs, the Germans are the mechanics, the Italians are the lovers, and the Swiss organize everything.
In hell, the Germans are the police, the English are the chefs, the French are the mechanics, the Swiss are the lovers, and the Italians organize everything.
Like all good comedy, it is funny because it contains some truth. I’m all for Fish and Chips, but have you ever actually had “bubbles and squeak”? Or tried to keep a Renault on the road?
Nations develop reputations, sometimes to their shame, sometimes a matter of great pride. The Romans took great pride in their reputation, not for their roads or architecture, not for their philosophers or historians. No, what the Romans were particularly proud of was their brutality. Their empire did not stretch from England to Persia because they were kind and everyone wanted to be part of the team. Their parasitic colonial enterprise existed because they were cruel.
One measure of that cruelty is the practice of crucifixion. It has become easy as the centuries have unspooled to think of the crucifixion of Jesus as a one-off, singular event. It was not. In fact, the story that is told of the execution of Jesus is unique, but only in that it is cleaner and kinder than the norm.
Crucifixion shares a root with the word excruciating, and with good reason. Death by asphyxiation, exhaustion, and dehydration could take days. The victim was nude and might be nailed or tied to the crossbeam, a hundred pounds or so and carried by the victim. Often the legs were broken and the genitals mutilated once on the cross. Even after death, the body was left there to rot, in a very public place, as a warning to anyone else who might challenge Roman rule. This included not only resistance leaders like Jesus, for you surely must consider him as someone who resisted Roman rule and the Judean elite that colluded with them, but also escaped or disobedient slaves, for like the U.S. economy before the Civil War, the Roman economy was fueled by the broken bodies of the enslaved, in the coliseum and deep in the mines.
This, then, was the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, a peace of terror and despair. It is the gospel story, fortunately untrue, that we always cut from our Christmas pageants, the slaughter of the boys of Bethlehem by Rome’s puppet king in Judea, Herod the Great. The Christ event is not the absence of violence and evil. It is the triumph of good over violence and evil, whether it is the Holy Family sneaking across the border or the victim rising from an undeserved grave.
So before we get too maudlin in our Advent focus on peace, all fluffy sheep on a hillside with happy shepherds and saccharine angels in the sky, we should remember that peace does not mean the mere absence of conflict, as the Rev. Dr. King reminded us. It means the presence of justice.
Besides, scripture tells us that the shepherds were terrified when the angels appeared in the sky. And the angelic announcement of peace was not for all of humankind, but only for those God favors.
And while we are deconstructing our pacifism, we might also take down that old trope “it takes two to tango,” because while it might take two to pull off that dance, conflict does not take two willing participants. You can be as at peace as you want as your bloody nose drips on to the sidewalk, as tanks roll across your border, as Christian American jihadis takeaway your right to make choices for your own body or to marry who you choose.
It does not matter if you think you are at war when the other side believes they are at war with you. There is no peace when their decisions put your peace at risk, put your life at risk, when they refuse a vaccine or to wear a mask, when they buy their teenagers 9mm handguns.
Peace, in any meaningful way, will only start when we humans find peace in ourselves, and that is a doozy, and always has been, for most humans are not at peace with their own mortality and act out that fear in ways that are toxic and dangerous, for themselves, for other humans, for other living species, and increasingly, for the planet itself. And not one single strip of land, not one object manufactured in Communist China, no pill or magic goop peddled by a former actress, no horse de-wormer, is going to prevent these bodies from failing sooner or later.
I have for years admired the equanimity of devoted Buddhists, though the Buddhist violence against Muslims in Myanmar has taken a bit of the shine off of that particular tradition. Still, there is something to be learned about their practice, even if the practitioners turn out to be merely mortal capable, of the same violent nonsense as the rest of us.
St. Thomas Merton reminded us that the spiritual practice that some call meditation has existed in every great tradition, existed under many different names. Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, meditation or prayer or ecstasy, mystic visions or emptiness and inter-being, matters not. Those who devote a portion of their time to their spiritual health, who soften the barrier between the constructed self and the non-self, experience peace and become peacemakers. For this is what we are called to be, not pacifists, but peacemakers.
We might wish to turn everyone into a Bodhisattva or a saint, but I, and possibly you have a way to go. What I can do is take away some of the needless causes of fear and anxiety by addressing systemic evils, greed and corruption and systemic racism, wealth disparity and the lie that says the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor, for Ayn Rand’s gospel of selfishness is hell on earth, violent and cruel, a Pax Solo where the only God is the one in the mirror, and that a twisted and deformed god filled with terror and rage like the worst depictions of Yahweh.
We must make peace with our mortality through spiritual practice, for we cannot win against finitude,. But we can and must also address the things we can control, these other sources of fear. For it was soldiers who carried out Herod the Great’s orders in that biblical fiction, and they could have refused.
We no longer accept “acting under orders” as cover for crimes against humanity. It was this, reminding soldiers that they were called to God’s higher law, that led to the assassination of St. Oscar Romero, and while José Napoleón Duarte would say there was blame on both sides, that was a lie. But just as with Jesus, murder did not stop the power of love.
And ultimately, that is our answer. Peace can never come from fear. It can never come from submission. It can never come from brutality. The domestic violence victim trapped in fear does not know peace.
Peace is not a magic baby. Every baby is filled with holy magic!
Peace can only come from love in action. Love of this life and all that is beautiful and amazing and transcendent in creation, in the faces and spirits of those with whom we travel in this all-too-brief and sometimes shockingly beautiful life, and love of ourselves, for you cannot love your neighbor as you love yourself if you do not, in fact, love yourself.
Love in action, peace in our spirits and in our lives, and an order of fish and chips wrapped in newsprint with salt and vinegar, and an unarmed “Bobby” directing traffic. Sounds way less terrifying than angels in the sky.
Amen.