Can Christians Be Makers of Peace?
I can think of nothing more prophetic than to preach the gospel of Jesus. Nothing more radical, more countercultural, than to nurture and promote the values of the Spirit—love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness as well as self-control—in little ways and great. —Cyprian Consiglio, Epiphanies
Camaldolese monk and songwriter Cyprian Consiglio shares a memory of visiting Israel and Palestine:
One of the strongest images I have from my brief but intense pilgrimage to the Holy Land is of Rabbi Eli, who was probably the closest thing to one of the Hebrew prophets I have ever met. This was an Israeli who had been arrested several times for standing in solidarity with Palestinians, protesting the human rights violations against them…. We were standing at a high spot in East Jerusalem looking out over the disputed territories, and Rabbi Eli was pointing out the various iterations of the security wall making its serpentine way through Palestinian land. He was showing us a map of a new settlement about to begin construction in defiance of the UN and the US, which would effectively cut Palestine in half, thus preventing any possibility of Palestinians ever having a contiguous piece of land to call their state and effectively destroying the so-called two-state solution. Rabbi Eli said, “And so we are asking ourselves: What time is it? Is it a quarter to midnight? Is it five minutes to midnight? With this development I think it’s one minute to midnight. It’s almost too late.”
That moment seared so deeply in my mind that on the way home on the plane I wrote a whole song about it called “One Minute to Midnight,” the closest thing to a ’60s-style protest song I had ever written. One of the verses included lines that were my sadly ironic version of the famous verses from the prophet Isaiah: “We’ve beaten our ploughshares back into swords / and made spears of our pruning hooks.” And I added, “We’ve turned revelation to a battle of words / and made weapons of our holy books.”
Consiglio finds himself changed by Rabbi Eli’s solidarity with the Palestinian people:
My friends told me that when I came back from that trip to the Holy Land my preaching changed. It was more fiery, more “prophetic,” I suppose. I was fired up by the frustration and energized by the agitation that I felt witnessing up close a situation that was patently unsustainable and obviously unjust, but with no visible solution and no one with enough real moral authority to “fix” everything. And I think I felt like never before the challenge of being a follower of Jesus, and I glimpsed what a privileged position we Christians have there in the Holy Land as well as in the world at large, to stand in the breach between our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters and dare to preach love of our enemies, dare to believe that peace is possible, dare to take Jesus at his word.
Reference:
Cyprian Consiglio, Epiphanies of Nature and Grace: Twelve Meditations from a Life in Dialogue (Orbis, 2025), 98–99, 105–106.
Image credit and inspiration: Ashkan Forouzani, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Iran, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Each bead in a strand could represent a faith tradition—rising beyond rivalry to something new, larger, and whole—while holding fast to the beauty of its own singular shape.
Story from Our Community:
Sometimes I see God in the most unexpected places. The other day, I was sitting in a McDonald’s, watching others enjoy their meals. I saw two female friends chatting and a grandfather giggling and holding his two grandchildren close. Most beautiful of all, I witnessed two young men pushing the wheelchair of their friend who looked unwell and emaciated. The gentleness, care, and love were so evident in their faces and actions; it moved me deeply. Truly, God was present.
—Sue W.