This post was first published ten years ago (without the photograph).
Ukrainian soldiers at rest New York Times Getty Images
Each Sunday on the way to church I listen to an NPR program called “On Being.” This program used to focus on religion but it has expanded to include philosophy and science. Today there was a conversation between the host, Krista Tippet, and two people, a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, who are part of a peace movement aimed at personal reconciliation. Both lost a loved one in the continuous fighting in the Holy Land, but they have become friends and co-workers in the daunting field of reconciliation.
I had thought that Jesus said in the Beatitudes (Matthew chapter 5) “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall find peace.” However, when I looked it up I found that what he said was, “Blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall be called the ‘children of God.'” So no promise of peace. As I listened I thought about how difficult and hopeless the road these two were walking down. Think of this century and the last one, and how nations rush off to war without considering the cost. At the time everything — nation, pride, revenge, justice, honor, glory — all seem more important than the cost, and perhaps there are conflicts where this is true. But the cost is so much greater than we expect.
I have been reading about Lincoln and the great Civil War that punished this nation. Lincoln was not a believer in an evangelical sense, but he read deeply in the Bible and believed in a God who balanced the scales. Thus he could say of the North and the South in his second inaugural:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
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With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
So, in this most terrible of wars, one that pitted brother against brother, one that spilled more American blood than any other, one, that I believe, was rooted in justice, and one which took more than a hundred years to fully end, peace was worth less than other things men valued. So blessed be the peacemakers, who may never find peace, but are called the children of God.
An economist without guile 