Perfect Peace

My dear Friends
I would like to share with you something that I heard from a friend some time ago, when I was staying with her by the coast in East Anglia. It was something that made a deep impression on me and is related to my Peacemaking work.

My friend told me that she had been walking along the sands, near the pier. Suddenly she saw a long line of women, an endless line, shoulder to shoulder and with a look of perfect peace on their faces. Surely a beautiful sign of the future?

In the Bible it is the women who have the tenacity and endurance in their personal relationships and in the hardships they have to face. We only have to take the Book of Ruth, and the covenant love between Ruth and her daughter Naomi. Ruth pledges to remain with her mother-in-law when she has been bereaved and lost her husband and her son, who was married to Ruth, from the Moabite people.

'Do not entreat me to leave you, or to go from following after you: wherever you go, I shall go. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you shall die, I shall die, and there I shall be buried.'

This capacity to live out different roles as women and to form close bonds, extends to the New Testament, to the relationship between Mary, pregant with Jesus, and her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, who leaps with JOY in the womb on encountering Jesus and his mother. In my own life I have experienced very close bonds with my female cousins. The relationship between Naomi and Ruth and Mary and Elizabeth transcends any boundaries of age, as they share a common suffering and a common vision.

It is my firm belief that the peace of this present world will come from the women. In Israel/Palestine at 12 midday each Friday, the 'women in black' stand silently at all the major crossroads, holding up banners of peace. We women from all cultures,religions and ages have the capacity and tenacity in our feminine way to carry a peacemaking process through. We must use all our nuanced resources at the pastoral as well as the intellectual level to bring this about.

Shabbat shalom, rest well
Sister Gila