|
If there is no way to Peace from where we are with what we've got, we have to make a very costly choice-for there is no peace with any lesser god still in our pack-sack. This means no peace and property; no peace and patriotism; no peace and position, no peace and power. It means no peace and any other priority. It means that even partial peace requires the release by us of some property, patriotism, position, and power. For these are the spoils of a war we have fought.
Look backward. The last time you were at peace you were nine years old; pre-puberty, pre-property, pre-responsibility-except that you were already at war, with your brothers and your tribe and your treasures. Where is Peace? Nowhere! We shall have to live with War or without anything else unless there is either a new kind of peace or a new kind of man.
When God talked Peace once he did it by, with, and through a Man, the Only Man, the Man none of our wants and desires could entrap and enslave.
The Star of this Hope is a man who weighs as much naked as dressed. He transcends the racial, regional, religious buckets of our existence by his ability to move in and out. He has dimensions of selfhood beyond nation, beyond property, beyond regional views of race. He knows that for everybody there is something more to be than American, white, Protestant, and local. There is a larger race, the human race. There is a larger region. There is a larger Church than ours.
One has gone before us into a Manhood and a Community that lies within our reach. The method is dialogical and requires us to hear each other. The setting is cruciform and demands our lives and fortunes. The characters are human. The drama has consequence - we can afford to work at being brothers to the race because we have met here, and there, too, a very great Grace.
|
