This is my homily for today, the Second Sunday of Easter. The readings for today are here.
“Peace be with you.”
This weekend is a grim milestone: it marks two months since Russia invaded Ukraine. Oftentimes, we don’t appreciate good things, like peace in our lives, until they’re gone; and it would be hard to find a more poignant way to illustrate how blessed peace is than to look at what is happening in Ukraine, now that peace has been snatched away from it. For the last two months, the news media has given us image after image of an army on the march, buildings reduced to rubble, and bodies, including civilian bodies, lying in the streets.
“Peace be with you”. Three times over the course of two appearances, Jesus greeted his disciples with those words. Jesus did not use words casually, and we may be sure that his words, “Peace be with you”, meant much more than a perfunctory greeting like “Hello” or “Hey, how’s it going?”. From the lips of Jesus, “Peace be with you” was a prayer, an exhortation, a blessing. Jesus was giving his disciples a gift, the gift of peace.
What is this gift of peace? The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting St. Augustine, defines peace as “the tranquility of order.” Peace is “the tranquility of order.” Both those words, “tranquility” and “order” are important to help us understand what peace is. Persons who are tranquil are calm, placid, unruffled. Even serene. Perhaps you may know placid and serene persons in your own life.
Very likely, when Jesus’s disciples had gathered in the locked room that evening, they were anything but calm, placid, unruffled and serene. It’s not difficult to guess at their torrent of emotions: they were upset, grieving and terrified for their lives, after having witnessed Jesus’s torture and death. At the same time, they were confused that the tomb was empty. If anyone needed the gift of peace at that moment, it was them.
The second key word from St. Augustine’s definition of “peace” is “order”: Peace is the “tranquility of order”. When things or people are properly ordered, it means that they are organized in the right relationship with one another. For example, consider the ideal of a family. All of us long for peace in our families; we want our families to be founts of peace, flowing outward to the other parts of our lives. The traditional ideal of a well-ordered family consists of two parents who love one another and love their children. In an ideal family, these parents lead their families by dedicating themselves to the health, growth and flourishing of their children. Ideally, a well-ordered family has the necessities and goods to flourish, such as a safe and secure home, and enough food, and good jobs for the parents, and good schools for the children. To be sure, what I’ve described is the ideal, and the ideal isn’t reality for many of us. Not all parents are in good marriages, or any marriage at all; some of us have serious dysfunctions in our family lives, such as mental illness, or addiction or abuse; and many families lack those necessary goods such as jobs which pay a sustainable wage, or good schools or adequate healthcare. We may not live in an ideal family, but we do our best. We may not achieve true peace in our family lives, but we come as close as we’re able.
What I’ve just described makes sense in a peaceful civil society, such as what prevails in the United States. But when the church looks like at a war-afflicted country like Ukraine, it sees a place which is the opposite of a place of orderly tranquility. Tranquility has been destroyed, and order has disintegrated in the violence and chaos of war. The effect of war on Ukrainian families has been devastating. Families have been split apart, with many women and children fleeing the country, while the men stay behind to fight. Homes have been destroyed. Shells are raining down on communities. School, church and other communal and civic institutions and activities have ceased. War kills any prospect of peaceful flourishing.
The Catholic church has had two millennia to think long and deeply about war, and its conclusion is that war is very bad. There is no such thing as a good war, although war may be necessary to defend ourselves, as the Ukrainians are attempting to do. If you follow Pope Francis, you know he is trying to find a way to halt the fighting and bombardment and bring about peace in that war-torn country. Francis is trying to be a peacemaker.
In fact, all of us who follow Jesus are called to be peacemakers – bringers of peace, creators of peace, models of peace.
Peace isn’t something that is only needed in places that are in shooting wars. We don’t have armed conflict in our American society, but we’re still suffering from a peace deficit. Our society is riven by political and social conflict and widespread distrust. During recent decades, social forces, including the influence of technology, media and social media seem to have pulled us farther apart from one another. So many of us live in isolation from one another, in bubbles of our own construction. We distrust other people and groups, and can be ignorant of how other fellow Americans live and what they experience. The opportunities for us to be peacemakers in our own communities, building bridges between those who are separated, are vast. Our families, our classrooms and our workplaces can be places of conflict; the need for peacemakers at home, at school and at work can be tremendous.
Recently, one of my co-workers paid me a compliment. I work in a pretty stressful and high-pressure environment, and there is conflict among my co-workers. In my workplace, we engage in peer performance reviews: that means that we all review each other’s work. Fortunately, most people are very kind to one another in those reviews – which is a very good thing: that kindness is the sort of “social lubrication” which helps build peace. (Pro tip: one way to help build peace in the workplace is to not tell your co-workers what you really think of them.) In our most recent round of these peer reviews, one guy said something nice about me: he said, “Jim is always so calm and tries to help the team succeed. He’s the guy who keeps us all from tearing each other apart.” I was really grateful for those words. I wish that was the kind of thing that resulted in big raises and bonuses, but in my experience, that’s not how the workplace ticks. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I’m perceived as a peacemaker – someone who builds peace in the workplace. It seems to me that being a peacemaker at work isn’t always a strenuous activity: sometimes, we can make a peaceful difference by our presence, our demeanor, our attitude.
And that’s where this place comes in. We gather here, and we encounter Jesus in the Word of God. God’s Word inspires us. And we encounter Jesus in the Eucharist; that sacrament gives us grace to be signs of peace and bringers of peace to the world.
When Jesus greeted his disciples with, “Peace be with you”, he followed it right up with, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” The disciples were given the gift of peace, and then they were sent out to be peacemakers. We’re disciples, too. We’ve also been given the gift of peace. And now we’re also being sent into the world, not to add to the conflict, not to get everyone all stirred up and upset, but to bring peace. Peace has been given to us. It’s a great gift. Let us in turn now give peace to others.
“Jim is always so calm and tries to help the team succeed. He’s the guy who keeps us all from tearing each other apart.”
ReplyDeleteIn the research on leadership this describes the sort of leadership that women have traditionally exercised in groups. In the last several decades as leadership styles traditionally associated with women have become acknowledged, men who exercised these types of leadership were rewarded, especially if they continued to exercise more assertive and directive leadership. They got salary raises.
On the other hand, women who exercised these more traditionally feminine skills were not usually rewarded. Consultants to women emphasized the importance of women including these skills in their goals and objective so that they could then point to what they had done (even if it was what they had always done)
Women who attempted to include more assertive and directive skills in their leadership even while maintaining some of their more feminine skills were not reward like men who combined both but were sanctioned for their unfeminine behavior.
I suspect as a deacon when it comes to performance evaluation your peacemaking skills may not be reward since of course that is what people expect you would do.
You could just simple this up, Jack, and say that women are not rewarded.
DeleteIn my experience in academia and non-profits, people who lead collaboratively and by consensus tend to be valued seconds-in-command, often rulers de facto without the commensurate salaries. They are the ones the CEO or chairman will send to finesse problems.
But that style of leadership tends to be seen as weak by those who are autocratic and/or think that pitting people against each other gets the best results.
My penchant for pitiless, rational analysis was probably the most valued managerial skill I had. I did my homework, I had numbers, and I drew on practical and past experience. I validated info with others. And I could pull it all together and present it on one page. I was often the "reality check" person. If you don't go on and on (which I do in private life) people pay more attention to you.
However, you can become something of a Cassandra, predicting things others don't always want to hear and then being resented when they ignore your warnings and it goes to pot.
I dislike ascribing "masculine" and "feminine" labels to leadership styles. I don't think they hold up in real life. I don't think women soften or make the workforce more humane than men with any predictable regularity.
My experience of senior management teams is that they work best when they have a great deal of diversity of talent and experience and become what Greenleaf calls primus inter pares groups. In practice that means the CEO and everyone else on the team understands, values and does not try to second guess other people in their responsibilities. I have had both a male and female CEO who have done that and the members of the group have been both men and women.
DeleteHowever, with regard to the rest of the organization there typically has been the need for both good cops and bad cops in the leadership team. I have played both roles.
In the largest mental health center in Toledo, because of a phase down of a federal grant we faced losing a quarter of a million dollars each year in steps over four years. The Woman CEO had to articulate not only that reality but also give people the hope that it could be done.
My data was the hope. I showed them not only what they needed to do in very reasonable steps, but also gave them the feedback reports that kept them on target. What looked that an unavoidable catastrophe was solved by transforming ourselves into a high quality organization at all levels.
When I came to our county mental health board, the problem was dire but not impossible. County’s could get additional state funding by keeping their patients out of state hospitals, but it looked impossible to do. We also had the opportunity to increase our funding through new levies, an uphill battle. We succeeded in doing both.
I had to take a stronger role through planning processes, data, and ideas. Boards in Ohio fund but do not directly operate services. Boards can take away funds from an agency but that often harms consumers; boards cannot hire or fire anyone in the agencies. Agencies have a lot of resistance to change.
Fortunately, we have well organized consumer groups in the county for both severely mentally disabled adults and for children. I became the hero of both. Our board was very pro-consumer.
In regard to agencies, I continued the very successful practice of working closely with agencies around data that I had begun in Toledo. Organizational change is difficult, it requires both carrots and sticks. Part of the stick for agencies is the fear that if they don't respond to what the board and consumers want, other agencies will and funding will shift.
When I read some of what you all describe as what you had to deal with in your various organizations,I have to give a small prayer of thanks that I was able to create my own career as a freelance consultant. I worked 85% of the time from home, and whenever I had to attend a team meeting of some kind in the offices of my clients, was also grateful that I could be a fly on the wall, observing the office politics, but not forced to be part of them.
DeleteI once took a course on "How to be a paid consultant." The instructor said that in the course of consulting one is likely to encounter organizations which have a "people" problem. He said that 95% of the time that "people" problem will be the person who hired you as a paid consultant.
DeleteJack, that only happened to me once. Ironically that person was a woman, Catholic, head of a non-profit, married to a Catholic who was often in the news - they were fairly prominent in the political realm. She was the only Catholic client I ever had - we met via the Catholic school we sent our sons to for elementary. I got along well with my clients and have maintained 20+ year long friendships with a couple of them, even though it’s been 12-15 years since our professional relationships ended.
DeleteJack, I should add that turnover in her organization, small as it was, was head-spinning. During the 10 months I survived working for her, three different program directors were hired and then quit. One of them (who left a couple of weeks after I started my work for the organization) told me the day she left that I should look up the term “Founder’s Syndrome “. As a consultant, not there most of the time, I survived a bit longer than some of her senior staff, but finally she and I had a major disagreement over an issue. We didn’t see eye to eye on it. So I said farewell. A few months later I got word that my position on the issue had been 100% vindicated, and that the organization had won a very large foundation grant because of my work. She wrote me a note after that suggesting that I stop by the office if I was in town. But I knew better than to go back for another round!
DeleteJim, I like your homily's focus on peace. We could certainly use more of the peace of Christ. Quite a few songs in our choir repertoire have the theme of peace.
ReplyDelete