The Peacemaker’s Path 

“Blessed are the peacemakers, because they will be called children of God.” Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 5:9)  

Peace must be made. Peace never just “happens.”  

And Jesus isn’t interested in religion that assumes it does. Peace is work. It’s almost always extremely daring, daunting work. Jesus signals this with his seventh blessing in his eightfold path of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  

In many ways, the previous six way-stations map how we become people who can actually do this daring, daunting work. Looking back on Jesus’s Beatitudinal Way, we can see this with clarified vision.  

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven”:Peacemakers are afflicted with poverty just like everyone else. We aren’t immune to suffering or exempt from emptiness. But we embrace the work of accepting that we’re accepted by God. This doesn’t start when we’re on top. It starts when we have nothing left to elevate ourselves over anyone else. In our poverty, we slowly begin receiving the promise that the kingdom of heaven calls us poor people “beloved” and invites us into a new future of full belonging. Rather than being hardened by our pain and striving for appearances of invulnerability, peacemakers embrace being softened and opened to others.  

“Blessed are the grieving, because they will be comforted”: Peacemakers step through and grieve our griefs. We process our devastating disappointments and express them with emotional honesty. As Toni Morrison narrated in “Beloved,” we enter the haunted house of our trauma and receive the promise that we will be comforted, that an Advocate will accompany us and cry with us. With this promise, we resist allowing the powerful energy of our pain to boil into rage and break out with vengeance. Grief is the great unionizer of humanity and connects us with others. It slowly converts us into gentleness.  

“Blessed are the nonviolent, because they will inherit the earth”: Peacemakers practice nonviolence with regulated power. We interrupt the imitation game and resist overcoming poverty and grief by impoverishing and grieving others. Our agency grows responsive and creative rather than reactive and combative. We begin trusting the promise that the whole earth will become our home. Slowly, we learn to accept that we don’t need to dominate and displace others to feel safe. Nonviolence is our planetary future.    

“Blessed are the hungry and thirsty for justice, because they will be filled”: Still, peacemakers hunger and thirst for justice, here and now. We don’t withdraw into passivity and resign the world to evil. We ache for right relationships of mutual flourishing. We dare to reimagine human identity, economic inequity, and political power. We immerse ourselves in this movement of metanoia. But as we crave for change, we learn to face our fear and trust the promise that we’ll be fully satisfied in the end. We won’t starve. And so, we resist becoming judgmental. We refuse to painish – to recycle our pain by punishing others – as we long for things to be right, even when they’re not yet and won’t fully be until the end.   

“Blessed are the compassionate, because they will be mirrored with compassion”: With this trust, peacemakers’ ache for justice expands into compassion. Our heart opens to the suffering of others, whoever they are, and we choose to be a merciful presence in pain. We look inward with honesty at our own rotten capacity to do harm. We look outward with empathy at the suffering of others and the traumas they transmit in the harm they do. And we desire healing and repair for all of us. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison, “Despite everything, we belong to God.” In the end, a mirror of compassion is promised to the compassionate, what Etty Hillesum called “a balm for all wounds.”  

“Blessed are the cleanhearted, because they will see God”: And through the dark nights of our souls – maybe the dark years or dark decades or dark lifetimes – peacemakers allow our selves to be cleansed of all the residual superiority to others that clings to the pain of our poverty. This purifying process can feel blinding, like being buried in darkness and death. But Jesus promises us that the cleanhearted will see God. Nihilism is not the end. Humility opens heaven, and God will appear – not as a ruinous force but as the dove of peace who wings away all violence. Our divine Parent declares that we are beloved children, and we begin to see God in everyone. With time, we return from the wilderness with peace as our life’s work.   

In short, walking the Beatitudinal Way of Jesus makes us into people who can make peace. The peace of God becomes hereditary to our humanity – not merely an idea in our heads or a feeling in our hearts. Peace is no longer an ideology we passively endorse or an isolated activity we do among others. Peace is our Parent. Peace is our primal culture. Peace is our birthright. Our mandate. Our embodied ancestral craft.  

When heaven truly opens, as Jesus saw, we realize that the divine dove is the presence where reality begins and returns. As we practice this presence, relationships of love and justice get woven throughout our poverty and tears, our vulnerability and longing, our anguish and ecstasy. We become these God-begotten humans in whom there is no violence – the unmistakable divine family resemblance.