Waging Peace

This week, a piece of paper fell out of something in the kitchen and landed on the floor. It was a poem that someone, one of friends in Montreal, wrote about us. Since it is not signed we don’t exactly know who. But if you know, please tell us. Evidently we stuck it away in something as we were packing.

It is quite a beautiful thing to find a poem “out of the blue” written to you and about you. It means much more now than during the going-away party were we receive. I thought I would share it, even though there are a lot of “inside” references that only those in our CURIEUX community would understand.

Waging Peace

Waging peace with your breath,
breathing in Québec culture and
breathing out Curieux,
and holy experience of fresh new ways
to live in God’s kingdom:
food chain…collage…book burning*…
Breathing in “modern” images of faith and
breathing out prayer stations….
encounters with the God of peace and forgiveness.
Breathing in confusion and
breathing out thinking and reflecting in community
Breathing in the fringy radical types and
breathing out opportunities of
free creative expression…”grace” and
lifelong friendships intact.
Waging peace with your listening,
Prayer-walking for the city’s pain

Remember your tools:
Seed balls, shared travel, clean rivers, guerrilla labyrinths
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and to make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
Imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
Or the gesture of a guerrilla choir
for the other side.

Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if reconciliation has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

Thank you / Merci beaucoup / Obrigadinho  to whoever wrote this for us….It is truly beautiful and touches us in a very deep, sweet spot.

* “book burning” was our term for studying a book in one night – burning right through a book.