disputes.
Finally, most peacemakers, especially religious ones, believe that peace is both an external state of concord and an internal state of tranquility. Some twenty-five centuries ago, the philosopher Plato drew an analogy between political justice and individual virtue. Both, he argued, are defined by a right proportionality, or justice, that establishes harmony, or peace. His point was that the inner and the outer are mutually dependent. The lesson for the peacemaker is the importance of cultivating a harmony in her inner world similar to the one she hopes to nurture in the outer world. Without this integration of inner and outer, the strain of peace work becomes too burdensome. To paraphrase Gandhi, “You must be the [nonviolent] change you wish to see in the world.”
Fortified by these five convictions, peacemakers from a mosaic of cultural perspectives continue to strive for a world in which, as pacifist Peter Maurin once said, it’s a bit easier for men and women to be good. All peacemakers bring different talents and temperaments to the task, and each has something valuable to contribute. What links them—and us—together is the shared desire to be, as a prayer attributed to Francis of Assisi puts it, “instruments of peace.” Our hope is that the entire year’s worth of peacemaker stories offered in this book helps sustain and focus that desire.
• • •
When we began thinking about this book, one of our worries was that we’d have trouble finding enough peacemakers to fill up an entire year’s calendar. It was a silly concern. As we progressed, we realized that our real problem would be figuring out how to hone down the hundreds and hundreds of candidates to a mere 365. It was exhilarating to discover so many fascinating and worthy peacemakers who have made the world a better place, but it was challenging—not to mention humbling!—to decide which ones to include and which ones to leave out. So we want to acknowledge here what will be apparent to discerning readers anyway: there are hundreds of celebrated peacemakers not included in this volume and unsung thousands who labor every day to end violence and promote justice. We know that many of you who will read this book could easily have been profiled in it, or that you know someone who could have been included. Our apologies, and our gratitude, to you all.
The 365 profiles are snapshots rather than fully developed biographies. Sometimes we’ve offered a biographical summary, but more often we’ve focused on a particular event or theme in the individual peacemaker’s life and work that especially reveals his or her character. In preparing the profiles, we combed through multiple resources: biographies and autobiographies, essays, letters, award citations, speeches, news articles, and obituaries. Readers wanting more information may consult the “For Further Reading” bibliography at the end of the book.
In organizing this book, we did our best to match up peacemakers and calendar days according to either their birth or death dates. We were usually successful. But because more than one peacemaker sometimes fit a single date, a few profiles had to be moved to nearby days of the calendar. Then, of course, there are a few other peacemakers, typically ancient but a few more recent, for whom we could find no definite birth or death days. We’ve scattered these throughout the book in a loving but calendrically arbitrary way.
We’re grateful to many people for their advice and encouragement. First and foremost, we’re glad to acknowledge that the initial inspiration for Blessed Peacemakers was Robert Ellsberg’s wonderful book All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. What he did for saints we hope, in a much more modest way, to do for peacemakers.
We are immensely grateful to our copy editor, Jacob Martin, for his expert and conscientious grooming of our text.
In addition, our families and friends have been enthusiastic and helpful supporters of the project from start to finish. It was a rare week when one or the other of them didn’t suggest a new candidate for inclusion in the book or ask us who we happened “to be working on” at the moment. More specifically, Kerry thanks Karl Mattson and Sara Tower for their patience in listening to him think aloud about this project, and for their own inspiring peace work. But the bulk of his gratitude goes, as usual, to his wife, Kim, and his son, Jonah. Robin thanks the group PeaceWay for their continued inspiration and loving example in their daily working for justice and peace. Robin would especially like to thank Chris, Janine, and Sedona.
1 January
Telemachus
Died 1 January 404
Opponent of Gladiatorial Games
The church father Theodoretus reports that in the waning years of the Roman Empire, an ascetic monk “from the east” ventured into a gladiatorial stadium in Rome and tried to put a stop to the bloodthirsty contest that was a staple of Roman culture.
The gladiatorial game originated as a funeral gift for the dead. The first of these funeral rituals occurred in 264 BCE, when Decimus Junius Brutus ordered three pairs of slaves to fight in memory of his father. Over the next few centuries, gladiatorial combat became one of the symbols of Roman culture and authority easily recognized throughout the entire empire. It was also an integral part of the oddly named Pax Romana.
The Pax Romana kept the “peace” in three ways: the military, which used brutal and ruthless violence to keep the Roman “peace”; crucifixion, which served as a public method of execution to suppress any rebellion from conquered lands; and the stadium, the venue of violence for the common people that celebrated the military ideal of conquest through bloodshed.
In the latter part of the fourth century, Roman military might was fraying, stretched too thin by the hopeless task of policing the empire’s borders. Crucifixion had been abolished in 337 by Constantine when he converted to Christianity. The stadium’s gladiatorial combat, still as popular as ever, was the only aspect of the Pax Romana that remained relatively unscathed.
In Greek, Telemachus means “faraway fighter.” It’s an ironic name for a Christian who tried to put a stop to the gladiatorial games. He is said to have descended into the stadium “entreating the combatants” to cease fighting, but was beaten to the ground and killed.
The symbolism of Telemachus’ name wasn’t lost on the faithful in the fifth century. He “fights” (nonviolently) for Christ against the Roman Empire. From the “faraway” east, a place unsullied by the values of the violent Roman culture, he steps into a gladiatorial fight for the sake of the peace of Christ and is martyred.
The historical details about Telemachus’ death are obscure. Some records claim he was killed by the gladiators he confronted, others that he was stoned to death by the spectators, who were furious that their sport had been interrupted. Regardless of how he met his end, Telemachus’ fifth-century biographer Theodoretus clearly saw the death of the ascetic monk from the east as a symbol of Christianity’s repudiation of violence. And whether killed by sword or stone, Telemachus’ death was the catalyst that prompted the Emperor Honorius to end the practice of gladiatorial games in Rome. According to tradition, the final gladiator game in the empire took place on 1 January 404, which is also accepted as the day Telemachus met his end.
2 January
Willi Graf
1 January 1918—12 October 1943
Silence Is Complicity
Born in the final year of World War I to Anna and Gerhard Graf, Willi Graf was one of four children. His family was devoutly Roman Catholic. By the time he was fifteen, the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany, he was a leader in a Catholic youth organization with distinctly anti-Nazi sentiments. When the Nazis outlawed all young peoples’ groups
