Power beyond might and money

I asked my students if they had heard of the 16-page letter, "A Common Word Between Us and You," sent by 138 Muslim clerics (12 from the U.S.) to Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict, the archbishop of Canterbury (leader of the Anglican/Episcopal churches), leaders of Protestant bodies and denominations around the world, and Orthodox leaders. They stared at me blankly. I told them that this letter came from a wide range of Muslim leaders and stated that "Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world … our very eternal souls are … at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony."

My students had not heard about this letter. Actually, I read about it in The Christian Century, not in the other papers I try to read regularly. Surely, it was there somewhere in those other papers. Well, maybe. I asked my students why they thought it wasn't on the front page. If 138 Muslim clerics had condemned Christianity, I have a strong hunch that would have been on the front pages of papers, so why wasn't this-

One wag in the class quipped, "Because the letter didn't have a bomb attached-"

I grabbed the chalk and put up the Web site where they could find the letter: www.acommonword.com, and one response can be located at www.yale.edu/faith/abou-commonword.htm. Some of them wrote it down.

I have suspicion that the reason this effort by Muslim clerics didn't make the nightly news was because we really don't think goodness and good intentions are very powerful. They are nice. They are admirable. But real power is located at the end of a gun barrel or contained in a bomb. Real power can be located on Wall Street or in the White House. We like to talk about The Power of One; we say that one person can make a difference. We make movies about the lone righteous person who saved the day or saved the refugees or stood up to power. We pay money to see those movies and want to believe their message, but we don't trust it, not for a minute. We trust guns and money. We trust that evil is truly powerful. Goodness is a sentimental wimp.

We look at history and are quite sure it confirms our worst suspicions. We have affection for Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Great folks. But we believe the real world changers are people with wealth or armies or both.

The Muslim clerics thought that the conflict between Christianity and Islam matters, and they thought they could do something about it. They trusted that goodness had power. They are not alone.

Every day, there are ordinary people around the world who take a chance that their little contribution to happiness, peace and good will among people just might have power. They defy the powers of conflict by trying to bring about reconciliation between warring factions in their lives. They encourage the despairing. But a lot of days, even the best of them have a hard time believing any of it makes much of a difference. Sometimes I think part of the problem is that they (we) have no idea how many other people out there are also doing their little bit. Sometimes I think hope is hard to come by because destruction is so noisy and creation is so quiet. Take down Trade Towers and you can't miss the crash. Build or grow anything and it seems to take forever; it is quiet and unspectacular. You can cut down a tree or a person in an instant. Getting either one of them started takes a long time.

This holiday season I am going to pay more attention than usual to the creators of strong children, peaceful relationships, and happiness in places where sadness threatens to snuff out hope. I am going to keep a sharp eye out for tree saplings, and be thankful for all those people now gone who planted the big trees that grace the land around me. Just for a day I am going to experiment with trusting that goodness may be more powerful than I imagine, and destruction, while very real, may be hollower than I once thought. Just for one day I will experiment with trusting that there may actually be a lot more goodness in the world than the front page of the paper can document.  Tomorrow, I may go back to believing in the unchallenged power of weapons and wealth, but surely I can take off one day to believe that all the world's great religions might be onto something when they proclaim that there exists a power even greater than all the evil in the world.

Patricia Hunt is a Mary Baldwin College chaplain and Staunton resident.