Dear Friends,

This Sunday we celebrate the Feast Day of St. Francis, the 12th century Italian friar who was known for his love of the natural world and dedication to peaceful relationships between all of God’s creatures – humans, animals, and plants, “Brother Sun, Sister moon, wind and water.” So, I think it is fitting that for the third week in a row, our gospel reading offers us a parable about a vineyard. 

To be sure, this one is among the most challenging. In it, Jesus tells the story of a vineyard owner who sends servants to collect the produce at harvest time, and of tenants who meet the servants with brutal attacks and murder. The landowner then sends his son, thinking the tenants will respect him; instead, they throw him out of the vineyard and murder him, thinking they can get his inheritance. It is a vineyard steeped in violence.

As I pondered this within the context of the life of a Saint who dedicated his life to God’s “Peaceable Kingdom,” it occurred to me how often violence begins in subtle ways, ways that often do not disrupt the peace…at least not first. Rather, it works its way into tiny openings, taking root in actions that accumulate over time: impatience, indifference, working beyond our weariness, depleting our internal reserves, relying too much on ourselves, pushing anger underground, making assumptions, giving ground to prejudice, stoking resentments…

I don’t think of myself as a violent person, and yet, after this week’s presidential debates, there are some heads I’ve felt the impulse to pinch, sadly to say. So it’s a good week for me to be asking myself, How am I cultivating my vineyard these days, and what am I allowing to seep in—even stuff that seems tiny, microscopic, really, but can take root over time?

I’ve found myself thinking of Etty Hillesum, the brilliant Jewish woman who was killed in the Holocaust and persisted in tending her soul as the world was falling apart. She understood that violence gestates in small acts and individual hearts, and that when we don’t attend to what’s going on inside us, the destructiveness within us accumulates and spills over into the world around us. “Ultimately,” she writes, “we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

It’s a challenge, this peace thing, especially since it specifically does not mean refusing to see the violence that persists in the world or pretending it isn’t there. It doesn’t mean being spineless, or letting the bullies win, or standing by while others are destroyed. Whatever peace doesn’t mean, I do know it includes seeking it within our own selves, cultivating it in the vineyard of our own souls, recognizing that what grows there is intertwined with what grows in the world beyond our own borders.

So, what’s growing in the vineyard of your life? Is there anything you have allowed to seep in and take root? How do you pursue peace there? What practices help you tend that field?

In the words of St. Francis, “Lord, make us instruments of your peace.”

In Christ,

Amelie+