Peace on Earth
By Jim Farrell, Professor of History and American Studies
Saturday, Feb. 21, Nobel Peace Prize Forum

"Peace on earth. Good will to men." In the gospel of Luke, these are among the first words spoken after the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. And it's not just a wild-eyed, long-haired prophet who speaks these words-it's a whole host of angels, so you sort of get the sense that people were supposed to pay attention. You get the sense that peace is part of the incarnation, part of the good news that's proclaimed in the life of this baby, part of the gospel that religious people today might actually embody. And you get the sense that there might be real religious reasons for thinking about peace.

Each year, the Peace Prize Forum helps us think about peace by putting us in conversation with people who embody peace in a wide variety of ways, from Presidents to Prime Ministers to peacemakers in small towns like Northfield, Minnesota. We see peace expressed in the difficult work of conflict resolution, in the basic business of village banking, and in the arts of painting and sculpture and poetry and dance and music and conversation.

The Peace Prize Forum is a celebration of peace. But even more, I think, the forum is a celebration of work. We live in a country where work is a four-letter word, a country where the great interdenominational prayer, chanted in unison every week, is "Thank God it's Friday." But at the Peace Prize Forum, we celebrate a different interdenominational prayer, the prayer for peace. And we celebrate the hard work of peacemaking, seven days a week. We don't honor Jimmy Carter or Doctor Brundtland or Eboo Patel because they have succeeded in making the world peaceful. The world is not peaceful. We don't celebrate the work of FINCA or the World Health Organization or the Interfaith Youth Core because they make peace perfectly. We celebrate all of them because these people express their faith in their work, whether or not they believe in God. And their faithfulness, not their success, is the true measure of their achievement.

The Peace Prize Forum calls us, therefore, to think about our work, and to think about our work as peacemakers. It calls us to think about vocation, the way we respond to God's call to work for peace in the world. Most of us in this room are called to be students; all of us are called to be learners. One of my favorite cartoons says simply, "If God had wanted us to have peace, She would have given us brains." We might make a litany of similar statements. "If God had wanted us to have justice, She would have given us brains." "If God had wanted us to cultivate and care for the garden of creation, She would have given us brains."

Here's the deal. We have brains. And God wants peace and justice and a natural world teeming with life. So it's our vocation-especially as college students- to use our brains to prepare not for the so-called "real world" and the conventional "good life," but for a better world and a better life. "Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in," Paul Goodman advised students in the 1960s. "What do you need to know to help build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that." Much of the time, sadly, students don't follow his advice. Too often, they prepare themselves to live in "the real world," instead of the world they really want to live in. Too often, they take courses to fulfill requirements instead of requiring courses to fulfill them and to help them build a better world. And students hardly ever demand enough from their professors or their education-or, in fact, from themselves.

Theologian Frederick Buechner defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." If this is true, college is a place for figuring out what the world needs, what gifts we have, and which gifts, given to the world, fulfill us by fulfilling those needs. It's a place for figuring out what we're good at and what we're good for .

In its classical religious sense, vocation is a divine calling, but, even so, it's really not a big deal. In fact, it's a little deal. Vocation is what you do when you get up in the morning. It's what you read and the classes you take. It's who you hang out with, and what you talk about. It's the simple choices of everyday life. It's how we spend our time. Recently one of my former students wrote me a beautiful letter about his struggle to find the good work that is the mark of vocation. In it, he observed that "We are made in our small moments. In fact, `now' is all we have, so we should do our best to be good during the smaller moments. It is a form of practice for the rest." So how can we practice peace in our small moments?

At college, there's a lot of peer socialization, and students teach each other at least as much as professors do. So how can you help each other to be peacemakers? First, you can talk about peace and justice and politics. Our words reflect our worlds, but our words also affect our worlds. If bitching and gossip and sports and TV are the standard topics of our conversations, we limit our worldview-and our friends-to trivial pursuits. But if, for example, we dared to talk about virtue and vocation, hope and possibility, we might be more inspired to significant action. Instead of asking seniors what they're planning to do after graduation, ask about vocation. The word itself changes the nature of the question. And don't be afraid to talk about virtue. It's not cool to talk about virtue-we live in a culture, after all, where it's often good to be "ba-a-ad," and advertisers routinely use the seven deadly sins to sell us stuff. But if we talked in public about virtues like honesty, humility, simplicity, sustainability, charity, and justice, it might be easier to embody them in our politics and our lives. If we're going to admire people who "walk the talk," it's important to talk about something important.

Second, you can support peacemaking by giving each other a safe space for idealism and enthusiasm. Idealism is the sense that what should be could be. Realism is often the sense that what should be can't be. Often, cynical adults tell us that we'll grow out of our idealism. I certainly hope not. At other times, realists tell idealists to "Get real." Occasionally that's good advice. But in many circumstances, "Get real!" is just the voice of practical pessimism. It means "Think like me" or "Think like the majority" or "Think like all the other people who live lives of quiet desperation." "Get real!" tells us to stop trying to make our deepest dreams come true. "Get real!" means " Con form to the world, don't re form or trans form the world." "Get real" often stands in the way of getting better. So share your idealism with people around you, and do it enthusiastically. "Enthusiasm," after all, comes from a root that means "filled with God," so our excitement for the practical work of idealism can be a mark of faith and vocation.

Third, you can give each other examples of engagement. When you join the College Democrats or the College Republicans and debate different strategies for peace and justice, when you join Amnesty International or Bread for the World, peacemaking ceases to be an abstraction and becomes embodied in you. When you work in a soup kitchen, or teach English to immigrant kids, or lobby the legislature for affordable housing, you are an example of the peace that's possible in the world.

We can also give each other hope. Often, at college, our friends are "coping mechanisms" for us, helping us to deal with the stresses of life and love and professors who assign too much reading. But we can also be "hoping mechanisms" for each other. Here at St. Olaf, I meet regularly with one of my best friends because she literally embodies the hope that changes the world. I hope, in some small way, that I do the same for her-and for all of my students. Hope is the driving force of practical idealism, and I encourage you to share your hopes-and even your extravagant hopes-with each other. Hope is the pregnancy of possibility. If you don't have hope, you're hopeless.

A vocation, I think, is both individual and institutional. We're responsible for ourselves and our lives, but we're also responsible for the institutions that support us and vice versa. Institutions are patterns of human behavior established in time to make it easier to live in community. All of our institutions-political, economic, social, educational, etc.-embody certain values and marginalize others. Each of these institutions makes peace possible, probable, or improbable. Right now, our institutions don't serve us as well as they might.

In a good society, institutions make it easier for people to be good. They make good behavior the default mode of the society. Like traffic lights and highways, which regulate individual behavior for the common good, institutions influence us to do good without making momentous moral choices at every intersection of our lives. In a good society, the incentives embodied in our institutions would make peace the rule of our lives, not just the interlude between episodes of war and violence. In a really good society, our institutions would make it possible to live justly by just living. If we are called to be peacemakers, we need to make all our institutions make peace-and justice.

In a beautiful essay called "Doing Good Work Together," William Kittredge writes the best paragraph I've read in the last year. Here it is: "We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things."

The Peace Prize Forum is a place for telling stories, stories in which real characters show their character by their action in the world. College is also a place for telling stories, reinventing reasons for our lives, and deciding which stories we choose to live in. Good stories, as we know from English classes, usually involve conflict. There will be conflicts in our lives and conflicts in our world. But I hope we all choose to live in stories of conflict resolution, where characters live not happily ever after (for that's the fairy tale ending), but hopefully ever after.

Peace on earth, good will to women-and men. We are called to peace. We are called to work. We have good work to do. Amen.