Can we build a path to peace?

I recently finished a training for caregivers that involved two days a week of classroom time, over eight wintry weeks. Each day, after so much intense learning in a language that is not my mother tongue, I felt the need to get out and walk during my lunch break. I wandered in various directions through the unfamiliar town, past shops and houses, along the borders of fields, glimpsing the Alps in the distance on a good day.

In the last week of the course I discovered a path marked “Ökumeneweg” — Ecumenical Way. A sign at the entrance defined Ökumene as a Greek word meaning “the whole inhabited world.” To the builders of this Weg, it meant living together in peace, respecting the foreigner, shaping the future with justice across religious borders.

Why was this path here, in this particular location? As I walked along it, I discovered that it led from the Protestant (Reformed) church of the town to the Catholic church, joining two religious streams that had often been in destructive conflict. The Thirty Years War, for example, erupted a century after the Reformation as the Holy Roman Empire and its Catholic allies battled Protestant nations for supremacy. Religion and worldly power merged in a toxic mix that devastated Europe, killing as many as 8 million people in the deadliest war on the continent until World War I.

This Ecumenical Way, I learned, was one of several built in various places in 2017 to mark the half-millennium of the Reformation. Today, as the Christian religion becomes increasingly irrelevant in Europe, such a gesture might seem unremarkable, unnecessary, even wasteful. But it touched me, as a visible embodiment of the openness and goodwill that can overcome the forces of war. There was no intention to merge the two churches, to dissolve differences, but rather to create a free space between them, an avenue of communication and respect. 400 years ago, this would have been inconceivable.

I thought about my twenty classmates in the caregivers’ training, a motley mix from Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and me, the lone American. All of our countries had known war and conflict, whether in the recent past or deeper in our history. Some of us had been torn from our homes, fleeing present danger to try to build a new home in a place of safety. Others, like me, had been uprooted by less violent events, but were still in transition, grappling with an unfamiliar language, learning new tasks, facing an uncertain future.

At first, we were all a bit stiff and uncertain with each other, but I had noticed how over the course of our eight weeks together our initial distance relaxed. Bridges were built through common experience, whether it was practicing sponge baths on a plastic dummy, giving hand massages to each other, or talking about our experiences with death and bereavement. We groaned when we had to do yet another role play and laughed at our classmates’ improvised dialogue. We applauded each others’ presentations on the symptoms of dementia or the best ways to prevent pneumonia. Something invisible was growing, something that had not been there before we all came together.

As I walked along the Ecumenical Way, I found more signs printed with verses and sayings by various authors. At the end of the path, near the Catholic church, was a quotation from the monastic code written in the sixth century by Saint Benedict of Nursia.

Be silent and listen

Incline the ear of your heart

Seek peace

In the course of our training, as we listened to each other and opened our hearts to the needs of another person, peace grew between us. This is the Way that embraces all differences in a common garment of humanity, a way it is our greatest task to discover and to follow.

When we all passed our final test, the room erupted with cheers, hugs, even some tears. A room full of strangers had become colleagues, fellow travelers, friends.

I had tears in my eyes myself, as I thought about what was erupting in my own faraway country, the suffering that people inflict on each other when they cannot find the Way that leads to peace. The other students in the room could well have shunned or mocked me for the sake of my nationality, yet they accepted me as an individual. They honored my intention to care for others, as they aspired to do themselves. With our caring intentions, we would each go on countering the forces of chaos in our small everyday way, and that gave me hope.

Such humble acts of care are not often recognized, they seldom make the news, yet they are building the pathways that lead into the future. Whenever we can, let us follow them.