Last month a celebration took place at the Lyndale Park Peace Garden in Minneapolis for the dedication of the Peace Garden Bridge. This new bridge features a Japanese design with granite “peace stones” from the 1945 post-atomic bomb blast ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Minneapolis is the only American city to have received these historic gifts from these Japanese cities. The peace garden seems to embody both a sense of tranquility in terms of our future hopes, and thoughts that are less than tranquil in terms of our past and present realities. That makes the experience of it not unlike the painful, spiritual wrestling of Jesus in the midst of the beauty of the Garden of Gethsemane. I wish that most of us actually wrestled with the issues of peace and forgiveness, beginning with our own families, our own churches, our own communities. I think about that each time I close the door to the Rector’s study at St. Stephen’s. The Mennonite poster on the back of that door is entitled “A Modest Proposal for Peace” and says, “Let the Christians of world agree that they will not kill each other.”
I’ve noticed that talking about this little bridge with its atomic relics brings out strong emotions in people – about being peacemakers in the spirit of the Beatitudes, about the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War, about loving our enemies in obedience to the words of Jesus, about the mass killing of innocent civilians in wartime, about the sobering example of Jesus in forgiving his unrepentent torturers from the cross. Unknown to most American Christians, Nagasaki was not only an important military target but also the historic center of Japanese Christianity, born in the mid-16th century. It was home to the “Martyrs of Japan,” twenty-six Christians, most of them Japanese, who suffered death by crucifixion at the end of the 16th century. Other imperial persecutions would follow, then, centuries later, came the atomic bomb. Christianity survives both there and here. I wonder what Christians there and here could learn from one another and demonstrate to the world about respecting the dignity of every human being.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently visited the Nippon Sei Ko Kai to celebrate 150 years of Anglican Christianity in Japan. As part of his visit, Archbishop Williams traveled to Nagasaki, laying flowers at a memorial at the epicenter of the atomic blast and delivering a speech about the importance of working for a world free from nuclear weapons. He referred in that speech to Dr. Takashi Nagai, a physician, convert to Roman Catholicism, and survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Dr. Nagai’s book, The Bells of Nagasaki, ends with the ringing of cathedral bells for the Angelus, recalling the moment when the Virgin Mary accepted the invitation to become the mother of the holy child of God. That choice transformed the world. There are choices before us that also have the power to transform the world, for better or worse. With that in mind, Archbishop Williams concluded his act of remembrance by saying,
Freedom matters. And the free choice that unleashed destruction on this city also started a chain reaction – literally in the massive force of an explosion, less directly in the long-term devastation caused by radiation, symbolically in starting the age of atomic and nuclear rivalry between nations. It is like a negative image of the creative impetus of freedom turned towards God.
Our prayer must be that this creative impetus will break through the chains we have fastened on ourselves, so that we can live in the certainty that there will never be a repetition of the terrible fate visited on this city, and that we shall discover by God’s grace and guidance how to live together without the threat of mass killing.
‘Choose life,’ says God to his people in the Bible. May his own free love set us free to make that choice.
