These, and many more, are the names I speak aloud this month as I light candles to remember the stories of women. It is a spiritual practice to recall that women have survived violence to become wise, creative, and spirit-filled healers who resolve conflict with nonviolence.

Though women bear unique burdens of violence, we also embody hope for change. According to Sayre Sheldon, founding president of WAND and professor at Boston University, “Women can bring fresh thinking to traditional explanations and justifications for war. They can question whether making war is an inevitable part of human nature. They envision societies without war.  Told they are naïve idealists for doing so, women stubbornly maintain that their idealism is in fact common sense. Survival depends on understanding and arresting the impulse to destroy, which today—as never before in history—is capable of extinguishing humanity altogether.” [1]

Yes, today weapons of mass destruction promise to extinguish human life.  Yet the Bush Administration intends to fund research to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons. Just last month, we learned President Bush also intends to negotiate a deal to share nuclear technology with India, a nation that has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). 

Today, the turmoil in Iraq threatens to boil over into tomorrow’s civil war, as places of worship are targeted for violence. Yet our nation continues to fund weapons manufacturing and war-making as if violence were a sustainable solution to the conflicts of our time. 

In troubled times, I find hope in remembering the women who have gone before us in clearing the way for peace, of whom the world was not worthy. These women, though commended for their faith, did not receive the promise of peace, but testified that it is indeed possible.  Peace is possible. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also plant with perseverance seeds that will grow and blossom into peace.