When I was a little girl I learned about Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese woman who died of radiation poisoning 10 years after the atomic bomb was dropped on her home of Hiroshima. She folded cranes as part of a wish for peace. I always found it so powerful that she did not long for healing or long life, but rather for something bigger than herself.
Her driving question was how can I make the world a better place while I still live. She used the time she had to speak a bigger truth. At the foot of the statue of Sadako in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is inscribed, “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”
Peace is sometimes distilled down to self, that we feel calm or good, but the peace we are exploring in this season of looking for the in breaking of Jesus is a corporate or shared peace. Sadako’s message reverberates 70 years after her death because she was calling for a shift in the way we as people behave, to remember that when we bomb our enemy we are condemning little girls to death. When we make choices from these bigger perspectives of shared humanity amazing things might just happen, like cranes being folded as reminders of peace and war being no more. In this season of advent may we all cultivate hearts for peace.
-Eilidh
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