We live in a time in which tensions, conflicts and hateful messages seem to multiply: on social media, at work, in politics, even in families. Even on a global scale, armed conflicts reach figures that we have not seen for decades. All this reminds us that peace is never guaranteed, but must be built every day.
Faced with this reality, Chiara Lubich's words from 2004 are also for today: «Every people and every person has a profound aspiration for peace, harmony and unity. But, despite efforts and good will, after millennia of history we find ourselves incapable of maintaining a stable and lasting peace. (…) because peace is not just the absence of war, struggles, divisions and traumas." True peace "is fullness of life and joy, it is the integral salvation of the person, it is freedom, it is justice and brotherhood in love among all peoples".
Working for peace requires taking action, taking the initiative, sometimes with creativity. Each of us can become a "craftsman of peace": in the small things of every day and also in the big ones, by joining global initiatives that promote harmony and collaboration.
Some concrete examples are significant. The Living Peace project[1], where the personal desire to do something for peace has become a peace education program. Currently more than 2,600 schools and groups join this project, and over two million children, young people and adults from five continents participate in its initiatives. Among these is the "peace dice", on whose faces are written phrases that help build peaceful relationships and that everyone tries to put into practice.
Recently, in a webinar entitled «Forgiveness and Peace: The Courage of Difficult Decisions»[2], the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation was highlighted to be creators of peace, rebuilding what had been broken.
Finally, another example is that of the Rondine Method[3]: an open-air laboratory to escape the enemy's logic. Israelis and Palestinians, Serbs and Bosnians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, but also Malians, Nigerians and Colombians, and recently Russians and Ukrainians, have built a viable way to repair relations destroyed by hatred and build solid bonds in favor of peace. Among all the young people who have come and gone in these thirty years in the Citadel of Peace, a small medieval village on the outskirts of Arezzo, today we find politicians, ambassadors, entrepreneurs, young leaders who make their lives available to heal the wounds of those painful conflicts, laying the foundations for a future that intertwines peaceful relationships and development.
To live this Idea, let us propose to sow peace wherever we are,
through relationships of trust, solidarity and cooperation, because every step towards peace makes us more fully human and brings the whole society closer to a horizon of justice and brotherhood.