A “culture of peace” was, in part, the focus of SSUC’s last-of-May Sunday service. It was earlier that month that Canada’s Jean Vanier died; a remembrance in The Globe avowed that his “capacity for human empathy was inexhaustible.” So choosing the luminary’s Finding Peace to be the Library’s Featured Book is altogether rightful.
In his 2003 book, the humanitarian—his signature accomplishment was the creation of L’Arche—“dares to suggest the radical possibility of peace in our time,” the Quill and Quire review affirms. “It is easy to reflexively dismiss such an idea, but Vanier is a realist, and Finding Peace explores the process of creating peace in a plainspoken, tough-minded manner that manages to suppress cynicism.”
“Peace is the fruit of love,” Vanier writes. “But to grow in love requires…hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies…loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts, that shelter and define us. …the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.” So it is that the Q&Q critique ends with this sentence: “His are words of experience that, if heeded, could bring profound change on a scale both personal and global.”
Finding Peace
By Jean Vanier
House of Anansi Press, 2003
