For her peace efforts in Northern Ireland, Mairead Corrigan Maguire received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976. For her peace efforts Bal’in, Palestine on Friday the 20th of April 2007, she received rubber-coated steel bullet in the leg and and was also nerve gassed during an unarmed nonviolent street vigil by Isreali Defence Forces.

The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was one of about twenty people who were wounded during the vigil, others where shot in the head, stomach, legs and an “elderly Palestinian mother carried on a stretcher… as she was shot in the back with a plastic bullet”.

As Mairead has said in praising Walter Wink’s scholarship, some of us start our pilgrimage to the nonviolence ofChrist through a “intellectual,historical, and scriptural” journey while for others of us embark on the journey through our experience of God in prayer or “intuitively, or through a painful experience”. This is certainly Maguire’s story, when on August 10, 1976, a car chase between IRA and British troops through Belfast, Northern Ireland, led to an accident in which two of her nephews and one of her nieces were killed. Her sister, distraught over the death of her children, took her own life several years later.

The incident led Maguire, a Catholic, and Betty Williams,a Protestant, along with newspaper reporter Ciaran McKeown, to found Peace People, a pioneering organization in the movement to end sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. They shared the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their work. Maguire continues to work for global nonviolence as honorary life president of Peace People.
As she has so often said in the fight for a healing justice,

“Wherever we are, wherever we live, we need to ask
ourselves as Christians, if Christ lived in Belfast would he carry a gun and kill for a cause? If Christ lived in America or Britain would he support nuclear weapons… that could annihilate millions of our sisters and brothers in the

world?”

As the devout Christian and Nobel Peace Prize winner wrote in her press statement about the shooting,

“This is not only a question of the abuse of human rights and international laws by the Israeli government; it is a health and environment issue. We were all traumatized by our experience, and with the gas on the air came the words flowing back to me of Palestinian doctor who said, “The whole Palestinian people — after 40 years of occupation, the whole people of Palestinian are traumatized. It is time the international community acted to put a stop to this suffering and injustice of our people.”

Let us continue to weep over Jerusalem and pray that the knowledge of what would bring peace would cover the earth like the waters the seas. Let us pray to the God of Peace for the people of Palestine and Israel, for real healing and transfiguration of the collective trauma of both communities, that justice with peace and even joy would reign in a situation where only the transference of past atrocities seem to be manifest. That the world community would not sit idle while this continues to take place but would take transformative initiatives, like our brave sister Mairead Corrigan Maguire walking “in the Way” (as my CPT mates put it), that witness to the time that has come rushing forward in Jesus where “everyone will have there own vine and fig tree, live in peace and not in fear.” (Micah 4:4)

My friend John Dear has edited Mairead’s fantastic book “The Vision of Peace”compiling the writings of this amazing example of what it is to be a Christian, a woman, and a human, in our world today.