One of the many messages I received after Mum died there was one today from a family friend who saw mum’s death notice online and they sent me the following,
“I remember Isobel well. I’m sure she will be greatly missed by all who knew her through Corrymeela and beyond. I imagine she never thought so but she made a huge contribution to the cause of peace and that deserves to be told”
I had not forgotten, more it had slipped my mind, that but yes it does deserve to be told as many will remember my mum as a peace-maker.
There’s a particular kind of strength in peace-making that doesn’t go “LOOK AT ME! I AM MAKING PEACE!!!” Peace-making it is not shouting polemic at the masses or the clashing of heads together, (no matter how much you want to do it) Rather a peace-makers power comes from the stillness that lies between those options.
To mend conflict, one must first be willing to listen when one side can’t bear the sound of the other sides voices. That listening is an act of courage, because it means standing in the storm without armour, letting the anger, grief, and fear of others wash over you without flinching and my Mum could do that with grace and apparent ease. For me that was “normal” yet I saw it in both Mum and Dad over the years of our lives together.
Quiet strength is knowing when not to take sides, when to speak with gentleness instead of force, and when to hold silence until the right word arrives. It’s the ability to absorb sharp words without returning them, to step back far enough to see what each person is protecting under their anger, their dignity, a fear of loss, a longing for respect. Mum did that for everyone that crossed her path, be they troubled souls in Corrymeela, Doctors who did not want to make changes to their idea of what palliative care meant, ministers in the churches forum stuck fast in their traditions and scared to spread their arms to a wide audience, or to a snarky, mercurial 16 year old me.
A peacemaker doesn’t impose harmony, that easily slips into authoritarianism. Peacemakers coax it, patiently, like one might coax a frightened child to sleep in a strange bed. They remind others of their own humanity, and in doing so, remind themselves as well, which I can testify that mum seldom if ever “lost the bap” as they say in Northern Ireland. Yes, she got annoyed, everyone does, but she channelled that anger into the steps she felt would lead to a “better way” and nearly always succeeded.
The hardest part is that the work often goes unnoticed which is perhaps why I have not mentioned it, even her son did not recognise the true extent of my mother’s peace-making at first glance. Her secret was that when peace is restored, it feels inevitable, as if the conflict had not been as bad as it was. Few see the steady hands that stitched the broken edges together. That’s why the quiet strength of my mum and my dad worked so well. They had a faith that reconciliation itself is more
than worth the effort, and important whether the world sings of their triumphs or not.
So I raise my glass in celebration of the peacemaker, my mum!