Published November 6, 2020

Today I thought about being tired, and I thought about peace.

I had thoughts.

A phrase popped into my head that has been visiting throughout the past four years, and I took note that it dates to the first day of a new year decades ago.

I made social media posts about it on what feels like the first day of a new beginning toward its clearly stated exhortation.

I’m old enough to remember that even a letter addressed to and written as a call to “men of thought!” and “men of action!” and “all mankind living in 1972!” by the leader of a famously and relentlessly patriarchal church, a message that went on to speak to men, to describe mankind, to consider the life of a man, and men, using pronouns that were 100 percent male — veering only once from its male-centric worldview in asking whether justice is an “immobile goddess” — then returning to its focus on man, every man, and pondering how every man had a new awareness of himself, that each man knows he is a person, and even a sacred being!, a letter that in its 1,515 words finally found a place in its coda, its final paragraph, to try to become inclusive when it spoke to “our brothers and sons and daughters of the Catholic Church,” EVEN A LETTER SUCH AS THIS knew enough to have as its title the phrase IF YOU WANT PEACE, WORK FOR JUSTICE.

If you want peace, work for justice.

Pope Paul VI
1 January 1972