Thank you so much to Pax Christi for this award and to all of you for coming this evening.

The title of this award-- Sister Christine Mulready Local Peacemaker Award-- has such a weighty ring. It is so auspicious and important and hard to live up to, especially in the company of my fellow awardees and in a room full of people who could just as easily be up here instead of me.

In light of this, I can't help but be reminded of something my uncle, Daniel Berrigan, wrote more than 30 years ago:

"We have assumed the name of peacemaker, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total, but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial..... We cry peace and cry peace and there is not peace. There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war, at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace, prison and death in its wake."
- Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood, 1970

Ouch, Uncle Dan. Especially right now, when it is clearer than ever that the waging of war is total, when it is more painful than ever how paltry our peacemaking efforts are.

But what I think makes this passage digestible-- what makes it hopeful, even-- is my uncle's use of the word "we," including himself in the company of half-hearted, half-lifed, half-willed peacemakers. He owns cowardice, despite the high price he has paid (and continues to pay) in the name of peace.

All our individual efforts for peace are not enough. And that is a sober thing to think on a day when we come together to honor peacemaking and celebrate the hope that peacemaking embodies. But it is this coming together that makes all the difference, that lifts the clouds of despair from around our heads. All our individual efforts for peace are not enough. But woven together, our efforts make peace possible.

At the same time, no one of us pays the price for peace alone, just as no one of us reaps the rewards alone. We pay the price for peace together-- on the vigil line, in the paddy wagon, in the tedium of long meetings, in the feeling of being an outraged outsider. And we reap the rewards together-- even if we never see the peaceable kingdom in our midst, even though we will never lay the final brick in the construction of a just and equitable society. There are rewards nonetheless: the meaning, the community, the friendship we find on the vigil line, in the paddy wagon, and even in the long meetings. The community that is built on the fringes of this filthy, rotten system in which we live. The community that is built as an antidote to confusion and selfishness of the mainstream. The community we build in Pax Christi, at the War Resisters League, with the Catholic Worker community.

These communities help us shed cowardice and half-heartedness. These communities hold us accountable. These communities challenge us to be more radical. These communities create opportunities for total dedication to peacemaking so that we can cry out, "Peace, peace," and our hands can build it.

In closing, I think of the community of peacemakers that Sisters Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson built with their Plowshares witness, and the community they continue to build from and in prison. I think of the intercontinental community Jonah House has nurtured into being. I think of the community David Dellinger built with his partner Elizabeth Peterson, and of the new community being built in his honor at his memorial service today.

So thank you, Pax Christi, for creating in this ceremony another chance for building a peacemaking community. I can only humbly accept this award on behalf of, and in gratitude for, these communities of hope.

Pax Christ Metro New York http://www.serve.com/pcmny/

Frida Berrigan (BerrigaF@newschool.edu) is a Senior Research Associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute in New York (www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms) and a member of the National Committee of the War Resisters League (www.warresisters.org). She is also the niece of poet-priest-Plowshares activist Daniel Berrigan and the daughter of Plowshares activists Elizabeth McAlister and Phil Berrigan, who co-founded the Jonah House Community in Baltimore (www.jonahhouse.org).

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