SUGGESTIONS FOR ACTIVITIES
TO COMMEMORATE THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE
September 21, 2006

1. Make a conscious effort to show love and forgiveness by your words and actions toward other members of your community especially those to whom you are not especially close.
2. Offer to help someone to do something before they ask for it.
3. If you drive, be especially courteous to other drivers even if they are not courteous themselves.
4. Reflect on a scripture passage or the readings of the day which call us to be instruments of mercy, reconciliation and peace.
5. Identify someone in your life who seems to be experiencing a lack of peace and come up with a way of responding to them.
6. Read an article on the use of violence in the Middle East, in Iraq or in Darfur reflect on it in light of the call to make peace and then write a letter or send an e-mail to one of our country’s leaders expressing your thoughts. One suggestion would be to read Fr Drew Christiansen’s article in the September 11, 2006 issue of America magazine entitled “Alarm Bells in the East”
7. Select a prayer for peace and recite it each day until the end of the month. Below are two suggested texts but you may have your own prayer.

Pax Christi

O Lord, you have said to us ‘Peace I leave with you.’
This peace that you give is not that of this world:
it is not the peace of order, when order oppresses;
it is not the peace of silence, when silence is born of suppression;
it is not the peace of resignation, when such resignation is unworthy.
Your peace is love for all people,
is justice for all people,
is truth for all people,
the truth that liberates and stimulates growth.

Lord, it is this peace we believe in because of your promise.
Grant us peace, and we will give this peace to others

Prayer of Pope John Paul II at Hiroshima

To you, Creator of nature and humanity,
in truth and beauty I pray:
Hear my voice, for it is the voice of victims of all wars and
violence among individuals and nations.
Hear my voice, for it is the voice of all children who suffer and
will suffer when people put their faith in weapons and war.

Hear my voice when I beg you to instill into the hearts of all
human beings the wisdom of peace, the strength of justice
and the joy of fellowship.
Hear my voice, for I speak for the multitudes in every
country and every period of history who do not want war
and are ready to walk the road of peace.
Hear my voice, and grant insight and strength so that we
may always respond to hatred with love, to injustice with
total dedication to justice, to need with the sharing of self,
to war with peace.
O God hear my voice, and grant unto the world your everlasting peace.