I randomly pull books off of my shelves and turn to a page to see what’s there. Today I found the following in Dorothee Soelle’s Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (she was a German theologian, feminist, and peace activist):
Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: “The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stone-cutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose; it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the completed cathedral. But one day, the cathedral was really there. You must imagine peace the same way.” Those words helped me a lot. It was good to know: I was participating in building a cathedral, and I knew that someday it would be completed, just as slavery was abolished, so war will also be abolished, though beyond my lifetime.
