“Happy the peacemakers: they shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9).
It was early in the Vietnam War, and an American platoon was hunkered down is some rice paddies, in the heat of a firefight with the Vietcong. Suddenly a line of six monks started walking along the elevated berms that separated paddy from paddy. Perfectly calm and poised, the monks walked directly toward the line of fire.
“They didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight through,” recalls David Busch, one of the American soldiers. “It was really strange, because nobody shot at ’em. And after they walked over the berms suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We stopped fighting.”
The power of the monks’ quietly courageous calm to pacify soldiers in the heat of battle illustrates a basic principle of life:…
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