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world peace prayer
Today at 8:15 a.m., the exact time that the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the Peace Bell at the Hiroshima Peace City Memorial Monument will ring. Residents of the city, whether at the Peace Park or elsewhere in the city, will pause for a minute to pay their respects, to pray for peace and to remember the horrors of war and of nuclear weaponry. Now, 74 years later, this moment of attention still seems like a sensible and prudent thing to do.
On a recent Sunday morning, I learned about the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi. It happened during the children’s time, when the leader held up a broken vase, a cherished family heirloom, that had been glued back together. And rather than a careful repair job that made the vase look like new, the broken places on this vase were highly visible, actually accented with what looked like raised golden paint. When you looked at this vase, you knew that it had been broken, and exactly where it had been broken. Kintsugi teaches that broken objects aren’t things to hide or throw away, but to display with awe, reverence, pride and restoration. The gold-filled cracks of a once-broken item tell a story; they are a testament to a history.
Today at 8:15 a.m., the exact time that the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the Peace Bell at the Hiroshima Peace City Memorial Monument will ring. Residents of the city, whether at the Peace Park or elsewhere in the city, will pause for a minute to pay their respects, to pray for peace and to remember the horrors of war and of nuclear weaponry. Now, 73 years later, this moment of attention still seems like a sensible and prudent thing to do.
