Another Mother for Peace

When Caroline Stevenson’s son began to struggle with mental health issues, she did what any mother would do: she starting asking where he could get help. When she found in the 1970’s that there wasn’t much help available, she started asking why. Caroline became an activist the same way lots of mothers do–by seeing her own child’s need and realizing that lots of other children are in the same situation.

After joining the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Caroline began to see that her son and others like him were not left without good care because of a general lack of resources, but rather because of specific decisions about how resources are used. “I started to connect the war machine with our lack of resources for mental illness,” Caroline tells me. “The military was sucking up all the money.” A good church lady, Caroline wasn’t out to cause trouble. She just wanted good health care for her son.

Then, in 1988, tragedy struck. Another of Caroline’s sons was coming home for Christmas on Pan-Am flight 103 from London when a bomb exploded, killing everyone on board. With the broken heart of a grieving mother, Caroline says she began to understand another American mother, Julia Ward Howe, who’d written a call to action following the Civil War.

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

“We mothers don’t raise our sons to kill other mothers’ sons,” Caroline says, reflecting on Howe’s declaration. “Mother’s Day isn’t the sentimental event Hallmark has made it out to be. It’s a day to organize.”

So once again this year, Caroline is calling the mothers of Little Rock together for a Mothers Day for Peace Luncheon. In one community, those who’ve given of themselves to birth and nurture children are leaving whatever they can of their daily work and commitments to gather together for the sake of imagining a new world in the shell of the old. “Where do you find hope,” I ask Caroline, noting that she has been at this for decades, the defense department now spending more than ever. “I meet all of these wonderful young people who are going to serve others in Cambodia and Kenya and Guatemala,” she says with a smile. “They’re going to serve, and when they come back they talk about what they’ve learned.”

This mother keeps working, inspired by a new generation that she prays will sow the seeds of peace.

It’s mother’s day weekend, and I’m grateful for my momma, who’s always loved me well, for other mothers who’ve taken me under their wings, and for mothers like Caroline, who do the hard work of hoping and praying and holding together the fabric of society that violence threatens to tear apart. The truth is, mothers for peace are everywhere. The peace that we enjoy is not the result of wars that nations have won, but the fragile fruit of those who tend the ties that bind us.

So, who is the mother for peace in your place? How can you celebrate her? And what can you do to join her today?