Still, I recognize myself all too clearly in the comment of Thomas a Kempis, the 15th century Christian spiritual writer, who quipped that "All persons desire peace, but few desire the things that make for peace." It would mean I'd have to do more than believe in peace; I'd have to choose to act as a peacemaker.

I often find myself rereading a little decade-old book by Joan Chittister, entitled Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, that talks about the lessons she's learned from living as a Sister of the Order of St. Benedict, the 6th century founder of western monasticism. In that book she wrote: "There will be racism in the world until you and I begin to take the other races in," she wrote. "There will be prejudice, until you and I take the other groups in. There will be war, until you and I begin to take the enemy in." For "peace," Chittister insightfully concludes, "is the sign of the disarmed heart." "... [Peace] means that every day we have to learn to curb our own urge for power and to resist the propaganda designed to make enemies of strangers."

The 20th century theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, led the small and finally ineffective Protestant Christian resistance movement against Nazism during the second world war, including participation in the unsuccessful plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler. For this he was arrested, imprisoned, and just before the war's end hanged on a prison camp gallows.

What most people don't know is that Bonhoeffer was a thoroughgoing pacifist, deeply influenced by his graduate school classmate, a French-speaking student named Jean Lassere - and then George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chicester, who lost his chance to become the Archbishop of Canterbury because of his refusal to demonize Germans like Bonhoeffer who were seeking peace through the overthrow of their own government - and Mohatma Gandhi, whom Bonhoeffer had planned to visit in India.

In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, written for the seminarians in the underground school he led rather than traveling to study with Gandhi, Bonhoeffer proposed that the thing that makes Christians distinct, indeed what is extraordinary about being a Christian at all is our willingness to follow Christ's costly command to love our enemies. Loving one's enemies is what distinguishes not just the most saintly of the followers of Christ, but any Christian precisely as a Christian at all. Without it, for Bonhoeffer, we are no different from the unbelievers, who also love their family and friends, while "loving enemies makes unmistakably clear what Jesus intends.