Nagasaki Vigil

This summer I attended the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America's annual summer conference. I was challenged there by my brothers and sisters in Christ to take a more active role in speaking out against the terror of nuclear weapons. In response I attended a vigil commemorating the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9. I wrote about my experience at the vigil for the September issue of the Vermont Peace & Justice Center's September newsletter. I've posted a link to the newsletter, but the whole text of my article is below.

Article Link


On Saturday, August 9th I stood with some fifty others to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki sixty-three years ago. Each year, the brothers and sisters of Pax Christi Burlington gather beneath the bell tower of the former Immaculate Conception Cathedral and remember the thousands of lives lost in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 and Hiroshima three days earlier. Each year they gather to honor those lives and pray for a world without atomic weapons.

The bell tower proved a fitting place. The sole standing artifact after an arsonist's torch destroyed the rest of the church, the bell tower remains a perfect picture of the destruction a world with much science but no soul can wreak.

Pax Christi is a Catholic organization. Pax Christi being latin for "Peace of Christ". Yet not only Catholics were present. I am Baptist. Jews and Muslims and a whole cadre of Buddhist drummers showed up also as well. There were also blacks and whites and browns. And there were children.

And I suppose that is why we all came. We came for the sake of the children. We came to bear witness to the truth, that when the powers of this world perpetrate acts of aggression and vengence, it is the children who suffer most.

Even as we vigiled the powers of this world were at work again. In what has the potential to escalate into the first act of a new Cold War, Russia was bombing Georgia. Nuclear-armed Russia was flexing its muscles and just daring the rest of the international community to say anything.

Near the end of the vigil an old nun said something. Not so much in words, but in presence. Her body tired and beaten down by many years of life and service, she needed assistance getting from the car into her wheelchair. She was late. She was late, but she had come. She had come to give her body, enfeebled as it is, to the future of this world and the future of its children.

O that we all might do the same.