Sparking Peace, Practicing Resurrection

A Book Review

Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front is one of those works that I return to over and over again. So many lines from this poem have spoken to me over the years, but here as Easter approaches, I think the most significant gift it has given me are the last two words: “Practice resurrection.” I think I finally “got it” when I began imagining resurrection as something I can practice and do rather than some far-fetched, 2000 year old story, isolated in time and space. The resurrection became more than just a story to “believe” in and hope will happen to me and everyone I love, too, when we die. It was through a living practice of action verb resurrection that I really came to believe in it.

trowel I forged from a rifle barrel

Perhaps my most profound experience of practicing resurrection has been through the Guns to Gardens movement, a swords to ploughshares ministry allowing people to transform their instruments of death into life-giving garden tools. The resurrective power of this work reverberates well beyond the newly forged metal; it breathes new life into communities, hearts and minds, our collective grief and hopelessness. It reorients us towards a practice of resurrection in all aspects of our life, too.

Which is what the newly released children’s book, Sparking Peace, by Teresa Kim Pecinovksy and Hannah Rose Martin, points to: the possibilities for emergent new life all around us. The book involves a Guns to Gardens community event, where the dad in the story explains to his child that they are changing “something sad, something that breaks our hearts” into something new. (When I read it with my 6 year old, she lit up in recognition at the blacksmithing part: “Mom! That’s what you do!”)

But the story really centers on a relationship between the child and a neighbor. It demonstrates how new life can spring forth from restorative justice, after the child accidentally breaks the neighbor’s window with a ball. It hints at the sadness and broken hearts we all carry from time to time and how relationship can make something new from even those places of despair. It shows the ways new life emerges from death in compost and gardening. And it invites children and adult readers alike to ask questions and create their own newness through the experience of Sparking Peace. To that end, it also contains helpful discussion prompts and guidance for talking about gun violence with children at the back.

This book is a practice of resurrection. It asks us to nurture the new life all around us, even in a death-riddled, broken world. With its beautiful illustrations by Gabhor Utomo and just lovely storytelling, it is a wonderful addition to any family, church, school, or community library.

Available now from Herald Press.