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Channeling Your Peace, Hope, and Creativity
Since rewatching the broadcast of Come From Away — the Broadway musical now streaming on Apple TV — I’ve had the song “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” stuck in my head. We sang it often at mass when I was growing up, and I found it to be not only a beautiful melody, but wonderfully aspirational in its lyrics. That’s the person I most wanted to be: someone who sowed light and love and hope in the world. Someone who understood that in giving we receive. Someone who was an instrument of peace. I took those goals very much to heart and I’ve tried to weave them into my life and work.
But something struck me this time hearing that song. There’s a section in which the lyrics direct us to “seek less to be consoled than to console, less to be understood than to understand, and less to be loved than to love.” As a child, I understood that to mean in order to be a truly good and worthy person, I must always, always put others before myself, and that it was “ungodly” to ever seek to be understood or consoled, and even a bit selfish to long for love. After all, the song uses the word “never.” One should never seek to be consoled rather than consoling someone else, even in the worst of times. At least that’s how I took it.
I’m not sure why the writers chose to include that song in Come From Away, which is the story of the passengers on 38 planes who were…
