You know, it's very difficult to take any international call for Israel to cease hostilities seriously when rockets continue to fire from the Gaza strip into residential Israel. 

On the other hand, when the U.S. Government comes out and says that we don't want an end to the fighting because we don't like the status quo, that is difficult to support.

Or, to be more accurate, we get it wrong.  We got this idea that Jesus' most central teaching was to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  That wasn't Jesus' central teaching, that was his summary (or the most important bit) of the Jewish law. 

Jesus' golden rule was this: "I give you a new commandment: love one another. Just as I have loved you, you must also love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

This goes beyond loving your neighbor as yourself.  Loving your neighbor as yourself is something common to just about every religion (or not doing to your neighbor as you would not have them to do you, etc.).  It is also the kind of natural-law teaching you can build a social ethic from.  You could build law on that principle, because everyone knows what they would not want done to them.

There is nothing particularly Christian about it.

On this basis, Augustine justified disobeying Jesus' teachings against nonviolence.  He said, "It's true we can't use violence to defend ourselves.  BUT we have to follow the golden rule, which means we have to use violence to defend our neighbors, whom we love as ourselves."

On the other hand, not everyone can follow the commandment to love one another as Jesus has loved us.  Only one who has experienced the transforming love of Christ can know that.  What is more, no secular social ethic could proceed from the commandment.  You cannot justify violence in defense of another on the basis of loving as Jesus loved, for Jesus loved nonviolently. 

What is more, this love says something unique about who Jesus is and what the Kingdom means.  To love your neighbor as yourself is common-sense.  That's how the human race will survive.  But to love as Jesus loved... by this the world will know that we are Jesus' disciples. 

-NDSR

Merton obviously wrote this during the Cold War, when we placed our faith and hope in the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction.  Today, our fears don't come from atheist nations, but religious extremists of no particular nation, and our faith and hope are a lot less easy to come by.  We are, it seems at the moment, casting around somewhere in the direction of armed protection, the NSA or what-have-you, or maybe the eleventh-hour return of Christ to spare us from all this. 

Are we praying for peace?  I just don't know anymore.

-NDSR