Archive for what end: Nuclear Disarmament, or Abolition?

 This will be a multi-part account of conscience or movement of praying with the Church for Nuclear Abolition.

Hiroshima Day, I had already been escorted from the premises of Lockheed Martin in King of Prussia, PA. Two hours later I walked into a cool library where seven boxes of archival materials awaited my attention, thanks to some generous and committed staff willing to take my same-day appointment. 3:46pm, August 6, 2026 I opened the files showing me that Craig Simpson had joined an early 1980s delegation to Japan. Though I had been working with him on his memoir, I didn't know this yet.

I felt something of spiritual communion with Craig then. 
On my tenth wedding anniversary, here I was more than 350 miles away from Emily, absorbed in the peace collection of an Boston activist who has shared memoir writings with me. These were archival scriptures of the companionship of peace makers.
“Male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). "Their companionship produces the primary form of interpersonal communion," teaches the Church, affirmed in Gaudium et Spes. While far apart, I felt right about the trip and after multiple check-ins with Emily, we had seen it as a family action. One of the most fundamental teachings, the pastoral declares that divine law is written in the flesh: 

No. 16 In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. 

“justice and peace have embraced” ( Ps 84:11)

…In fidelity to conscience, Christians are joined with the rest of men in the search for truth, and for the genuine solution to the numerous problems which arise in the life of individuals from social relationships.

“Touch the wounded flesh” Popes Francis and Leo XVI have enjoined, echoing the Second Vatican Council, "the Church feels she must make her own both the voice of those who died in past wars and the voice of the living who still bear wounds today, so that their cries may become an appeal for peace and harmony and not a prelude to new conflicts." 

Home from travel, my friend Amy gifted us exquisite stationary paper made from recycled paper cranes.
orange origami crane glued in one corner
Adira, my youngest, touched  with her blueberry stained fingers. 

 My daughters plucking pints in the rows of bushes at Smolak farm. Before the humidity rose.

An item from a Women's Association:
Folded paper cranes represent a-bomb victim’s wish for peace and welfare. The brave yet tender cranes were designed by Mr. Toshitsugu Yoshida, a renowned artist of Osaka and also an ardent preacher for peace.

The lettering was done by Tutae Kubo, who was three months old when Nagasaki was bombed. Having devoted her whole energy to the lettering, she died a few days after (October 19, 1983) from cancer. She was 38 years old.

(Cyclamen flowers) 

 

Another Clock by Sadako Kurihara Translated by Setsuko Thurlow [2017 co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize]

Red cyclamen flower blooming by the window

Symbolizing a New Year.

But another clock shows three minutes to midnight [or 87 seconds in 2026]

As for mothers is there nothing they can do

But wait for the end of time

Kissing their children farewell?

In Europe Pershing IIs are deployed;

In Asia the battleship “New Jersey”

Will arrive loaded with cruise missiles.

In order to guard their children’s future

To protect the earth from cold, darkness, desolation,

As radioactive particles block out the sun,

Women of Europe

Surround the base

With a human chain;

Let the sun shine over children’s heads

Let the children chase butterflies,

Dragonflies and cicadas in forest and field.

It was beautiful to find this poem, scrawled with a note that Mother Theresa, June 27, in Toronto--incidentally, Aug. 9, 2026 marked the 50th anniversary of her visit to the Camden, New Jersey church where Fr. Pat Sieber OFM had presided the memorial mass for his brother Fr. Rick Sieber, OFM.

One other poem, even more striking of how God disposes us to serve life's purpose:  

Let it Be Born

It was night in the basement

Of a shuttered building. 

Those wounded by the atomic bomb

Filled up the dark basement

Without the light of a single candle.

Amid the smell of blood,

The stench of dead bodies,

A sweaty stuffiness–And sound of moaning.

Out of them, a strange voice was heard:

“A baby is being born!”

In the hell of a basement like this

A young woman is in labor at this moment.

What should the people do

In this darkness, without a match?

The people huddled there

Were anxious about her,

Forgetting their own pain. Then–!

A voice sounded: “I am a midwife!

I will assist at the birth!”

It was a severely wounded person

Who spoke, one who had been moaning 

A moment ago. Thus, in the dark,

In the bottom of the hell, a new life

Came into the world. The midwife

Died before dawn, covered with blood.

Let it be born! Let it be born!

Even if one must pay with one’s own life.

–Sadako Kurihara, 

A friend who worked to gain student visas for Afghan Peace Volunteers sent me a book of poems. The author had grown up in U.S. occupied Afghanistan and carried into poetry memory of a martyr of human rights, tortured

…until one fine September morning, he was found shot several times
In the chest.
He died as a human rights commissioner.
What a price he paid.” 
–Nematullah Ahangosh, ”What Price Did Abdul Samad Amiri Pay”

 Reading this, I feel humbled by the pain and suffering that others face in an office I nominally share. What am I called to in order to preserve the integrity of human rights? What conditions am I willing to confront? 

Sources:

Nematulla Ahangosh, The Color of Peace: Poems. Athol, MA: Haley Press, 2025.

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)

Second Vatican Council Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium Et Spes (7 December 1965) Promulgated by Pope Paul VI <ttps://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html>.