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Into whatever house you enter say, "Peace to this household."
If a peaceful person is there, your peace will rest upon him.

It was night in the small 1930's town of Maycomb, Alabama. Atticus Finch sat upon a chair in front of the town jail. As lawyer for Tom Robinson, a young African-American accused (falsely) of assault, he had taken up his post because he expected a lynch mob to show up. His daughter Scout and her brother Jem noticed his late absence from home and decided to see what was going on. They reached the town square and saw Atticus alone, reading a newspaper while nightbugs danced in the light around his head. The children also noticed four cars driving round the square - to stop in front of the jail. Scout and Jem ran to observe things from nearby. Men began to emerge from the cars. As Harper Lee writes in her story To Kill A Mockingbird: "Shadows became substance as light revealed solid shapes moving toward the jail door."

"Get away from the door, Finch," someone shouted. Tension mounted. Atticus would not move. The men felt challenged. Suddenly Scout ran to be by her father and Jem followed. Atticus winced. "Go home, Jem . . . Take Scout . . . Go home." The children wouldn't budge. Someone from among the lynch mob growled, "You got fifteen seconds to get 'em outa here." Scout sized up the men: "overalls . . . blue denim . . sullen-looking men who seemed unused to late hours." Scout saw a familiar face.

"Hey, Mr. Cunningham . . . How's your entailment gettin' along?" Mr. Cunningham was a poor farmer who to save his farm during the Depression had mortgaged and entailed himself beyond any hope of solvency. Atticus provided him legal representation gratis and Cunningham would repay him with a sack of hickory nuts or a load of stove wood. Scout had often befriended his barefoot son at school. "Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts." The big man blinked, shifted his feet. "I go to school with Walter. He's your boy, ain't he? Ain't he, sir?" Cunningham nodded. "He's in my grade. He's . . a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time . . I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it.. Tell him hey for me, won't you?"

Atticus and the men stood with their mouths half-open. Then Mr. Cunningham "did a peculiar thing." He squatted down and took Scout by both shoulders and said, "I'll tell him you said hey, little lady." He then stood up and said, "Let's clear out." Soon car doors were closing and engines starting. The mob dissolved. What had Scout done to defuse that potentially lethal confrontation? She got personal. She didn't see the mob. She saw someone with whom she felt a personal tie and appealed to that, thereby compelling Mr. Cunningham to extricate himself from the impersonal abstraction he had become; from the inflexible "principles" he had allowed to petrify his behavior, neutralize all that was benign within him. She brought out in him his paternity, his humanity and this "virus" began to spread. Feeling began to compete with the mob's thirst for vengeance.

Into whatever house you enter, first say, "Peace to this household." If a peaceful person lives there, your peace will rest upon him. The world in many ways would make of us automatons, driven by abstract ideologies or grievances. Christ came to make us persons, to help us see beyond the "principles" of scribes and Pharisees (who are always so ready to stone someone to death). He came to introduce into human relationships that personal touch otherwise known as grace - the kind of personal touch God would apply to you and me, if we would let him. And wherever a vestige of personality remains within the most hardened of hearts, may not a graciousness even there be revived?

-- Geoff Wood