Finding Peace
Given by James Covington on September 30th, 2007
One of the deepest human desires and needs is to live in peace, to be in peace–but hatred, fear and violence seem so prevalent, and sometimes our world seems to have lost its bearings and become mad with suicide bombings, hostage takings, and war mongering. We all yearn for peace, but what is it exactly? Is it just the absence of war? How can we find peace? What are the origins of conflict? How should we act when faced with conflict? How can we resolve conflict? How do we become peacemakers?
Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish woman killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, wrote, “After this war two torrents will be unleashed on the world: a torrent of loving kindness and a torrent of hatred. I knew that I should struggle against hatred.” Where does the hatred come from?
The causes of conflicts and wars are multiple, but often they find their origin in difference and in the forging of identity through culture and religion. The bond among people of the same culture or ethnic group gives them security, a firm sense of solidarity, and a kind of peace–reserved for those in their group, or at least for those who can and do follow the laws of the group. Cultural and national groups are strong and coherent. Each has its own certitudes; each group seems to know that it is “right,” “chosen,” “blessed by God” or by the gods. And to affirm its identity it seeks to defend itself from other groups or so often to dominate them, to show how wonderful, right and powerful it is, and to gain land for its expanding population. For such a group to have God’s blessing means to have power, and to have power is to become like God the Almighty. And so we have merciless dictators and ideological forces that will extinguish the other, the lesser, the infidel.
The Crusades and wars of religion were almost always waged with hatred and cruelty, “in the name of God.”
And in more recent times one has only to think of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, or of Stalin crushing the Christian church and killing so many people in the Soviet Union. Throughout the history of humanity we see the need to create an empire based on the power of one group and the elimination of others. We are seeing similar conflicts between Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq, with religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan, resulting in genocide in Rawanda in the last decade, and presently genocide in Darfur. And this week, we have heard the wrenching news about strife in Myanmar. Villages have begun to disappear in the country side.
Genocide always presents a moral challenge for us, because sadly often times the only way to prevent genocide is through military means. Genocide is the reason I am not a pacifist. Genocide is evil. Genocide creates a moral conundrum for us all. For example, I believe the “free world” acted shamefully when we stood by and let hundreds of thousands of people be slaughtered in Rwanda. I believe we are acting shamefully as we wring our hands while hundreds of thousands die in Darfur. And I believe we waited far too long to act to stop genocide in the former Yugoslavia. And I believe that the insane attacks of al Qaeda need a military response. Tragically, military intervention is better than genocide.
And while I believe the U.S. must begin to draw down its troops in Iraq, I also believe it must be done with a strong sense of moral responsibility that I believe our government owes to that country. Obviously the Iraqi government, what there is of it, must own its own responsibility, but I also believe, since we are the ones who invaded that country–ill-conceived and unjust as that may have been–that we have a moral responsibility, not only to our soldiers who have given their lives but also to the Iraqi people, thousands of whom have died in this war, millions of whom have fled to neighboring countries and millions more who live in a broken society–already broken by a murderous dictator and now broken even more. The moral question for me is born of ultimate concern and it is this: How do we withdraw our troops from Iraq in a way that will prevent the most violence and death (possibly, genocide), insure the most security for the Iraqi people (and the region), and assure the best peace? In my opinion, no withdrawal must take place without those concerns answered as justly and realistically as possible by the U.S. government in concert with the United Nations and the Iraqi government. No doubt this will be and is a hazardous process, complex, uncertain. No one can be sure about the best outcome. I call it a moral conundrum.
But when it comes to war and peace, moral conundrums are often common, because each group believes its reality is the only reality. History books from different countries and cultures tell different stories, depending on who is perceived as “good” and who as “bad.” One has only to read the story of the Crusades as written by the Arabs, the Greeks, and the French to see how difficult it is to grasp the truth. Read about the birth of modern Israel from the Zionist perspective and then from the Palestinian point of view, and you have totally different stories.
The problem is that the world is divided into many thousands of more or less hermetically closed groups. If each group is sure that it is better than others, how can peace ever come? People resist opening up to others.
Jewish people can remain victims of historical mistreatment and the Holocaust, and Palestinians may seek revenge for being driven from their homes and country. Hindus and Muslims in India, Christians and Muslims in Indonesia, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, blacks and whites in South Africa–the history of hurts and injustice is long. Can peace come if there is no healing of memories. Is it possible to forgive the person or the group who in some way has damaged my life, reduced my freedom, or killed my friends? “Ultimately we have just one moral duty,” wrote Etty Hillesum. “To reclaim large areas of peace and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.”
So, peace, like war, needs to be waged. Peace needs to be waged the way war is waged–with courage, determination, and passion. Peace, like war, requires focusing vast human and material resources.
How shall we wage peace? What is required of us if we are to create a strong, resilient, lasting peace on earth?
If we are to wage peace, we must begin with spiritual and moral basic training. We begin with our spiritual practices that connect us with a love of life. We experience beauty. We celebrate in community. We reach out in love and compassion. In his book I and Thou, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber speaks of relationship as the treasure of the human person; he distinguishes the “it” from the “thou.” There are things and there are people. He reminds us that a society that encourages the accumulation of things–things to do, things to possess, things to look at, to buy, to throw away–risks undervaluing and forgetting the treasure of personal, heart-to-heart relationships. It is through relationship that we are fulfilled.
And so we practice seeing and feeling the pain of others. We allow ourselves to feel a holy outrage at the destruction of life upon life. We let ourselves experience a healthy anger that people are suffering and dying by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. Our love of life, our love of our fellow humans is the foundation for waging peace. We must not allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering around us. When the pain of others no longer moves us to tears and to righteous anger, we have already begun to lose. Nor can we allow our anger and dismay to grow into bitterness. Bitterness and hatred are poisonous. Ultimately they sap our strength. A wise person once said that hating someone is like drinking poison in the hope that someone else will die. Only the love of life will sustain us in this long struggle.
Corrymeela, a peacemaking community in Northern Ireland, brought together mothers and wives of men killed by the IRA with mothers and wives of people killed by the loyalist paramilitary. They wept together and realized the senselessness of the civil war and of vengeance. U.S. Senator George Mitchell did something similar in Northern Ireland when he helped leaders from the two sides move from a place of grievance to a place of personal encounter. He took them out to dinner and asked them not to speak about their rights or politic, their hurts or grievance, but about their families, their leisure activities. We begin to move towards peace as we move away from our own labels and the labels we have put on others, and meet heart to heart, person to person. Trust is born and we live in a true encounter.
This communion of hearts is not just sentimental. It implies that together, as a community and as friends, we are committed to working for peace and justice, first in our homes, including this spiritual home we call our Fellowship.
With this preparation, we move out into our community. Peace is not something that we can possess in isolation. Peace is an ongoing relationship. In order to create peace we must move beyond introspection. And we must move beyond the safe confines of our congregation.
There are many ways to wage peace.
Our first steps are to bear witness and to work in our community. But this is not enough. We need to think nationally and internationally. Just the way disease breaks out when there is a lack of basic sanitation; war breaks out because conditions are ripe for war. We must be critics of those conditions that lead to conflict and steady advocates for creating conditions where peace can flower.
What are those conditions that lead to violence? We all know what they are: religious and cultural pride, exploitation, ignorance, hatred, injustice, inequality, poverty, fear, racism, greed. We cannot pretend to be advocates for peace while we support economic relations based on exploitation of helpless people. We cannot honestly say we are for peace if we support an economic system which increasingly concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. We cannot pretend to wage peace if we are indifferent to the denial of basic human rights to the powerless. Peace is not a static thing. Peace is not the absence of violence. Peace is a relationship that is built on compassion, on respect, on interdependence, on understanding and on economic prosperity.
Look, for example, at Western Europe. A century ago Europe was about to plunge into a long and horrible war. The First World War ended in 1918 with much of Europe devastated and Russia in the hands of communists. The truce that ended the war, however, did little to change the underlying conditions that led to war. What followed was a false peace. It was truly a time of reloading. A generation later the children born during the First World War were now old enough to fight and die in a second great war. The Second World War was even worse than the first. New technology made killing more efficient. Over twenty million people died. The Holocaust exterminated six million Jews.
Yet look at Europe today. Today there is real peace. Europe is not an earthly paradise, but we have witnessed a nearly miraculous transformation. The major countries of the continent, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium now share a common currency. Workers can easily cross national boundaries to take jobs. People flow across borders almost as easily as you or I cross state borders. Germany and France are not much more likely to go to war with one another today than Colorado is likely to go to war against Kansas. After centuries of bloody wars, topped off by World War II, the bloodiest of them all, peace has been created in Europe.
What happened? Interdependence happened. The European Common Market helped to create the conditions for economic interdependence. Prosperity happened. Interdependence and the absence of conflict allowed unprecedented economic growth. The wisdom of the Marshall Plan was that it focused on building the European economy rather than on punishment of the defeated and demands for reparations. This economic prosperity was shared throughout the population. Common people had access health care and protection from economic dislocations. With stability and prosperity came more travel and communication. With more human contact came more understanding.
My real interest and your real interest is in a lasting peace that is based on a foundation of universal human rights, so eloquently written in the charter of the United Nations.
And, obviously, if we are to create a lasting peace our own nation has to be much, much less willing to resort to the use of force. You and I need to join hands with millions of other people in our country to make military force truly a last resort.
I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, but the sad fact is that we human beings are also a violent species. Throughout history we have murdered one another. We kill each other as individuals. We kill each other as tribes and gangs. As nations we wage war with terrible weapons. The option to use violence, to wage war, is always there as a temptation.
Peace does not just happen by accident or luck. Peace must be created. Peace, a resilient and lasting peace, is like a strong fabric that can contain the impulse to go to war. Think of peace as a kind of bullet proof Kevlar cloth that is strong enough to enclose human society and prevent our violent tendencies from breaking out. We weave this cloth of peace from many individual threads. We help to weave this cloth when we witness for peace. We help weave this cloth when we advocate for human rights for everyone. We help weave this cloth of peace when we create interdependence and understanding. We weave peace when we insist that every one have the economic resources necessary to a life with dignity and freedom from the desperation of extreme poverty.
It is not enough to wish for peace. It is not enough to pray for peace. It is not nearly enough to have good intentions. These are just the very beginning.
No, our call today, our responsibility as compassionate human beings is to wage peace. It is going to be a long struggle. Victory is not guaranteed. Yet peace is possible. What is the alternative?
Peacemaking is not just doing big things to solve giant conflicts, in the way of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or George Mitchell. We are not all called to work for peace on the international level, but we are all called to become men and women of peace wherever we may be–in our family, at work, in our parish, in our neighborhood–open and welcoming to others inside and outside of our community, our culture, and our faith group. To be a peacemaker means not to judge or condemn or speak badly of people, not to rejoice in any form of ill that may strike them. Peacemaking is holding people gently in your thoughts your prayers.
Come, let us wage peace. I leave you with this prayer of Francis of Assisi, written 800 years ago:
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
And I would add: it is by waging peace, that we find peace. . .