What Does Peace Look Like?
The Necessity of Imagining the World We Wish to See
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Pat B. Allen, Ph.D.
Sermon:
I love the John Lennon song 'Imagine' as much as the next guy but please note it doesn't really give us much to go on. No heave, no hell, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no possessions, no greed or hunger. Okay, a brotherhood of man but that's pretty sketchy. What Lennon has done at best is clear the stage, encourage us to empty our minds of 'what-is', but that is not enough. One of the things I realized when I began to think seriously about this topic is that peace is not the opposite of war. Every person engaged in war from our President to the generals to the soldiers thinks of war as a means to an end and that end is peace.
War is a process. The origin of the word 'war' in the English language traces its roots to the prehistoric Germanic tribes. The word war means to confuse; it means strife and conflict. Strife amplifies the issue: it means bitter, sometimes violent conflict to determine superiority. Conflict means to strike together, to clash, and its origin derives from the word profligate which means to beat down into a state of degradation. War is a concept that must, by our definition, have a winner and a loser, a right side and a wrong side, an enemy. In short, war is the quintessential metaphor of dualism, a zero sum game where the goal is to reach a kind of apex where there is only one: one idea, one system, one religion, one leader, one man left standing, one version of the truth.
In Hebrew there are at last ten words for war. Each has different nuances and shades of meaning and is related to a constellation of other words. We are accustomed to hearing that the Eskimo language has many words for snow. What does it mean to have ten words for war? I believe it implies an understanding of many levels of struggle. The word Israel means literally 'one who wrestles with God'. Unlike many other religions Judaism does not have a creed or dogma but instead charges each of us to wrestle with the sacred texts to gain a contemporary understanding to guide our lives. One of the Hebrew words for war is 'karav' which means struggle but also means 'come close.' The shoresh, or root of karav is the same as the word 'korban', which means altar, sacrifice and to make sacred. As I contemplated these meanings I began to imagine different activities might take the place of war. When we come close and struggle together, is that not sacred? Can we imagine another way to come together besides the clash of weapons? Another kind of sacrifice besides that of human lives? Another kind of making sacred besides martyrdom?
And what is peace? In Hebrew as well as in Arabic the word for peace, shalom or salaam also means hello and goodbye. What can we make of this? Our dictionary definition of peace is simply 'the absence of conflict'. The third or forth definition down the list equates peace with tranquility of mind, which usually implies solitude or silence. But if peace contains both hello and goodbye, then it is an active state, a state of movement and transformation. Shalom is a concept of engagement, not absence of conflict but engagement in the comings and goings of life.
Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. held that peace without justice is not peace at all. They begin to bring us closer to an understanding of peace as an active state, an engaged reality where people are doing things together that benefit each other and the greater good. The most common word for war in Hebrew is 'milchama' which shares its root with 'lechem', the word for bread. We are meant to understand that conflict happens over resources and how we feed each other is important. When we imagine there are not enough resources for everyone to be fed, or housed, or have their heath needs cared for, we are on the road to war because we have entered a state of fear. Fear causes us to withdraw from one another whether to protect what is "ours" or simply to avoid the pain of seeing others suffer. Remember the word 'karav'. War is a way to come close. I believe that to engage, to come close is a basic human need and so will happen one way or another. How do we imagine sharing resources? How do we imagine coming close?
This is where the imagination comes in, either through fear or through loving visioning. "Historically we have reserved our positive emotions and behaviors for those with whom we feel a personal affiliation. But the evolutionary trend is toward increasing the scope of that affiliation." (IONS, 2007, p. 73. We are being called to enlarge the lens of our caring, increase the aperture of our caring. To do this we must deal with our fears as they come up to block us. Infinite potential exists that is shaped into what we see and experience in the world - war, peace, terror, cooperation-by the accumulation of countless thoughts that lead to our actions. To understand why the world looks the way it does we must enter the imaginal realm, we must see the images that live in us, what fears, what hopes and dreams, and give them form. This is no longer the work of only the designated artist. It is time to awaken the imaginal visionary in each person. Individuation requires our imagination.
In my first book, Art is a way of knowing (Allen, 1995) I began the chapter "Knowing Imagination" this way: "Our imagination is the most important faculty we possess. It can be our greatest resource or our most formidable adversary. It is through the imagination that we discern possibilities and options. Yet imagination is no mere blank slate on which we simply inscribe our will. Rather, imagination is the deepest voice of the soul and can be heard only through cultivation and careful attention. A relationship with our imagination is a relationship with our deepest self."
It is okay to be afraid of others, as long as that isn't where we stop our process. It is okay to recognize we are unwilling to give up some of the comforts in our lives, as long as that isn't where we stop. It is okay to face the fact that we see some groups as 'other' and that makes us afraid, as long as that isn't where we stop. Confronting what we believe, daring to know, is part one of the challenge of the imagination. Knowing what our beliefs are requires confronting ourselves, our fears and our resistance to change. Once we know what we actually believe we have a choice about whether or not we wish to alter those beliefs. What we know, what is implied in Lennon's phrase a 'brotherhood of man' is the universality of human needs. We know that every single human being:
When these needs are acknowledged as honored, we feel our alignment with one another and with the Creative Source that animates the world. In my view, this alignment is the only safety there is, the safety of being fully present and alive in this moment, the only moment we have. Peace can only happen moment by moment, interaction by interaction, until it becomes a habit, an expectation, pattern that we have exchanged for fear that blossoms into a world we have not yet dreamed into being.
I'd like to end with a story by the Rev. John Dear, a Catholic priest and peace activist. He tells a true story of a group of activists meeting in a church basement in East Berlin in the 1980's around the 'ridiculous' topic of "What Will It Be Like 1,000 Years From Now When The Berlin Wall Finally Comes Down -and What Do We Have To Do Now To Help That Great Day Happen?" They were as you might imagine dismissed as idealistic fools. But, Dear says, their meeting excited and energized them, so they decided to meet again and more people showed up, and they kept meeting, and soon, people were meeting in basements all across East Germany, and within a few years, in November of 1989, the newly imagined happened, the Berlin Wall came down peacefully" (Dear, 2007). Dear goes on to say that this was no miracle but a grassroots movement that grew over time through the idea of 'karav' people coming closer together and engaging their imaginations and each other in creating and giving energy to a vision.
Rev. Dear and I are both members of an organization called the Network of Spiritual Progressives founded by Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and author of many wonderful books including Spirit matters, The politics of meaning and the bestselling The left hand of God. The NSP is an interfaith educational and consciousness raising movement with chapters across the country working create a world of compassion and generosity. To further explore these ideas and learn more about NSP, please visit the website: http://www.spiritualprogressives.org.
To visit the Oak Park NSP chapter, or to discuss how to set up your own chapter, please contact me at patallen8@comcast.net.
References:
Allen, Pat (1995). Art is a way of knowing. Boston: Shambhala
Dear, Rev. John (2006). "Don't give up" Tikkun. Sept/Oct p. 44.
O'Dea, James. (2007) The 2007 SHIFT Report: Evidence of a world transforming.