Peace
I am on the treadmill early in the morning at the local gym and I see an older gentleman on the exercise bike. He has an affable smile and greets passersby. I hear him joking with an acquaintance and they mention the latest news from Iraq. “Nuke ‘em,” he says. “Those people are animals.” I wince. The listener mumbles something and walks away.
My mind wanders to recent memories and conversations. I think of my friend, who just moved back to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia. Her worldview was irrevocably altered when she saw the depth and complex nature of that culture. She and her husband, a businessman, lived and worked with Saudis. She loves being back home, but she knows she and her children are somehow different, shaped by new experiences that most can never understand.
I think of a colleague who counsels vets contending daily with the effects of post traumatic stress disorder. She has worked in Vietnam, Ethiopia, and El Salvador and has worked with refugees in places as far away as Sierra Leone, Armenia and Thailand. She tells stories that move me to tears.
I recall a fellow student who lived in Iraq before the war, ministering to Iraqi families and young children, terrified by the prospect of war. Their lives are shaped by fear as they have lived under a regime of domination and oppression.
I remember the story my friend shared of her nephew, 23 years old, who shot and killed an Iraqi insurgent in an abandoned building outside Kuwait. He is four years older than my daughter and his mind fills with images of war even as he awaits the birth of his first child.
My safe, insular world feels shallow and superfluous as I remember these stories. I am on a treadmill in a bright, cheerful gym half a world away, unaware of the luxury of knowing that my family is fairly safe from harm, my garden is bursting with color, and I have these precious moments to carve out for self-care. Making sense of the discrepancy is a daily challenge and my mind searches for answers.
What do we know for sure?
The world has changed and we no longer come from similar religious and cultural backgrounds. With a globalized economy, the internet, and rapid transit, our world is smaller and more complex. This century will be remembered for its radical departure from an old worldview.
We can learn from history’s lessons, but we cannot be slaves to the solutions that worked when the world looked very different. It makes little sense to long for the days of tight knit communities when people from similar backgrounds and religions lived and worked together. We can create community in our own towns, but we are also called to be cognizant and responsive to a wounded world outside our insular world.
Will we cling tenaciously to our comfortable past, or will we courageously envision a new worldview that is open to deep, long lasting change?
Think of our own American history-courageous people had the determination and vision to imagine a country without monarchy, rooted in the notion of democracy. Revolutionary stuff! How can we be pioneers in envisioning a world that integrates the remarkable changes of this past century?
We are now challenged to break out of old patterns of thinking and depart radically from existing frames of response. The only way to break a pattern is to be outside of the pattern. Just as our Enneagram personality type keeps us blind to our automatic behaviors, there are systemic patterns that keep us blind to cultural automatic responses.
The question remains, what does this mean for YOU? How can you begin to envision hope in a world wounded by war, economic disparity, and religious fundamentalism?
1. The first thing is feel your feelings and notice your reactions. Anger, wrath, sadness, helplessness, apathy, condemnation. These events elicit strong emotions. Feel them. Then, notice how you channel your feelings.
- Do you avoid the papers and the TV?
- Do you stay glued to the TV and read every article and listen to the pundits who share your opinion?
- Do you immerse yourself in daily activities, convinced that there is nothing you can do?
- Do write a letters to the newspaper or join a group?
- Do you vent, and judge and argue with anyone who does not share your view?
- Do you cry?
- Do you pray?
2. Do nothing. Sit quietly and refrain from acting. Practice what monks call metanoia, the discipline of looking inside with a critical eye. Remember the adage, “truth is the first casualty of war”. Notice the very human desire to demonize and dehumanize the other. I notice that people who experience other cultures, tend to avoid black and white thinking for they have lived among those whose lives are colored by the complexity of poverty, oppression and despair. They also know that the America portrayed in some foreign papers is very different from the America they call home. Notice your own biases and the biases of others without judgement.
3. Stop and listen. Really listen. Take a moment each day and listen to or read another point of view. Imagine you are a filmmaker researching a subject for a movie or book. Ask questions. Learn one thing that surprises you or moves you. Inhabit another world in order to truly feel another perspective so well that you could convey it to a friend.
4. Pray for compassion and peace or do what Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron calls a tonglen (compassion) meditation. Begin with a deep prayer for yourself. Next, engage all your senses and visualize your close friends and family. Then, include your neighbors and your community. Expand the circle to include those in other towns, states, countries. Next, visualize/pray for those who you have not forgiven and those who cause you to hate. Imagine those you love who have died and meditate on their power of forgiveness at the time of death. I have witnessed the powerful effects of this meditation.
5. Finally, now that you have resisted the impulse to react, think about how to respond creatively. Change is birthed in small increments. New worldviews rarely happen overnight. Consider:
- The Berlin Wall fell in a few days, but the power to support that fall happened long before the event.
- In 1776, Abigail Adams entreated her husband to “remember the women” in the new code of laws he was writing, yet the 19th amendment, guaranteeing full voting rights for women was not passed until 1920!
The key lies in opening our minds to divergent perspectives. Transformation is not an event-it’s a process.
Perhaps, just for today we can work on being peace to the people we encounter in our home, our work and communities. We may not be completely free of self-interest, but if we are present to the interests and concerns of others, that is a beginning.