Peace Essay #5

This week's Peace Essay comes from Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, formerly of AFSC's San Fransisco office, who recently helped found the Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point. AFSC will miss Lynn, but we wish her success with her new project.

Peace Talk

Language helps creates peace. The concept shomer lashon/guarding one's tongue against hurtful communication is central to Jewish nonviolent communication and peacemaking. Our sages consider the following questions: What can we say about each other? What is considered hurtful language? When talking through contested issues, how do we engage each other in ways that leads to cooperation and concrete action? How do we use language to bless and heal wounded relationships? We are also obligated, as peacemakers, to purify community narratives by removing the strands of racism, sexism, triumphalism and other forms of violence woven within the human story.

Educational methodology associated with Torah study values multiple points of view and the dialogic process as 'words of the living God.' Creative tension in multiplicity is divine. As a rabbi committed to nonviolence, I pray that work for a peaceful and just holy land using language that humanizes the faces of all involved while struggling to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian life with clarity, courage and direct action. We are obligated to speak the truth about violence while working for restorative justice. It is not an easy road.

L'Shalom,
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Co-founder of the Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point


All peace essays on this blog are the work and opinion of their authors, even those written by AFSC staff. The authors (including staff) are free to disagree with AFSC's positions; these essays should not be seen as statements by AFSC. We share them in the hope of sparking conversation about the true meanings of peace.

Peace Essay #4

This week's peace essay comes from my friend Elizabeth Walmsley. She runs the Middle School Friends Program of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

Peace: Collected Musing in Journal Form:
by Elizabeth Walmsley

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

My father once gave a message in Meeting for Worship while we were at Australia Yearly Meeting. He stood and said something along the lines of:

“Friends, peace is possible. I know this because I have experienced it. At the talent show last night I was caught up in the crowd’s whooping and cheering in a way that I am not accustomed to, and realized that there was peace, in that moment.”

When I think of my father’s message, I wonder in which moments I have experienced peace. Certainly while sleeping, and snuggles are a close second. But in large groups of people there have also been moments of peace, like watching middle school youth work together to achieve a team building task on an obstacle course, participating in a large fashion show fund raiser for women’s health, and dancing with lots of people on a dance floor, to name a few. When I think of peace, I think of:

Although she doesn’t pray the way humans do, she is clearly well acquainted with peace and does her best to remind me of it as often as possible - my beautiful, fluffy and loving cat Cally

• Having an inner, personal peace. To be calm and settled within yourself.
• The absence of greed and paranoia.
• The presence of generosity, confidence, and calm wisdom.
• Valuing every human being equally as all being worthy of love, care, and good attention.
• Fairness and honesty in business practices.
• Functional families.
• LISTENING!!

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

I see peace as a process, and not just a state of being. It requires a lot of work to “do” peace, to maintain (ie - do maintenance on) peaceful relations. It is not merely the absence of violence, but requires forgiveness. It is almost beyond comprehension to me to think of how a Hutu and a Tutsi, ex-neighbors, could possibly get together and talk to each other in the same room, face to face, when one of them has killed the entire immediate family of the other. How can the other find it within themselves to forgive this person? And after all the wrongs have been forgiven and there is no more violence occurring, is that peace?

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

As I sit on a morning commuter train surrounded by other middle class western world folks like myself, I find that I am challenged to write about the meaning of peace. I am wearing nice clothes, sipping fresh coffee, and next to me sits a plump wallet displaying my card for the train that shows that all of my passages have been paid for. I glance over and see people contentedly absorbed in their books, gazing out the window at the pleasant shrubbery, or having quiet conversations on their cell phones. No wonder I am feeling so challenged to write about the meaning of peace – my experience is totally disconnected from the raw and cutting edge side of peace that makes itself so obvious because it is not violence.

Colossians 3:12 As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.

My favorite prayer activity is the “Five Fingers of Prayer”. I experience strong elements of peace in the process. As you work your way through your fingers, you focus on, and pray about, the following areas:

Thumb: Thanksgiving
First finger: Confession (That no one is perfect)
Middle finger: Intercession (Holding people in the Light)
Fourth finger: Listening (to God)
Pinky: Praise (God!)

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.



All peace essays on this blog are the work and opinion of their authors, even those written by AFSC staff. The authors (including staff) are free to disagree with AFSC's positions; these essays should not be seen as statements by AFSC. We share them in the hope of sparking conversation about the true meanings of peace.

Peace Essay #1

A few weeks ago I asked a few of my friends to write essays to answer the question: What does "peace" mean? Starting today we're going to publish one essay a week answering that question. If you would like to submit an essay, please contact us at oneminute@afsc.org for more information. Essays are the views of the author, who are free to disagree with AFSC.

This first essay was submitted by my friend Pamela (who also provided one of our first Peace Indicators):

Peace

I sat with this question of what peace means to me for a couple of days, testing whether what came to mind would hold true both for individuals and communities, for spiritual as well as temporal life. It was a good challenge, and here’s what I came up with as conditions for peace:

• Knowing that there are others who wish you well, that your life and well-being matter;
• Having some predictability in the larger environment; not being on edge about what might happen next, or at the mercy of forces that are too large to control and not at peace themselves;
• Have some reason to believe that your efforts will yield results;
• Having some confidence in your goodness—and the goodness of others;
• Not holding tightly to more than your share, or protecting yourself against those with less.

Since I’m suspicious of ideas and beliefs that aren’t rooted in practice, the next challenge was to consider how all this relates to my experience.

I thought immediately about all the attempts that people make to reach peace by eliminating or muting what seems to threaten it. So we have peace through drugs and numbness, peace by the iron fist, peace in a vacuum, ultimately peace through death. I know the attraction, but am looking for more.

I thought of the deeply conflict-averse family I was raised in, and what a struggle it has been to embrace conflict as survivable even, much less something that could bring growth. I’ve fought hard to understand the roots of anger and fear, and develop the skills and confidence to engage in and get to the bottom of conflict.

I thought about the appearance of peace—and all the rubber band wars, hand-made toy weapons, contact sports, and noise in our family over the years. I’m pleased with our focus on supporting our boys’ natural growth in goodness rather than setting up a hedge of prohibitions against anything that could be associated with the evils of violence.

I thought about the relative security that comes with being defended versus being connected. Our choice to live and raise a family in the city, rather than going for the more protected suburbs, has had its costs for sure. But it has given us access to many wonderful people whom others miss in their choice to put more resources into protection. Following that path to its ultimate end—the gated community—seems like a deeply misguided search for peace.

I thought of how deeply any true and lasting peace is intertwined with economic and political justice. I’ve looked for ways to lend my weight to those struggles, and fought for respectful peer connection with people who have less—and every step I’ve taken, every connection I’ve made, makes me feel more at home, more secure in this world.

I have to say that I also love quiet. I love the stillness of Quaker meeting. I am always striving to clear out the bustle and noise that keeps me from listening for and hearing what I’m called to. I love my early morning walks and time spent with the earth, yielding up beauty and bounty. But the peace I’m most excited about is lively and full of conflict, with all the risk, surprise, and joy that come with hard-won connection.