The Readers Blog is a group blog, a collection of provocative, passionate people who represent a broad geographical, professional, personal and vocational range. New bloggers from other places and other points of view will join the conversation from time to time. Here, we invite them all to share their perspectives and opinions on the issues that matter to them most. And we invite you to respond. Let the dialogue begin!
The Risks of Peace
Creating peace on this planet requires risk. Did you already know that? It surprises me that so many of us think we know what peace is. I’m not sure we do. I’ve been working with peace as a spiritual priority in my life for more than fifteen years, and I’m not sure I know what peace is.
On the other hand, I definitely know what a chocolate chip cookie is, and I also know how to create one. Peace isn’t the same thing as that. There is no recipe, and its form morphs as soon as we think we have it pinned down. Peace is the biggest umbrella idea I know other than God. God, bless Her, as a word, puts off enough people that I’m sticking with Peace in this entry.
So let me ask some rough-and-tumble questions in no particular order:
What is an economics of peace?
What is a family of peace?
What is a government of peace?
What is a church of peace
What is a war of peace?
What is a zoo of peace?
What is a classroom of peace?
What is a stock market of peace?
What is a surrender of peace?
What is a chocolate chip cookie of peace?
I don’t personally know the answers to these questions, but I know that if I’m asking the questions, then the answers exist in me somewhere, or else I wouldn’t be asking them.
I am a fan of that wondrous poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In his Letters to a Young Poet, written in 1903, he writes:
“...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Are you willing to take the risks needed to created peace on our lovely blue and green marble Earth? Live the questions now. The more of us who do so, who say yes to the questions, who risk living the questions, the sooner we will create peace on earth.
I love your rough-and-tumble questions, and I encourage you to keep asking. The first two questions are being addressed by the works of Riane Eisler, and the third question has an answer in The Peace Alliance campaign for the U.S. Department of Peace. I can tell you from my personal experience of the people in this campaign that for us peace is not far away, and not the responsibility of the government nor anyone else other than ourselves. We are living the question.
I have become convinced that I have the power to transform the world into one that is free of domination. I believe that all it takes to transform the world is for me to transform myself into a more mature, responsible, and loving person. That’s all I have to do, nothing more than that, nothing less than that, and nothing is more important than that transformation. When I change my inner world, my external behavior shifts to match, and I become a creative source of systemic change.
Moreover, if I can do it, with my history of dysfunction and wounding, certainly anyone can do it. The ripple effect from this transformation is immeasurable, and it has the power to stimulate the largest institutions of repressive domination to implode. This is the risk, to turn conventional thought on its head, and would appear to be insane to most people, a kind of megalomania, which it is not, it is the exact opposite of megalomania. It is acknowledging our critical participation in energetic systems far larger than ourselves.
I do not accept that I am the victim of the military-media-corporate-government conspiracy. I am 100% responsible for it, another apparently “insane” idea, and yet what I mean is that I am 100% able to respond to it. I have an answer. I have more than one answer, and I take the risk of asserting them. Having a better idea is far more effective for producing social transformation than recrimination and revolt. Very soon the world will be ready to hear hundreds of thousands of people who have transformed themselves internally to be the change, and not demand the change from some external source.
posted by Davoid on 5/29/2008 10:32 am