Yearly Archives: 2007

Can’t We Just All Get Along?

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I’m tired of hearing all the arguing about who is right and who is wrong—especially about religious doctrines and political ideologies, from Christianity v. Islam to Democracy v. Theocracy, right down to partisan bickering, conflicts within denominations, and even conflicts within congregations and families. Why does everyone feel it necessary to have the final word and definitive answer about everything?

 

What would better suit me is for everyone to confess proudly to “knowing” what feels right to them as an individual, regardless of how well- or ill-informed they are, however finely or ill-honed their opinions and conclusions–and then everyone respect those personal truths for what they are. It’s perfectly normal to want to test our opinions on other people, and it's perfectly OK to respectfully disagree and discuss, but why do others have to be “wrong” in order that we may be “right”? Why can’t we just all be right for ourselves alone, or, just-as-right-if-incomplete, as anyone can ever be in this best of all possible worlds?

 

Why don’t we all just humbly accept that we are destined to live and die with great mysteries and uncertainties, and that we weren’t meant to know very many things with any great deal of clarity? We can still pursue understanding, but it's more fun when we realize that whatever it is that God intends for us to do and be and have and believe on this earth—a God of each of our personal understandings, and Whoever or whatever we each choose to mean by that Name, or none—it is very evidently not likely that we will ever clearly understand everything, or anything, and will certainly never all come to the same conclusions. That doesn't mean we cannot live our own faiths, our belief systems, our personal ways of knowing and seeing, even if we can't convince everyone (and sometimes, even ourselves) that “they” are wrong and “we” are right.

 

It must be evident by now to most people, in this great information age, that God, if (S)he exists at all, only offers tempting bits and controversial hints about His/Her/Its workings and nature and identity, not to mention those of mankind and the universe. Certainly each of those tidbits and partial answers leads to greater wisdom, but also to ever more questions…. The Bible and the Koran, for instance, are only the beginnings of discussion, not its end, as evident from all the conflicts and disagreement mentioned above.

 

To claim to “know” something, or anything, with any finality, seems the merest hubris, disrespectful even to God and his ineffable creation, and to all the other humans who invariably will come to some other conclusions. Certainly one sign of a well-educated person is that they finally have learned enough to realize how little they really know about anything.

 

To be sure, some scholarly inquiring types spend lifetimes educating themselves about particularly intriguing aspects of reality, and certainly we can listen to their viewpoints more attentively than to others, and to better purpose. But even then, we owe respect to everyone’s story, regardless of their expertise and talents or lack of same, if only for the peculiarity and uniqueness of their experiences and understandings, for their particular dreams, their one-of-a-kind strivings, victories, and holy lost attempts.

 

But why ever hope to find one unique and particular version of wisdom and experience which is generalizable to everyone, whether in the field of politics, religion, philosophy, or any other field of knowledge? Why not just celebrate our own unique versions of truth, and those of others?

 

No one can doubt the veracity of each uniquely individual experience and its conclusions, at least for that one person, however fatally flawed the limitations inherent in being only one person, with only one person's experience and understanding, and only a highly fallibly human capacity to communicate, to boot. We can always safely rejoice instead in the universal commonality of ultimately not-knowing, and live joyfully within such uncertainty and risk, supporting every human effort to grapple with understanding and sharing of personal truths—without setting ourselves aggressively into opposite camps that polarize attempts at communication and turn them into contests of rightness and wrongness.

 

Especially in religious, philosophical, and political discourse, we can spend less time divided among our many differences, and instead celebrate and focus upon our many commonalities—all the universal truths upon which we can all agree, all that unites us, such as love, hope, faith (wherever we choose to put that faith), respect, responsibility, honesty, fairness, hard work, spiritual practice, community, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, purity, selflessness, peacefulness…and the rest of the long list of good things we can all agree upon which goes on forever. These ecumenical values, in all their various positive permutations and versions, can always be communally embraced, taught, admired, built upon, and warmly shared among people of all faiths and ideologies, or of no faith or ideology. Then, instead of forever being self-righteously “right”–that is, wrong–we can celebrate and embrace one another's uniqueness, and…just get along.

 

 

 

 

 

Please send your comments to nancy.pace@adelphia.net

Prayer's Progress

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Prayer’s Progress

(to be read from the bottom to the top)

 

fff

awe

lifting

angel floating

dragon flying

signals smoking

peace piping

toes tipping

breast puffing

throat swelling

loaves rising

brown rounding

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please send feedback to nancy.pace@adelphia.net. Thanks!

 

A Department of Peace?

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“The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day, the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.”- Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

 

A cabinet-level Department of Peace is a fundamentally conservative idea.  Peace in America and throughout the world has become an urgently practical mainstream goal for generations of Americans wishing to conserve lives, resources, good will, money, health, our American ideals, principles, and values, our traditional way of life, our environment, and our talents, time, energy, and property.

There is no reason why the long-held American dream of “peace in our time” should not be the business of government. According to our Constitution, a good government supports domestic tranquility, a more perfect union, justice, the common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty. Without a citizenry and leadership skilled in non-violent resolution of conflict, all these goals are doomed to failure.

 

If we don’t stand for peace, what do we stand for?

 

What better way to show our heartfelt appreciation and support for our troops’ past and future selfless service, what better way to express our debt of gratitude, than to give them a Department of Peace charged with partnering with our military, diplomatic, and political leadership to insure that American soldiers never again march into ill-planned unnecessary wars?

 

Department of Peace legislation could be the unifying, groundbreaking, even visionary legacy needed by the Bush presidency.

 

Most importantly, a Department of Peace promises an effective new approach for solving our nation’s biggest and most costly problem—domestic and international violence.

 

Despite our many prisons, laws, and police forces, despite our huge nuclear and conventional arsenals, our vast military and seemingly limitless expenditures for espionage, we are less safe with every passing day.

 

America cannot shoot its way out of a world full of angry, well-armed enemies and criminals. Growing cycles of hatred, injustice, and violence increasingly threaten the very survival of mankind. Even with pre-emptive action, military solutions to global conflict are insufficient to keep even our own small part of the world safe and stable, unless we add to our military technologies the many equally sophisticated, powerful, and field-tested “technologies” of non-violent conflict resolution and pro-active peace-building.

 

Cooperative, harmonious relationships, rather than being a religious or utopian ideal, are a practical goal critical to our national security. The enormous costs of domestic and international violence—to our children, American society, and the world—are unsustainable. The World Health Organization estimates that the effects of domestic violence in the U.S. annually cost us over $300 billion. Annual defense expenditures in the U.S. top $600 billion. Roughly 100 million lives have been lost during the 20th century to war. We can sustain neither a desirable standard of living nor our beloved freedoms at our current levels of spending.

 

Yet the problems we face in a violent, unstable world relentlessly compound.

 

A cabinet-level Department of Peace, established with the equivalent of 2% of the annual budget for the Department of Defense, will analyze the root causes of violence including war, giving credibility and voice to non-violent, relationship-building conflict-resolution methods—resulting in less crime and war, fewer criminals and enemies, and thus, money to spend (or save!) for other urgent priorities like environmental protection, education, and health care.

 

To be sure, human conflict will always be a natural, even beneficial part of life, offering challenges necessary to growth and change. On the other hand, violent responses to conflict are nearly always inadequate and harmful in the long run. We can learn (and teach) different responses to conflict as readily as we have taught and learned destructive ones. War and violence are not inevitable. In fact, they are arguably the greatest threat to our nation and to mankind. The causes of violence, like the causes of disease, can be culturally eradicated one-by-one.

 

Our present approach to national defense is not working. We are very strong in conventional military operations, but weak in alliance-building (win-win negotiations and diplomacy) and very weak in the use of the many innovative non-violent peace-building technologies already available for addressing both domestic and international conflicts.

 

The common goal of all security departments—Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Peace—is to insure peace and stability. Their primary differences lie in their different strategies for achieving their common goal. A strong military force can be a deterrent, but without a cabinet-level Department of Peace, political leaders of all stripes too often allow war profiteers to rush them unwittingly into wars of aggression, greed, and domination, or turn too quickly to military forces to resolve political problems. A Department of Peace offers a strong counterweight to such commonplace misuse of our vast military might.

 

In this dangerous world, strong U.S. leadership can be invaluable in keeping the peace. Instead of arrogance which costs us allies, we can show the world through our support for a Department of Peace that our highest ideals and intentions lie in playing a peacekeeping role.

 

A Secretary of Peace can nurture a growing culture of peace both nationally and internationally, partnering with the President and his cabinet to provide cultural information and alternative strategies for every possible conflict area in the world, asking hard questions when war seems inevitable, and preventing, reducing, ameliorating, and de-escalating conflicts before they boil over into deadly violence. An Academy of Peace equivalent to our highly-respected military academies will research, evaluate, and teach alternative non-violent responses to conflict.

 

Domestically, a Department of Peace will support and disseminate best practices originating in neighborhood and faith-based programs, addressing drug and alcohol problems, crime, incarceration and recidivism, the spread of weapons, school bullying and violence, gangs, racism, ethnic and homophobic intolerance, child, elder, and spousal abuse, immigration pressures, and other domestic violence problems, through proven programs of peer mediation, violence-prevention counseling, restorative justice, and other successful non-violent approaches. Such grassroots efforts will, in turn, inform and inspire national policy.

 

Scattering leadership for peace-building and diplomatic efforts over various departments has not worked. Why not? Because peace-building technologies require the serious institutional heft, importance, and backing of a national platform.

 

Americans who hate war and who want to leave to future generations the same land of plenty, possibility, and freedom they have been privileged to enjoy have an opportunity to work with our many peace professionals—whether military, diplomatic, Republican, Democratic, or Independent—to institutionalize the pursuit of peace promised in our founding documents by urging the passage of H.R. #808 establishing a Department of Peace.

 

Peace-building through non-violent responses to conflict, like other historical grass-roots movements (e.g., civil rights, women’s suffrage, emancipation of slaves, etc.) may not have seemed obvious at first, but it is America’s best hope.  

 

“Through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make it a brotherhood.”

 

In today’s small, interconnected world, that which we do to others will always come back to help us or to harm us, as we have chosen. We cannot avoid all injustices, but we can seek to avoid adding to their sum. We no longer have the choice of changing or not changing. Our choice now is whether to change for the better, or for the worse. We have risked war. It is time to risk peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Please send comments to nancy.pace@adelphia.net. Thank you!  🙂 

 

The World Needs Healing Now, and So Do We

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The world needs healing. We feel divided from ourselves, from the world, and from God.
 
Yet our own personal healing can only begin when we choose to heal others first; that’s just the way healing works. The magic that happens when we forgive others is the very thing that helps us forget and move on.
 
Minimally, people are irritating. (This includes us!) Many will break our hearts, or even kill us. Yet, when we look at each person and each situation more gently, when we let go of our resentments, give others slack, let up on others' human mistakes, however grievous, we begin to notice that we’re not so hard on ourselves anymore either.
 
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.”
 
Why would Jesus say this?
 
He was teaching us how to heal one another and ourselves.
 
So where in the world do we start, in this business of easing up on others, and ultimately, ourselves?
 
We can begin by forgiving everyone else’s indifference to our own lost hopes, dreams, loves, and opportunities, our deepest sorrows and regrets. When we do, our own apathy and indifference to the plight and suffering of others everywhere will begin to dissipate.
 
We can stop fretting about the stupid or terrible ways others obliviously act out their fears of loss, death, suffering, disappointment, humiliation, deprivation, cruelty, and loss of control—and find ourselves bravely facing and addressing our own fears.
 
We can overlook the foolishness people go through to hide behind their masks and walls—and find ourselves extending our hands and hearts outside our own comfort zones.
 
We can stop criticizing the selfishness that tears apart families and nations and our small blue planet, ruining millions of lives—and let go of our own failures of compassion, giving freely instead, as we have received.
 
We can let go of others’ self-absorbed rudeness and anxiety (born of the belief that life-is-tough-and-then-you-die)—and find ourselves peacefully within safe, loving circles of unity and oneness.
 
We can stop being indignant because others think they know, they’re right, they’re sure about how things should work, and how everyone should live—and become secure in our own attitudes of acceptance and humility.
 
We can stop disapproving of others’ mistake-ridden beliefs, traditions, politics, and cultures—and transform our own fallible and all-too-human personal belief systems and institutions.
 
We can forgive all who frighten, hate, and angrily misuse us—and forget our own fear, hatred, anger, and abuse.
 
We can pardon the world its smallness, ignorance, and prejudice—and find within ourselves the loving power of the whole universe.
 
We can absolve all who have killed or maimed our loved ones in the names of mysterious causes—and free ourselves from our own confused complicity in others’ pain.
 
We can respect others’ blind loyalties to tribe, nation, race, ideology, religion, class, gender—and embrace our commonalities: one Life, one Love, one Self, one Source.
 
We can bear with others’ grave and/or foolish past and future mistakes—and live joyously together in the present.
 
We can let pass others’ weak faith—and grow closer in our shared search for understanding and peace.
 
We can empathize with others for seeming so far from God and man—and heal our own sense of separation.
 
We can stop blaming leaders for their many failures, and start speaking out, lifting up, taking risks, and failing and succeeding responsibly, publicly, courageously.
 
We can release others’ guilt for mistreating us—and drop our own defenses, treating others as we wish to be treated.
 
We can stop hating God for messing up our lives and mis-creating the world—and start listening for His guiding Voice, and recognizing His bountiful, diverse Creation, perfect exactly as it is.
 
We can forgive the world, reclaim our ideals and our love, and move on to heal the world as we have been healed.

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Saddam Hussein’s Hanging, The Bush Administration, Forgiveness, and Happy New Year

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Saddam Hussein, who is very much one of God’s beloved, fallible children (just like the rest of us) met his death with dignity and courage.

 

If all such world leaders who wreak ill-conceived, reckless, needless mayhem, who destroy innocent lives in their ambitious pursuit of influence and power, deserve such grisly ends, then some of our current world leaders ought to be feeling a bit queasy just about now.

 

A fully-functioning Department of Peace (see www.thepeacealliance.org ) would do much to make such dismal futures less likely for all.

 

There is a lot of irony in the sad fact that we’ve spent hundreds of billions of hard-earned and greatly-needed tax dollars to kill off one violent despotic regime in Iraq, simply in order to install another one equally unpopular and equally dependent upon maintaining its power via the same undemocratic brutish means—armies and secret prisons and assassinations and torture. Why else would we need to send ever more armies into Iraq to prop them up?

 

The Bush administration sold us their disastrously costly war by drumming up American fears of an evil madman imminently threatening U.S. citizens, yet not only could we not find such weapons, we couldn’t even pull off a demonstrably “democratic” (i.e., fair) trial convincingly proving that Saddam Hussein indeed deserved death by hanging for even one single alleged killing spree.

 

The west is absolutely accountable for forcibly creating a country called “Iraq” from out of many original tribes, and for supporting their own preferred despot, Saddam Hussein, with only a single aim: to keep cheap oil pumping west. When Saddam later thumbed his nose in the direction of his original kingmakers (Rumsfeld/Cheney et.al.) they were so incensed that they were willing to do anything and everything to depose and replace him with yet another (hopefully more loyal) crony—regardless of how despotic and evil—again with their sole goal of keeping cheap oil pumping west. (The Bush administration recently reclassified all their original distasteful and disgraceful historical machinations with Saddam Hussein in order to cover up their bloody incestuous tracks.) What a grievous waste in every sense—human, material, political, financial, spiritual—this terrible war has been.

 

And to think that all we ever had to do was humbly stand in line to pay for oil at the market price, just like every other country.

 

The “war-for-democracy-and-for-love-of-Iraqis” notion came up briefly only when the American public (and, probably, our still-innocent and idealistic president) could no longer stomach the evil-Saddam-imminent-weapons-fear-thing. Rather than admit that this had always been a war about oil, Cheney/Rumsfeld used Rice to convince Bush (and the public) that continuing the war in order to spread democracy and save Iraqis (at least the ones who weren’t currently shooting at us) was important and necessary. Now they’re finally admitting, at least to one another and to a few others, that this war is indeed a smarmy geopolitical struggle for power, money, resources, and influence; that admission, however, doesn’t make the war any more wise or moral.

 

Democracy cannot be spread by war, just as peace can only arise from peace. We aging hippies used to say in the 60’s that fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity….

 

We need to begin acting like Americans again. We need to generously support peaceful leaders everywhere, and use our power and influence in ways that demonstrate our highest, most deeply American ideals. We need to stop acting like big bullies, and rebuild international good will with generosity and acceptance and statesmanship and diplomacy. We need to build up our economy ethically, and base our businesses and long-term trade partnerships on mutual advantage, not unbridled greed, power, and indifference. Peace on earth will come only when each of us learns to offer peace. And yes, we need to be the ones to go first, to take the first step, because we are still the most powerful, most envied, most influential nation on earth.

 

We can still use multilateral international police forces well-trained in non-violent intervention as necessary to lock up and re-educate violent criminals of all stripes. But we must simultaneously teach our next generation (every child on this small blue planet) to live peacefully with one another, to share, to love our mother earth, and to live and work morally, generously, and sustainably. (Again, please consider the beautiful Department of Peace proposed legislation already supported by 75+ congressional leaders, at www.thepeacealliance.org ).

 

The world of the future will not be one of vengeance and anger, but one of reconciliation and forgiveness (if it is to be, at all.) Human beings—we ourselves, as well as Saddam Hussein, George Bush, all those we love and all those we fear–each of us–will always make mistakes. Of course we should be held accountable. Of course we should see the grief we have caused others, and learn to regret our mistakes and make amends. But just as I would rather not be condemned or tortured or killed or thrown in prison forever for the harm I’ve done in my life (frankly, I’d really rather be forgiven, and supported in doing better) so too do I hope that in this new year and in all the coming new years, we will all learn to live and love and forgive others their trespasses, as we would have others forgive us our own, and then move on to build a new world, together, with love.

 

 

 

Please send your comments to nancy.pace@adelphia.net . Thank you!