If We Really Wanted to Make a More Peaceful World
If we really wanted to make a more peaceful world, what would we do? What if it was up to you and me? What would you do? If you think President Bush is doing it wrong, what would you do differently? If you don't like those terrorists exploding themselves in car bombs in Iraq or in the subways in London or God forbid, slamming more airplanes into buildings in our own country, how would YOU get them to stop? We tend to think creating peace is something that the experts are supposed to do, the politicians, the diplomats, the top elected officials, and then the rest of us go to war when they tell us to or we complain loudly when we think it was a mistake, but aside from that, most of us have delegated the job of peace-making to someone else, to those people whose job it is or to those saintly creatures who choose to work in war-torn lands trying to get people to love each other. And they end up getting themselves kidnapped and their fool heads cut off. Yeah, right! Fat chance I'm gonna do anything like that! Naw, leave me to my beer and to my SUV and my mortgage. I've got plenty enough to think about thank you.
Yet, when I look around at my fellow American citizens I see a lot of people who are either overtly or covertly in anguish about conflict in their lives. When people you know get honest with you they will tell you that the real suffering in their lives comes from conflicts that they can't solve: with their husbands, their children (especially with teenagers), with siblings, with friends and co-workers and neighbors. Most people are just trying to get by and be happy. They're trying to make it. They're trying to live the American dream. They're trying to have some good stuff: a house, a car, a vacation once in a while, send the kids to college and help the kids out when they get married, nothing big or grandiose. But gosh, it's so darn hard! People suffer about money and they suffer about health problems it's true, but when you get right down to it, the worst suffering of all for human beings is the suffering we have about relationships, when we feel dis-connected from, blamed, made wrong or isolated from those we love and care about. I have a hunch that if our relationships were generous, supportive and loving, then whatever money or health problems we had, we could handle them. But far too many of us feel powerless and helpless when it comes to dealing with the people in our lives and we end up screaming at people we care about, saying things we wish we hadn't said and feeling like we're making things worse instead of better. We don't live in peace with those closest to us and we don't live in peace with ourselves. How could we possibly make a difference with the friggin' planet for christ's sake???
And yet, I am convinced, from long study of how human beings have developed and evolved, how human beings behave and how the human brain works, but most of all, from long practice in making myself into a more peaceful person, that humans have the capacity to be far, far happier, serene, joyous, playful, fulfilled, self-expressed, and yes, peaceful than we have ever dreamed. What holds us back? What don't we choose to build a more loving world? Why do we keep suffering when we could be so much happier? Interesting question!!! Closely linked to that question is another one: if humans decided that they were sick of violence, war, suffering and the loss that comes with armed conflict, what actions could we take to begin to create a more peaceful world? To me those are the most interesting questions in the whole world.
To begin with, if we had decided that we wanted a more peaceful world, the most obvious place to begin would be to begin with ourselves. We would have to confront, if we were serious about it, the possibility of creating peace in our own relationships. And for most of us, that would open up a whole can of worms that we might not want to face. Because most of us have it that conflict is tough, nasty, difficult. We want someone else to solve it. Or we want easy recipes. Give me three simple rules to follow, do A, B and C, good, I'll do that, hm . . . why didn't the person respond? Why are they still angry at me? Give me a formula: I know, I'll talk in I statements, I want this, will you please do that? Johnny, don't throw the toy! Use your words. No, you may not hit your sister! So, in general, most of these band-aid approaches to conflict resolution will remain simply that: first aid, pulled out in the heat of conflict when, in desperation because you don't know what else to do, you'll try anything, even something you read in an article or heard about in a workshop.
However, if you truly want to make peace in your relationships, nothing short of a revolution is required, at least that is my experience. And such a revolution (one might call it a velvet revolution) might be the single most powerful, single most important journey or transformational experience anyone might experience in their lifetime, simply because the payoffs and the rewards in one's relationships with other people are so great. Is there some great secret in all this work? Because if there is, why not get it right now, right at the beginning and save oneself a lot of grief? Ah, if it were only that easy! If only human beings just threw themselves at their trainers and teachers and said, "I'm here to learn, teach me everything you know about how communicate, love and end conflict with others? How can I create peace?" And the wise sage would say something like: "walk a mile in their shoes!"
"But, but, I don't wanna, I don't feel like it! It's too hard." "Then walk three miles!" The creation of peace, I have discovered, is something like building a bridge to another person, especially to someone you hate or dislike and crossing over that bridge until you can be inside the other person's skin. I was watching Dr. Phil yesterday and a young woman was on who was suffering greatly because her mother is a drug addict who is still using crack cocaine and refuses to give it up (mom looked to be in her 50's). Dr. Phil's counsel was that she could love her mother but she did not have to choose to be around her and most especially she did not have to expose her children to their grandmother. I would expand and amplify Dr. Phil's counsel, wise as it was, so that this young woman could find more and more peace over time with who her mother is and who she is not. She may need to give up her judgments of her mother as bad and wrong for not being there for her when she was a child (boy is that a tough one to do!). She may need to envision or imagine the conditions or traumas that led her mother to seek the solace of drugs which led her to get addicted and so disempowered her that she cannot imagine a life without drugs. All we can do, when those we love are hurting themselves, is to open our hearts wider and wider, love them more, understand them more and, at the same time, we do not have to let them hurt us any more or hurt anyone we care for. A delicate balancing act but it can be done. Peacemaking forces you to grow up.
You begin to discover the blessings that come when you give up making other people wrong and give up holding on to your own righteousness. We are so good at this, we humans. We love, love, love to blame other people. We love to make ourselves superior to other people. Well, if I were president, I wouldn't have taken us to war in Iraq! Well, at least I wouldn't have lied about it! At least I would ask other people for help or seek other peoples' opinions. I would admit when I was wrong. Yeah, right! She shouldn't wear a dress like that. She's too fat. He has no business dating a woman that young. Yada, yada, yada . . . . that's what our minds are doing all day long, judging, assessing, evalutating, making other people wrong, finding fault with them, patting ourselves on the back. Yet should someone criticize us, or someone we love, and there's holy hell to pay!
We think there is something to be gained by taking an unrelenting stand for how terribly someone behaved toward us in the past, declaring heroically, as I heard someone do on a talk show yesterday, "I don't do that forgiveness stuff,". He abused me, he used me, she lied to me, he violated me, etc. etc. I do truly believe in calling people to account for acts of violence and violation. However, when our calling to account is unsuccessful, there comes a time when the majestic banner of heroism and justice must be laid to rest. Could it be that sometimes we are so dramatic and so superior in our calling other people to account for their behavior to us, that there is simply no room for them to be human, no space or place for grace, for dignity, for humanity to emerge? I say this as someone who finally realized, after sixteen years of being disowned by my family, that I had mastered the role of victim like nobody's business. If there were an award for drama queen, an Oscar for best Victim of the Year (no the Decade!), I would have won it. That's how good I was at making other people feel bad at what they had done to me. There comes a time to move on in life. And guess what, once you've given up the victim role, life is so much softer, simpler and more spacious. Giving up victimhood opens up the possibility of truly loving other people and truly living in peace alongside and with other people.
Perhaps the most powerful peacemaking tool of all is the simple act of listening, deeply listening, listening with full attention, with all one's heart and soul. Such listening is altogether rare in our world and I am convinced that if we used it in politics, war would indeed be rare. We have a saying in The Compassionate Listening Project, the organization in which I am deeply involved: An enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard. To listen deeply is to hear and experience the world in a new way and to understand our common humanity with someone whose life may be radically different than our own. To dare to listen, even when you don't want to, is a courageous act. To listen with the ears of your heart, to shush the yammerings of your mind and listen even more deeply is a bold and difficult thing. Our world could use more of it in these dangerous days.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. What are the skills of everyday peacemaking that you use? What can you do to create peaceful relations in your family? your workplace? your religious community?
2. What can we do to create a more peaceful political discourse and rhetoric in our media and between and among our political leaders?
3. What ideas do you have for creative engagement with the Moslem/Arabic worlds and healing the splits caused between them and the Western world brought on by terrorism?
Yet, when I look around at my fellow American citizens I see a lot of people who are either overtly or covertly in anguish about conflict in their lives. When people you know get honest with you they will tell you that the real suffering in their lives comes from conflicts that they can't solve: with their husbands, their children (especially with teenagers), with siblings, with friends and co-workers and neighbors. Most people are just trying to get by and be happy. They're trying to make it. They're trying to live the American dream. They're trying to have some good stuff: a house, a car, a vacation once in a while, send the kids to college and help the kids out when they get married, nothing big or grandiose. But gosh, it's so darn hard! People suffer about money and they suffer about health problems it's true, but when you get right down to it, the worst suffering of all for human beings is the suffering we have about relationships, when we feel dis-connected from, blamed, made wrong or isolated from those we love and care about. I have a hunch that if our relationships were generous, supportive and loving, then whatever money or health problems we had, we could handle them. But far too many of us feel powerless and helpless when it comes to dealing with the people in our lives and we end up screaming at people we care about, saying things we wish we hadn't said and feeling like we're making things worse instead of better. We don't live in peace with those closest to us and we don't live in peace with ourselves. How could we possibly make a difference with the friggin' planet for christ's sake???
And yet, I am convinced, from long study of how human beings have developed and evolved, how human beings behave and how the human brain works, but most of all, from long practice in making myself into a more peaceful person, that humans have the capacity to be far, far happier, serene, joyous, playful, fulfilled, self-expressed, and yes, peaceful than we have ever dreamed. What holds us back? What don't we choose to build a more loving world? Why do we keep suffering when we could be so much happier? Interesting question!!! Closely linked to that question is another one: if humans decided that they were sick of violence, war, suffering and the loss that comes with armed conflict, what actions could we take to begin to create a more peaceful world? To me those are the most interesting questions in the whole world.
To begin with, if we had decided that we wanted a more peaceful world, the most obvious place to begin would be to begin with ourselves. We would have to confront, if we were serious about it, the possibility of creating peace in our own relationships. And for most of us, that would open up a whole can of worms that we might not want to face. Because most of us have it that conflict is tough, nasty, difficult. We want someone else to solve it. Or we want easy recipes. Give me three simple rules to follow, do A, B and C, good, I'll do that, hm . . . why didn't the person respond? Why are they still angry at me? Give me a formula: I know, I'll talk in I statements, I want this, will you please do that? Johnny, don't throw the toy! Use your words. No, you may not hit your sister! So, in general, most of these band-aid approaches to conflict resolution will remain simply that: first aid, pulled out in the heat of conflict when, in desperation because you don't know what else to do, you'll try anything, even something you read in an article or heard about in a workshop.
However, if you truly want to make peace in your relationships, nothing short of a revolution is required, at least that is my experience. And such a revolution (one might call it a velvet revolution) might be the single most powerful, single most important journey or transformational experience anyone might experience in their lifetime, simply because the payoffs and the rewards in one's relationships with other people are so great. Is there some great secret in all this work? Because if there is, why not get it right now, right at the beginning and save oneself a lot of grief? Ah, if it were only that easy! If only human beings just threw themselves at their trainers and teachers and said, "I'm here to learn, teach me everything you know about how communicate, love and end conflict with others? How can I create peace?" And the wise sage would say something like: "walk a mile in their shoes!"
"But, but, I don't wanna, I don't feel like it! It's too hard." "Then walk three miles!" The creation of peace, I have discovered, is something like building a bridge to another person, especially to someone you hate or dislike and crossing over that bridge until you can be inside the other person's skin. I was watching Dr. Phil yesterday and a young woman was on who was suffering greatly because her mother is a drug addict who is still using crack cocaine and refuses to give it up (mom looked to be in her 50's). Dr. Phil's counsel was that she could love her mother but she did not have to choose to be around her and most especially she did not have to expose her children to their grandmother. I would expand and amplify Dr. Phil's counsel, wise as it was, so that this young woman could find more and more peace over time with who her mother is and who she is not. She may need to give up her judgments of her mother as bad and wrong for not being there for her when she was a child (boy is that a tough one to do!). She may need to envision or imagine the conditions or traumas that led her mother to seek the solace of drugs which led her to get addicted and so disempowered her that she cannot imagine a life without drugs. All we can do, when those we love are hurting themselves, is to open our hearts wider and wider, love them more, understand them more and, at the same time, we do not have to let them hurt us any more or hurt anyone we care for. A delicate balancing act but it can be done. Peacemaking forces you to grow up.
You begin to discover the blessings that come when you give up making other people wrong and give up holding on to your own righteousness. We are so good at this, we humans. We love, love, love to blame other people. We love to make ourselves superior to other people. Well, if I were president, I wouldn't have taken us to war in Iraq! Well, at least I wouldn't have lied about it! At least I would ask other people for help or seek other peoples' opinions. I would admit when I was wrong. Yeah, right! She shouldn't wear a dress like that. She's too fat. He has no business dating a woman that young. Yada, yada, yada . . . . that's what our minds are doing all day long, judging, assessing, evalutating, making other people wrong, finding fault with them, patting ourselves on the back. Yet should someone criticize us, or someone we love, and there's holy hell to pay!
We think there is something to be gained by taking an unrelenting stand for how terribly someone behaved toward us in the past, declaring heroically, as I heard someone do on a talk show yesterday, "I don't do that forgiveness stuff,". He abused me, he used me, she lied to me, he violated me, etc. etc. I do truly believe in calling people to account for acts of violence and violation. However, when our calling to account is unsuccessful, there comes a time when the majestic banner of heroism and justice must be laid to rest. Could it be that sometimes we are so dramatic and so superior in our calling other people to account for their behavior to us, that there is simply no room for them to be human, no space or place for grace, for dignity, for humanity to emerge? I say this as someone who finally realized, after sixteen years of being disowned by my family, that I had mastered the role of victim like nobody's business. If there were an award for drama queen, an Oscar for best Victim of the Year (no the Decade!), I would have won it. That's how good I was at making other people feel bad at what they had done to me. There comes a time to move on in life. And guess what, once you've given up the victim role, life is so much softer, simpler and more spacious. Giving up victimhood opens up the possibility of truly loving other people and truly living in peace alongside and with other people.
Perhaps the most powerful peacemaking tool of all is the simple act of listening, deeply listening, listening with full attention, with all one's heart and soul. Such listening is altogether rare in our world and I am convinced that if we used it in politics, war would indeed be rare. We have a saying in The Compassionate Listening Project, the organization in which I am deeply involved: An enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard. To listen deeply is to hear and experience the world in a new way and to understand our common humanity with someone whose life may be radically different than our own. To dare to listen, even when you don't want to, is a courageous act. To listen with the ears of your heart, to shush the yammerings of your mind and listen even more deeply is a bold and difficult thing. Our world could use more of it in these dangerous days.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. What are the skills of everyday peacemaking that you use? What can you do to create peaceful relations in your family? your workplace? your religious community?
2. What can we do to create a more peaceful political discourse and rhetoric in our media and between and among our political leaders?
3. What ideas do you have for creative engagement with the Moslem/Arabic worlds and healing the splits caused between them and the Western world brought on by terrorism?
posted by Joy at 3:14 PM
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