What does it mean to be a person who embodies peace?
What does it mean to be a peacemaker?
These are guiding questions for me living in a culture of mass weaponry in the United States. I intentionally don’t use the word guns here because it misleads and provokes a resistance. So, this is not about hunting with rifles or self protection, it is about a death culture of accumulating weapons that have capacity for great harm.
How do we speak life into these fears, the very foundation of this mass weaponry culture?
Fear and vengeance drive and energize conflict everywhere. Conflict that seemingly has no end.
Jesus had an interesting response to conflict, often presented in the binary as if there were only one side or another. Jesus’s response (often referred to as The Third Way) centered relationship rather than right or wrong (the law) and spoke life into places and spaces of conflict. Jesus lived, as we do, in a politically volatile time where tribal identities divided people into categories of insiders and outsiders. Jesus moved beyond these categories and challenged love only as a personal emotion, but as a call to a higher, broader consideration to love for all Beings, including enemies.
So, this is what I pay attention to in these times. I have no answers, only a heart that discerns from the depths of my being that violence continues to create harm and can never repair harm.
Who, regardless of religious affiliation, is embodying this way of embracing conflict so it might be generative, provide space for reconciliation and transformative justice?
Here is a small list of who I am paying attention to these days.
Standing Together is a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice.
Adrienne maree brown adrienne maree brown (she/they) is growing a garden of healing ideas. Informed by 27 years of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Loving Correction as ideas and practices for transformation.
Mennonite Action US and Canadian Mennonites calling for Ceasefire in Gaza and peaceful disruption of white Christian nationalism.
Speaking life to me right now also is Cole Arthur Riley, The Black Liturgist as well as the poetry of Mary Oliver and the work of Joanna Macy.
Whose voices are you paying attention to that speak life rather than self righteous certainty?
What teachings inform your thoughts, words and actions?
Please share!
