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The Peace Report, Issue #12
By Louise Diamond, Ph.D.
Welcome to The Peace Report, an occasional set of reflections on world and national affairs in these times of change and challenge, as seen through a peace lens.
Peace, the Great Divine
There is a reason Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice, and Kwanzaa all have light as a central element of celebration. The candles, fires, and strings of multi-colored lightbulbs are physical representations of a larger spiritual truth – the Divine Light is re-lit within us at this season.
It’s so easy to forget that we are beings of Light, made of the same stuff as the stars, walking holy people, living manifestations of God/Allah/Great Spirit/Universal Love. We are, quite simply, Divine. To realize how profoundly we have forgotten this, all we need do is read the headlines.
And so, once a year, we have rituals to remind us of our common spiritual purpose, regardless of our religious affiliation: to remember who we truly are, and to be that Light in our daily lives. We are here to join matter with spirit, through our words, our thoughts, our actions, and the choices we make in every moment.
Though we have different, and often elaborate, ethical codes and religious rules and rituals to tell us how to do this, it doesn’t take either a rocket scientist or an enlightened master to know the basics. We are here to be Love and Peace incarnate.
To be Love and Peace incarnate. More easily said than done, if the world we have created is any indication of how well we’ve accomplished our mission. In these times we are called urgently to remember our spiritual instructions. Global warming and global warring now threaten not just our survival but our very soul development.
We could argue forever about how we have come to this sorry state, who is to blame, and what we should do about it. For me the way forward is simple: we have forgotten who and why we are, and now we must wake up – to our divine nature; rev up – the brilliance of our Light; and step up – to the responsibility this entails, to make the manifestation of Peace and Love the sole focus, the soul focus, of our every breath and action.
- To wake up, we listen to the wise ones among us, and let our hearts remember. We renew our commitment and set our intention to be all that we can be.
- To rev up, we pray and meditate. We grow the sacred glow from the inside out, so that every atom of our being is radiant with the Divine Light that is our birthright.
- To step up, we treat every being, including ourselves, as a sacred spark of the one Light. We are unwavering in our practice of right relationship, with every person and with every living being, including the Earth herself.
Our mantra in the holiday season is Peace on Earth, because that is the ultimate vision of our spiritual mission. Peace is the outpicturing of Love. When our hearts are hardened against one another, for whatever reasons we invent to feed our fantasies of power, greed, or fear, Divine Love and Light cannot flow. The open heart, the heart that knows compassion and loving kindness, the heart that sees the divine perfection in all, the heart that is naturally and boundlessly generous, kind, and forgiving – that is the pathway to Peace.
And so, my friends, as we celebrate our holidays this month, my gift to you is this remembrance and this simple roadmap to Peace, the Great Divine, manifest among us. Let us wake up, rev up, and step up to make Peace on Earth a reality in our lifetime. May it be so, for the benefit of all beings.
Christmas in Jerusalem
Nearly 20 years ago, I spent a cold and rainy Christmas in Israel and what was then called the Occupied Territories. It was the late 1980’s, and the first Intifada was raging. As a budding peacebuilder, I was there to learn, and to see if I could contribute in any small way to peace.
Since then, I have gone back dozens of times, listening and sharing deeply with Palestinians, Israelis, and also Israeli Palestinians, and every time I see the suffering of the people, and I say to myself, ‘It can’t get any worse than this.’ And every year it gets worse.
The political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simple, though admittedly not easy. It has been known for decades. The political will to solve the conflict is missing The longer the conflict goes on, the more difficult it is for the people to compromise and forgive, and the more hardened the hearts become all over the region.
I hold that the Israeli-Palestinian is not just another long-standing, intractable conflict, like in Kashmir or Sudan. With its global reach and its origins in the very birth of monotheism, I believe this is the place where humanity rises or falls to its evolutionary challenge. Though not a believer in the Armageddon scenario, I have often said that if we get it right here, then there is hope for us, and if we don’t, we are in big trouble.
One day I was meditating on the beach south of Tel Aviv, and I felt a great distress deep in the ground below. The thought arose that this land had once been the spiritual heart center of the earth, and because of the centuries of warfare, that heart was shattered. The coherence that once had made Jerusalem in particular the holiest spot for the three Abrahamic peoples (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian), had been broken and needed to be mended. Still, today, that cry for healing resounds.
If you have not been to Jerusalem, let me paint you a picture. Within a few blocks of each other lie three of the holiest sites on the planet. On the Haram al Sharif, or Temple Mount, is a magnificent building called the Dome of the Rock, within which is a large rock said to be both the rock upon which Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God’s will, and also the rock from which Mohammed ascended to heaven. A few feet away stands the Al Aksa Mosque, the third most holy place to Muslims everywhere, after Mecca and Medina.
These buildings occupy the site of the original Jewish Temple, which housed the Holiest of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, the instructions given to Moses at Sinai, the same Temple familiar to Christians as the place where Jesus chastised the moneylenders. Just below this site, and holding up one side of the plateau on which it sits, is the Western Wall, previously called the Wailing Wall, reputed to be the last remnant of the original Temple grounds. This is, today, the holiest site for Jews at which to make their prayers.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away, sits the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, said to cover the spot where Christ was crucified. Winding its way through the ancient market place nearby is the Via Dolorosa, the path he took on the way to his crucifixion. Just down the road, ten minutes away, is Bethlehem, and in its central square the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was supposedly born.
So forget for a moment the political knot that has defied unraveling for so long in this part of the world. Just focus on this holy land, shared by the three great monotheistic religions of the world, where the spiritual energy of the last 4,000 years for much of humanity lies inextricably entwined and bloodied, since the Crusades if not before, with centuries of violent struggle over who shall have dominion here. Can you hear the cry for healing? I hear it every day, in every news story, every memory of my time there, every thought of my friends there, Israeli and Palestinian; Muslim, Christian, and Jew.
The recent Middle East peace conference in Annapolis has opened a door to hope for a political peace agreement, though there have been many such moments in the past and it is easy to be skeptical. However, the real peace must come through the healing of the relationship between these three religions.
If I ran the world, I would immediately convene an ongoing global dialogue between religious leaders of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. (Actually, I would have done this on September 12, 2001, but that’s another story.) I would charge them with healing the wounds among them and finding a way to live in harmony, and also learning to live in peace internally, between various sects. I would tell them that the survival of the entire world depended on their success. And if I could, I would lock them in together and not let them out until they finished.
Since I don’t run the world, I can only hold this image in my mind and prayers. That cold rainy Christmas in Jerusalem so many years ago, I had a smaller version of that prayer. I thought of the many warm and cozy households and churches around the world where people were cheerfully singing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ at the same time that the real Bethlehem lay forlorn and shuttered, bereft of a single pilgrim, with Israeli soldiers manning their outpost in Manger Square.
I imagined the Palestinians one by one, defying curfew by coming out into the dark to offer the Israeli soldiers a cup of hot tea, and the soldiers, far from home and cold and wet, gratefully accepting. I imagined them sitting together over the tea, telling each other their stories, showing pictures of their families.
I imagined the re-birth of what was truly born there so many years ago – the heart of Love and the spirit of Peace. Every Christmas season we have the opportunity to celebrate this birth and re-create it in our own lives, whoever we are, for the heart of Love and the spirit of Peace are universal and belong to no one group exclusively.
My friends, I invite you to join me in the midst of holiday festivities to remember Jerusalem, the City of Peace. Let us open the way for true healing there by seeing the city and all its peoples awash in the glow of a cheer that comes not from eggnog and dreidl games, not from presents but from presence – the presence of a Peace long sought and finally realized.
To do this we must each, like the negotiators in Annapolis, put away all our pre-conceptions, all our strongly held views of ‘the other,’ all our opinions and moral judgments, and simply be in the Presence – the presence of Peace Inherent, Peace Potential, Peace Arising. And then let us do the same for Baghdad and Kabul, for Darfur and Somalia, for the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burma, for Colombia and Sri Lanka and everywhere that people are killing each other.
And let us do the same for our own neighborhoods, our cities, our families, our nation. For Jerusalem lives within each and every one of us, whoever we are, wherever we are. We are all citizens of the City of Peace, all building worlds around us where hope and joy, harmony and understanding flourish – or not. Let Jerusalem be a beacon for us in these times, lit up through our prayers and actions, and in this way May Peace Prevail on Earth.
The Gift of Peace
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us trillions of dollars. Trillions – a number almost too huge to imagine. And this on top of the largest defense budget in the world, larger than all the other major countries put together. One of my most ardent prayers is that we would see this kind of money flowing to peace instead of war. Imagine with me, if you will, what our world would be like if that were so. Instead, I know of hardly a single peace-related organization that isn’t hurting for money.
Now that gift-giving time is upon us, I encourage you to make gifts to your favorite peace organizations. Donate in the name of your loved ones, as a very special holiday present, or give from yourself, or even anonymously.
Don’t have a favorite peace organization, or want to expand your circle? Here are some suggestions:
- If you want to see a comprehensive list of peace organizations in many fields, go to www.peacemajority.us/groups.htm. I especially recommend checking out the Military-related section.
- If you want to support peace and justice activism, go to United for Peace and Justice, www.unitedforpeace.org, and check out their extensive member list.
- If you want to support international peacebuilding and conflict resolution, go to The Alliance for Peacebuilding, www.allianceforpeacebuilding.org, and check out their impressive list of members.
- If you want to support inter-religious harmony or faith-based approaches to peace, go to Fellowship for Reconciliation, www.forusa.org, and click on ‘Groups’ to see their list of peace organizations connected to a wide range of faith traditions. Or, go to United Religions Initiative, www.uri.org, committed to ‘interfaith cooperation and to ending religiously motivated violence.’
- If you want to support humanitarian organizations concerned with sustainable development around the world, go to www.interaction.org, and explore their remarkable member organizations.
- Interested in shopping for peace-related gifts and supporting artisans in conflict zones around the world at the same time? Go to www.thepeacecompany.com or www.amberchand.com.
Or, just ‘Google’ the word ‘peace’ followed by any keyword that interests you. The field is huge; the opportunities are endless; the need is great. Whatever your doorway into the world of peace organizations, I hope you will consider giving the gift of peace this holiday season. For if we who love peace do not put our financial support behind the activities of those who are heeding the cries of the world for peace, who will? And if not now, when?
Hummingbird Recommends
The Peace Book: 108 Simple Ways to Make a More Peaceful World, is another vehicle for giving the gift of peace. At a time when ‘peace on earth’ seems so far away, held hostage by those who fight for power, wealth, or ideology, it is easy for us as individuals to feel helpless and hopeless.
I wrote this book seven years ago to show that, on the contrary, we can all be creators of peace, contributing through our everyday activities to a critical shift from a culture of violence to a culture of peace. The book details concrete, practical things that you can do toward that goal, whoever and wherever you are, to make peace with self and spirit, with family and friends; in the workplace, public affairs, and the world; for social change, reconciliation, and nonviolence.
This book is not in bookstores. It is available at The Peace Company (www.thepeacecompany.com), and is priced favorably so that you can buy it by the boxful and give it away to friends and family. Through this method, nearly 90,000 copies are now in circulation, proving the original assumption that peace grows when you give it away.
When people hand The Peace Book to another and say, ‘The gift of peace for you,’ something very special happens to both the giver and the receiver. There is a moment of deep joy, and heart opening on both ends – I have seen it and experienced it countless times myself. This holiday season, please consider empowering your loved ones with the peace that keeps on growing, and help make peace the way we live.
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