Peace
Devastating news images and social media posts detailing horrific suffering are bringing peace globally to the top of the agenda for so many of us, but what is peace and how do we bring it about?
If this is not a spiritual question, then I don’t know what is. It calls us to go within and ask and sit in stillness until an answer comes. What came to me in answer to this question was a feeling and an image of an Owl. I saw the Owl sitting watching the conflicting feelings I was witnessing within. What I saw and felt was that peace is not an absence of conflict, but it is certainly an absence of violence. It is not an absence of disagreement or the things that cause us fear and sadness and anger, but a wisdom and love that sees these things and does not turn away from them or revile them or seek to exile them – to make them somebody else’s fault or responsibility.
The first step I felt in bringing peace is to cry the tears of sadness and anger and grief, to feel those things and to acknowledge them and finally to accept them. I felt a sense of owning them, entering into an agreement that I will travel through this landscape of grief and fear and anger until I reach the other side. I will not leave it for another to do and I will not let it fester and grow for future generations to process. But, as a global issue, it is not mine to do alone.
In this path, we are called to bring forgiveness – forgiveness for our absence of peace, for the thoughts and words and actions that arose from this and for all of the consequences. I see forgiveness as putting the past in the past and allowing the possibility of healing and the beautiful future we dream of. I understand forgiveness to be releasing ourselves and others from past stories we have about them. When we attack or criticise, all people can do is to defend themselves, which often looks like repeating the very behaviours being criticised and trying to justify them. Forgiveness is not about saying that it’s OK for those behaviours to continue. It is saying that I believe that you can and will do better and I am willing to give you what you need from me in order to do that, which may be nothing more than a ceasefire of some sort. Is it paradoxical that in order to bring peace, we have to first create it for ourselves? Is this what Gandhi meant when he said “be the change you wish to see in the world?”
The other aspect of this is compassion. I find compassion asks us to in some way see from a different perspective – often to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes or at least to understand that we are generally not acting from a place of being a bad person. The people who need our compassion the most are those who are so afraid and so lost that they would take the lives of others in order to secure their own peace. But there is no peace in the taking of a life unless it is a part of a sacred agreement (as exists between the Owl and the Dormouse, for example). This loss of peace points to another important facet of peace – inner peace.
We so often look to find or create peace in the outer world, concerning ourselves with fixing things so that we can have inner peace, but we always fall short when we do that. I come back to the Owl’s wisdom – that peace is not an absence of conflict. Violence and in particular taking a life, without some kind of sacred agreement, leads to a tear in the fabric of life, which is incredibly hard to repair and carries through generations. It also causes the most awful inner turmoil, whether we are conscious of it or not.
The guidance I received this morning was to look within for all the places where I am violent with my thoughts and my words and my condemnation. I was asked to look at all I reject, all that needs to be met and spoken to kindly and a reconciliation found. I was told these are not small and insignificant things in the grand scheme of life, to direct energy towards peace and reconciliation from within, to embody it and from there, healing and rebalancing can ripple outwards.
Wishing all beings deep and lasting peace, connection and belonging.
Photo by <a href=”https://unsplash.com/@agto?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash”>Agto Nugroho</a> on <a href=”https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-brown-owl-wuDvhtaAYYI?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash”>Unsplash</a>