Seeking Peace, Within and Without The Rev. Victor Kazanjian (USA

“There is a sense of wholeness at the core of humanity that must abound in all we do; that marks with reverence our every step, that has its sway when all else fails; that wearies out all evil things; that warms the depths of frozen fears making friend of foe; and lasts beyond the living and the dead, beyond the goals of peace, the ends of war! This we seek through all our years; to be complete and of one piece, within and without.”1

— Howard Thurman

Seeking Peace: Within and Without

The Rev. Victor Kazanjian

Go beyond the goals of peace. Go beyond the ends of war. Be complete and of one piece - within and without. That is what I believe the world needs: to go beyond our familiar conversations about ending violence and war and establishing peace and justice through merely instrumental means, and envision a new paradigm, an approach to peace and justice that is about completeness, about wholeness within and without. In this way peace and justice is realized through strategies based on the values of love, compassion and empathy as much as critical analysis, and are rooted in an appreciation of the inner world as much as the outer world.

What has struck me as particularly important about the work of peacebuilding is that the power behind peacebuilding is less about politics and strategy than it is about relationships and human connection both without, with other people and other living beings and the earth herself, and connection with the life within oneself.

After three decades of work as a community organizer, a priest, a teacher of peace studies and a grassroots activist, I have become convinced that without the power provided by love, compassion and empathy connecting the world within with the world without the most sophisticated strategies are but hollow branches bracing against the winds of injustice and violence.

Violence and injustice require the dehumanizing of the other and oneself. We know this – in both interpersonal and geopolitical contexts. I would submit then that an essential component of all peacebuilding and justiceseeking is the “re-humanizing” power of love, compassion and empathy for self and other.

There is a picture on the wall of my office that was given to me by a friend who is an astronaut. It is a picture that she took from the space shuttle, which she was piloting, a picture of the earth from deep in space. Perhaps you have seen something similar. The blue, green earth, a perfectly round ball floating in a sea of black…earth and ocean the only visible distinguishing features. It is a magnificent image: so beautiful, so peaceful, so serene.

Gazing upon that image, it seems unfathomable that upon that beautiful sphere moving through the universe, its inhabitants are locked in life and death struggles with each other. From thousands of miles up in space one is free from the sounds and stench of war and violence, of poverty and oppression, of misogyny and prejudice that plague the peoples of this planet. Reading the daily papers or watching the news rife with stories of this violence, one perhaps yearns for such distance from the suffering below.

But if this was our only view of humanity, as an observer from so far away out in space, we would be unaware that on this same planet, amidst the violence, miracles are occurring every second. At this very moment, new life is being born in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, in Iraq, Iran and the United States, in Uganda and Nigeria, Argentina and Chile, in the Philippines and Malaysia and to Palestinian and Israeli families. And in each of these places and so many more, people are engaging in acts of compassion and kindness. In each of these places, people are falling in love and forming friendships. And in many of these places, people of different religious and cultural traditions are gathering in circles in their communities to forge bonds of friendship and create cultures of peace.

When we look at the earth from the distance of thousands of miles up in space or the closeness of sitting in a circle of friends and colleagues, we need to see not just the potential for peace, but the reality of peace. We know that peace is not just that which we seek, but that which we know in the embrace of a loved one, through the warmth of friendship, in extending oneself in compassion and empathy towards a stranger, in standing together against violence, injustice and oppression, and, so often overlooked, through cultivating a loving relationship with oneself.

Creating cultures of peace requires participating in the practice of peace, within and without. We who do this work usually focus on the external part of that equation – peace without, believing that it is the systems and structures of society that are both the cause of violence and injustice and its remedy. And this is not wrong. For the earth is in fact a connected whole, a system, a “global commons,” a shared space in which limits on resources and the environment are planetary, economies as well as human systems are inextricably interconnected, and human diversity is ever more apparent among the occupants of this planetary home.

Gazing upon that blue-green ball, we can see how, like the commons of a village which was shared by its inhabitants for water, wood and grazing, the commons which is our planet includes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the seas, forests, and mountains, the diversity of life itself and also that which humankind has created – language; scientific, cultural, and technical knowledge; and health, education, political, justice and economic systems. The “commons” is synonymous with that which we must engage together to sustain life and also implies a shared commitment to community, cooperation, the respect for the rights of others and the corresponding responsibilities that we each share for life on this planet.

There is no question that “to be of one piece without,” as Thurman says, requires our attention to all of those systems which shape our lives as human beings. This is the work that so many of us have been engaged in for so long. It is crucial work. And in the face of so many urgent external threats in areas of health, the environment, economies, human rights, political instability, and regional and global aggression, it is understandable that our focus would be drawn to the world without, and that our work would involve conceiving instruments of peacebuilding that engage these issues and create the conditions for peace and human security.

But when we focus only on the external instrumental mechanisms of peacebuilding, we fail to harness what may be the greatest power at our disposal to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings. This power, as Dr. Thurman teaches us, emanates from the world within. It is a power flowing from the wholeness that is at the heart of humanity and indeed at the heart of life itself. It is the power of the human spirit. The power of life. It is the feeling that we know when we hold a child in our arms, or are held by a beloved, or walk among the magnificence of nature and feel at home in the universe. It is love…and love’s expressions: compassion, empathy, kindness, and generosity. It is life emanating from the natural world around us. It is the unbreakable bonds of human connection forged through the building a healthy loving relationship with one’s self and then loving and sustainable relationships with others.

I have seen this in the bonds of friendship between Muslim, Christian and Hindu women in Gujarat, India; each of whom lost loved ones to the insanity of violence, and who now work daily side by side for peace in their communities. I have seen it in Israeli and Palestinian youth who defy their peers and politicians and reach across emotional and physical boundaries to declare together, “we refuse to be enemies” - no matter what the future brings. The examples are endless. Each of us has seen the power of love, compassion and empathy in action. But these are not the stories that we tell about conflict and peace. The world is addicted to the gruesome tales of death and destruction, violence and injustice, and when we allow the power of love and relationship to be sentimentalized and marginalized, our peacebuilding efforts are stripped of heart and soul, creating a vacuum into which those who teach fear and hatred happily take control. The rise of extremist movements around the world can be attributed to many factors, but one needs to be understood as a failure to love, self and other.

The failure to embody the full potential of love and life is evidenced by religious and ideological communities who claim exclusive ownership of the truth and diminish the beliefs of others. It is evidenced by cultural and ethnic communities who claim superiority over others, and fuel intergroup violence around the world. The rise of violence against women and children needs to be understood in part as the absence of basic human values of love, compassion and empathy. A human society deprived of love and its related social needs, is a society moving towards social insanity, the affects of which no amount of instrumental peacebuilding can reverse. And it is belief systems that separate human beings from the natural world and claim superiority and dominion over nature, resulting in the eco-destruction that is killing our planet.

In such a situation, we end up at worst in genocidal struggles pitting one group against another, and at best our best efforts often lead to people merely tolerating each other. Without love, tolerance may be the best we can hope for. But such tolerance is merely conflict arrested. It is neither peace nor justice. It is a great harness applied to the destructive forces of ignorance, fear and prejudice. It provides a wall between warring parties.

At best tolerance is a glass wall where protected people can see one another going about parallel lives. But nonetheless it is still a wall dividing us from each other. As such, tolerance is not a basis for healthy loving human relationship nor will it ever lead to peace, for tolerance does not allow for learning, or growth, or transformation, or human connection, but rather ultimately keeps people in a state of suspended ignorance and conflict.

True peace and justice that transforms conflict and creates sustainable community requires the embracing of interdependence and the interconnectedness of all living beings… Nothing less. And how does this happen? How do we move beyond fear and violence, and even beyond tolerance? How do we create cultures of peace and justice rooted in love, compassion and empathy?

I believe that it starts by cultivating meaningful and connected human relationships in which people of different backgrounds, whether this be cultural, religious, political, gender or any identity, forge strong bonds of connection and become living witnesses of the power of love to create cultures and communities of peace and justice. It is also about dispelling the illusion of seperateness between humanity and nature and reclaiming the kinship of all living beings and the Earth herself.

Albert Einstein spoke of such a process.

“A human being,” he said, “is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. That person experiences them self, their thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our own desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free (one another and ourselves) from this prison (of isolation) by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 2

Such a task, like any worthy effort, involves practice daily practice – cultivating a spirit of love, compassion and empathy within ourselves, with our circle of familiars, and with others whose backgrounds and beliefs are different from our own. If we weave together such a practice with the plethora of extraordinary peacebuilding strategies available to us, if we combine our efforts working together as partners in one movement sharing connection to common values – then this movement of which we are a part will be fully energized to transform a struggling world into a truer reflection of the wholeness that lies at its core.

In our class, Seeking Peace Within and Without: Becoming Conscious Peacebuilders taught as part of the Bartos Institute at the United World College - USA, students participated in a program which wove together contemporary analysis of conflict and peacebuilding strategies with inner peace development through breathwork, meditation and self-reflection. This class emerged out of our experience in educational and community settings in which we witnessed the deforming and unsustainable educational and peacebuilding practices that focused solely on external analysis, while ignoring the internal realms of understanding and the impact of the emotional and intuitive realms.

As educational theory and practice has evolved to broaden our understanding of epistemology and learning and teaching pedagogy (see mindfulness and education, Jon Cabot Zinn; Howard Gardiner’s work on socio-emotional intelligence; Robert Kegan’s book In Over Our Heads which explores multiple epistemologies/ways of knowing; bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress which urges decolonization of the mind; Dan Seigel’s work on the mind, Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria which opened the conversation about racial identity, communication and education; and Parker Palmer’s exploration of teaching from within in The Courage to Teach, to name but a few), so too must the field of peace studies and peacebuilding evolve to broaden its understanding of conflict, peace and justice and the tools available.

A holistic approach to peacebuilding that integrates the worlds within and without will nurture conscious peacebuilders who draw on all aspects of their ways of thinking and feeling to inform their knowing and create sustainable movements better aligned with the renewing life energy that flows within us, between us and throughout our world. ²

1 Howard Thurman, For the Inward Journey: The Writings of Howard Thurman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) p11 2 Albert Einstein, from a letter of consolation to a grieving father named Robert S. Marcus, political director of the World Jewish Congress, whose young son had just died of polio