Paths to Peace

Religion must be held accountable to its oldest, purest traditions: compassion and peace.

In its most commendable form, religion expresses a vision for the world’s best becoming. In many religious traditions, that vision sees the world’s citizens happily conducting their lives in an arena of political peace, social harmony, and economic abundance.

Given the state of the world today, we might well conclude that such a vision is purely imaginary, that it belongs on the children’s shelf in the local public library along with other myths and fables drawn in black and white. In fact, we might conclude that religion itself has become an obstacle to a world where people can live in freedom, dignity, and peace.

Time and again, purveyors of so-called religious truth find themselves in discord with one another, one voice contending with another for power and place. It is the religious voice that threads the loom in Northern Ireland; the religious voice that sings the descant, above the strain of human cries, for a sustainable life in Afghanistan, the religious voice that fuels tribal conflicts the world over.

Or perhaps we should say that it is one form of religious voice that dominates the landscape of global conflict – not one religion, one form of voice. It is a religious voice that begins and ends with a commitment to the absolute truth of its own theological outlook. Ironically, the competition between religious absolutes, stretching across the borders of religious difference, creates one outcome: violence.

What path then to peace? Religious discourse must stand in the public square. It stands there now, accounted for or not. But it must stand there held accountable to the best practices of its own traditions. Of course those practices are particular, but their intention is common: religion invites the best becoming of the people it serves. It expresses the longings and hopes of human hearts, which I would argue in the end incline toward peace. Apart from the sociopath, who among us does not wish for our children bread, peace, prosperity, and health?

As religion’s role as fuel for the fire of global conflict escalates, the importance of old religious wisdom becomes more pronounced. Diverse religious traditions hold wisdom as necessary for walking the path to peace.

It would be wise to note, for instance, that the practice of peace is local and daily. It means choosing to water those seeds within our own hearts that open into compassion and kindness, and those seeds that give birth to generosity and promise the possibility of healing. It means refusing to feed those seeds of violence and discontent that make us ask for more than it is our right to have, that push us to condemn rather than understand the other, that fuel a need to be right rather than just, that drive us to self-interest at the sacrifice of the dignity of our neighbour.

Global conflict, when examined at a macro level, becomes too big to fix. It is remote, somebody else’s problem. But the paradox is that in the end, all conflict begins right here, in the heart of each of us. In the end, or perhaps I should say at the beginning, all global conflict is intimately local, a projection of what we carry with us. But because it begins with us, it also has the prospect of ending with us. In each life, in each heart, there exists the potential to make choices that move us all toward peace.

When my daughter Anna turned 12, she stood up abruptly in the middle of her birthday dinner and asked of the adults gathered, “Don’t you realize that every choice you make changes the course of world history?” It’s in realizing that our small, local choices determine the global story that the possibility for world peace begins.