(Posted at ThePeaceAlliance.org, August 26, 2006)
The other day I got an email about an upcoming peace march. They were organizing walks for peace across the country and wondered if I'd like to join them close to home.
Maybe it was because I'd missed out on the era of noisy peace marches, the distance between the sanitized life I was then caught up in and what was happening on the streets having been too great for whatever sympathies I might have had for their cause. Maybe it was just today's weariness at finding ourselves backed into yet another horror of endless butchery. Maybe it was something hidden and altogether closer to home. But all at once here I am leading a peace walk in my hometown.
The preparation, the correspondences have been instructive . . .
In our morning readings last week, mulling over what do I know about peace?, I came upon this from the journal of our favorite poet-monk, Thomas Merton. It was all uphill from there.
Today I realize with urgency the absolute seriousness of my need to study and practice non-violence as an idea. I have "approved" it, looked with benignity on it, have praised it, even earnestly. . . But I have not practiced it fully. My thoughts and words retaliate. I condemn and resist adversaries when I think I am unjustly treated. I revile them; even treat them with open (but polite) contempt to their face.
OUCH! Armed with new humility I began looking at just what sort of activity this could be, this trudging for peace. One more media stunt, I wondered, to get the cameras pointed at our side? Already I was beginning to hope peace itself wouldn't be a matter of securing simply one more commanding height on today's bloody red-blue battle lines.
Maybe I was getting it. I began to see that this violence of mine, of ours, amounted to a failure of imagination. We fight back when we believe there's no other way, when we think we're cornered. Yes, call it knee-jerk by way of mindless, decidedly lower impulses. But what if, at every turn of the road, there always is another way? What if violence was the result of nothing so real on our journey as so much dark smoke of our own making?
The words of hero-peacemakers now rushed at me with new force. I pass them along for the benefit of fellow striders next month whose ponderings may be following similar routes.
From Martin Luther King:
Along the way of life, someone must have enough sense and morality to cut off the chain of hate by projecting the ethics of love into the center of our lives.
From Khalil Gibran:
You are my companion on the byways of life, my helper in perceiving the essence of reality concealed behind the mists. You are a human being and I have loved you, my brother.
From Bon Kai, a Buddhist monk:
You think that good is hating what is bad. What is bad is the hating mind itself.
And only this morning, at the conclusion of her new book which has been my companion for the past few weeks, this bombshell (see, it sticks to our very language!) from Karen Armstrong,
In one way or another, (the axial sages' ) programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule . . . It gave them (us) ekstasis, a "stepping out" from their habitual, self-bound consciousness that enabled them to apprehend a quality they called "God", nibbana, brahman, atman, or the Way. . . The practice of disciplined sympathy would itself yield intimations of transcendence.
A stepping out from Self Almighty. If my walk for peace in a few weeks achieves nothing else, maybe it can signal this much.
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Merton, Thomas, Practicing Non-Violence, entry for 8/21/62 in A Year With Thomas Merton, Daily Meditations from his Journals, Johnathan Montaldo, ed, Harper, San Francisco, 2004, p 244
King, Martin Luther,
Bon Kai,
http://antiwar.com/quotes.php
Gibran, Khalil, The Voice of The Poet: On Human Unity (III) in The Vision, Reflections on the Way of The Soul, translated by Juan R.I. Cole, 1994 & 1998 in http://4umi.com/gibran/vision/5.htm
Armstrong, Karen, The Great Transformation, The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2006, p 391
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about the author . . .
Following a term in the Florida prison system, Jim Rucquoi is in his twenty-third year of a sentence of life probation for second degree murder. A poet and photographer (simplysanford.com), he lives in Sanford, Florida with his wife of twelve years, the writer, Adele Azar-Rucquoi. Jim is contact person for a peace walk in Sanford on September 16th honoring Gandhi's first walk for peace 100 years ago in South Africa. Walk for Peace is sponsored by Alliance for Peace, a grassroots citizen action group backing legislation for a US Department of Peace.
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