Spirituality and Community Building: Promoting Peace
Clarify the nature of peaceful approaches and behaviors in community settings, and learn how to develop, refine, and utilize them in community practice.
This and other sections in the Tool Box chapter on Spirituality and Community Building (Chapter 28) have been written with the support and contributions of experts connected with the Charter for Compassion International. For more information about the Charter and its work, visit www.charterforcompassion.org.
“Everyone must be committed in the matter of peace, to do everything that they can …
Peace is the language we must speak.” — Pope Francis
INTRODUCTION
This section is about peace – a most fundamental asset to community building, to personal growth, and to the very survival of our planet. At the heart of many faiths, practices, and cultures, advancing peaceful co-existence is essential to ensuring productive, meaningful lives and sustainable societies.
After providing a working definition of peace, our main focus will be on practical steps one can take to advance peace, so that we can strengthen ourselves and our communities. We’ll supplement this guidance with examples throughout. These come from initiatives stimulated by the Charter for Compassion, its partner organizations, and many others who offer practical models that individuals, groups, and/or governments can employ for peace-building. We will also consider how we, as individuals, can be enriched by establishing peace within our individual lives, even in the most challenging of circumstances.
Throughout this section we draw from actual events and emphasize personal experiences. Assisting in authoring is September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, whose members have connected with others from over 25 countries – from Rwanda and South Africa to Japanese survivors of atomic bombs; these individuals have lost loved ones, or themselves been injured by mass violence through war, terror, or other incidents, but they have joined together to work toward a more peaceful future.
To get us started on the topic of promoting peace, let us look to what may seem at first to be an unlikely source for leadership and inspiration – the mountains of Afghanistan. There live a group of young people who have been surrounded by war from birth, from Soviet invasions to warlords, Taliban fighting, and more recently the American invasion. As a result, several of them have been severely injured and/or lost family and friends due to conflicts that have nothing to do with their interests.
Yet they have not responded with a violent thirst for revenge, but rather by forming the Afghan Peace Volunteers. This group has held peace marches and vigils in areas across the Middle East and has worked to support other youth and victims of war, while strengthening education and justice within their own communities. They challenge you and me, and the entire world, with their simple question: "Why not friendship?" Perhaps you would like to respond to their heartfelt plea. They welcome everyone to join in their conversations toward mutual understanding, called Global Days of Listening.
Youth and adults across the U.S. and the world have joined in these calls to discuss ways to make our communities safer and to live together in peace. Later in this section, we will discuss how a student group in Groton, MA participated, sharing dreams and strategies. If these young people can embrace peace and see a way forward through mutual support with those who have been enemies, we can all find that path, whether in our home communities or across the globe.
The Author’s Personal Story
As a 9/11 family member, this topic of peace is profoundly important to me. My brother, Donald Freeman Greene, having hugged his beloved wife and young children goodbye, headed off on an early flight on September 11, 2001 to visit our siblings on the West Coast. He died on that beautiful morning as a passenger aboard United Flight 93. Young men, deluded into thinking that they were acting in accordance to their religion’s beliefs and/or to benefit their people, had taken over the plane in an act of extreme violence. Their intent to use the airplane as a weapon, most likely aimed at the United States Capitol, was thwarted by passengers who came together to retake control of the cockpit.
In my anguish and personal loss, it was still painful to me to hear the call of the Flight 93 passengers – "Let's Roll" – taken up across the nation and used as a justification to head to war. The nation embraced the idea that a military approach would teach our enemies a lesson and destroy them. Yet we must ask ourselves, what is the lesson? As hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, predominantly women and children, have died due to the ensuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have failed to demonstrate in any way that violence against civilians is ever justified.
We have lost far more young soldiers than the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks. The wars seem to have perpetuated the same misguided belief held by the terrorists – that enemies can simply be eliminated. Prior to the wars, the group that launched the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaeda, was a very small extremist faction with virtually no presence in Iraq. Now ISIS, an extreme offshoot of Al-Qaeda, has emerged and taken over large sections of the country, even as the Taliban has crept back into power in Afghanistan.
Eventually, I learned of other 9/11 family members who shared my perspective and had formed September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, turning our grief into actions for peace. Our goal is for no other families anywhere in the world to suffer needlessly due to violence, whether from terrorism, war, or other causes. Our name comes from the prescient quote by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars make poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." (Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, "The Casualties of War in Vietnam,” Speech, Los Angeles, CA, January 1967.)
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