Tag: peace

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Peace and Love at Christmas

Embrace the Deeper Meaning of Christmas

Fresno Bee, December 12, 2014

The state of Texas recently passed a law making it legal to say “Merry Christmas” in schools. The law grows out of a misguided worry that secular schools should not even mention Christmas. Some even fear that there is a secular war against Christmas.

Peace, Love, Joy, Christmas

The Reverend Franklin Graham, for example, recently wrote: “The war on Christmas is a war on Christ and His followers. It’s the hatred of our culture for the exclusive claims that Christ made.” This dispute is not surprising given the history of religious conflict and ongoing divisions in our diverse culture.

It might help to recall that disputes about Christmas have a deep history. There is no consensus about Christmas, even among Christians. Eastern traditions celebrate Christmas on January 6. The manger scenes we see around Christmas take liberties with the story. Jesus was most likely born in a cave, not in a stable. The animals are also a later addition, not found in the Bible. The Gospels themselves contain different stories.

This is not surprising for people who study religion. Religions and religious stories evolve over time. This helps us gain some perspective on the so-called war on Christmas. Christmas and Christianity itself has never been just one thing.

But the point of Christmas, it seems to me, is to find a way to look beyond our disputes. We celebrate peace, love, hope and joy during the Christmas season. It would be great to focus on those shared valued and leave the divisiveness for the rest of the year.

In our diverse world, not everyone accepts the exclusive theology behind Mr. Graham’s interpretation of Christmas. But we can all benefit from peace and love, joy and hope. Indeed, it is those values that allow us to coexist despite our deep theological differences.

You don’t need to take the nativity story literally to understand values celebrated at Christmas. We can all understand the dramatic moment when Mary and Joseph are turned away from the inn. You don’t have to be a Christian to understand that this story shows us the need for hospitality and that giving birth is momentous joyous and mysterious.

In some sense, Christmas has already become a secular holiday. It is a regular part of our yearly round of holiday closures and vacation scheduling. We all know that “winter break” coincides with Christmas. Charles Haynes, a scholar at the First Amendment Center, made this point in a recent essay discussing the difficulty of managing religious holidays in our multi-religious culture. His solution is to be equitable, hospitable and respectful of our differences.

I corresponded with Mr. Haynes about this. He pointed out that schools should be free to teach about Christmas, while also teaching about other holidays in an academic fashion. Such teaching might include historic debates over the meaning of Christmas among Christians themselves. The colonial Puritans, for example, banned Christmas because they viewed its pagan elements as un-Christian.

While Christmas is inextricably linked to a celebration of the birth of Christ, the holiday is much more than that — it includes Santa and his reindeer, jingle bells and evergreen trees. These later additions have no connection to the Bible story. Christmas has evolved to be a secular — and universally accessible — celebration of joy, peace, love and hope.

The First Amendment guarantees that conservative Christians like Mr. Graham have a right to point out that Christmas originates in stories about the birth of Christ. Atheists also have a right to argue against Christmas and Christianity, if they like. But the Christmas spirit is more inclusive and welcoming than any exclusive religious or anti-religious diatribe. The values of Christmas encourage us to be warmer, gentler, kinder and more friendly. Inclusivity, hospitality, peace and love are important values for all of us.

The deep and universal message of Christmas is the hope that in an inhospitable world, we might find a peace, love and refuge. You don’t have to be a Christian to understand that. Christians layer theology onto the nativity scene, directing hope beyond this world. But the magic of Christmas is found here on earth in the joyous love of mothers and in the peaceful and hopeful faces of children, who have not yet been hardened by the world and its divisions.

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Let it go: Amish and Taoist Peace and Forgiveness

Simple spirituality can teach us to say ‘let it go’

BY ANDREW FIALA

FresnoBee October 17, 2014 

I recently attended a conference in Lancaster, Pa., focused on forgiveness and peace. Amish farms dot the countryside and Amish farmers in horse-drawn buggies roam the hills under turning leaves. What a great place to discuss forgiveness and peace.611zcLF19TL._SX425_

A guiding idea for the Amish is the concept of Gelassenheit. This German word means “letting things be” or “letting go.” This idea guides the simple and modest life of the Amish, who avoid vanity, pride and the temptations of the modern world.

A recent book on Amish spirituality by Donald Kraybill explains that Amish Gelassenheit is the opposite of the “bold, assertive individualism of mainstream American culture.” The Amish encourage submission, humility and simplicity as well as forgiveness, peace, love and community.

Our bold and assertive individualism may be the root of many of our problems: crime, war, ecological disaster and social dislocation. Mainstream culture does not encourage us to be yielding or to be humble. Nor are we content to go easy in the world. Would you exchange your car for a horse and buggy, your cell phone for a simpler life?

We fill our lives with gadgetry and we charge down the freeway at breakneck speed. We celebrate heroes who impose their will upon the world. We are rarely encouraged to give way, to yield, or to simply let things be. We are too busy asserting ourselves, defending our rights and expressing our outrage.

But a yielding and gentle spirit is the heart of peaceful human relations. Consider forgiveness. To forgive is to give up on resentment, revenge and the right to retaliate. If I forgive you, I let you get away with what you’ve done. I forgo the right to punishment or compensation. Forgiveness leaves the injury behind, lets go of the past and allows the future to unfold anew.

Love is also connected to letting go. Loving human beings relinquish their egos in communion with others. We want those we love to flourish and grow, to become fully themselves. Loving parents guide their children gently, encouraging development with an accepting spirit.

Some may worry that peaceful yielding and loving forgiveness undermine discipline and order. Some still believe that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. But peaceful and harmonious communities do not need coercive force. Obedience based upon cruelty is superficial. True moral communities develop when people are patiently persuaded to discover natural affinities and common good.

My contribution at the Lancaster conference was a talk on Taoism. The Chinese philosophers also celebrate the spirit of letting go and letting be. Taoist wisdom encourages us to let things be the way they are. The Taoists emphasize living naturally, spontaneously, without conniving or contriving.

There are huge differences between Amish Christianity and Chinese Taoism. The Amish emulate Jesus and submission to God by saying, “Thy will be done.” The Taoists emphasize finding balance and harmony in nature. They are inspired by natural metaphors, encouraging us, for example, to emulate water, which flows, yields and conforms to the world.

Despite this essential difference, the Taoists and the Amish are similar in advocating retreat from the aggressive world of competitive culture. The Taoists retreated to the mountains of China. The Amish retreated to the hills of Pennsylvania.

Our fast-paced competitive world does not have much room for Gelassenheit. We tamper and tinker, judge and manipulate. We celebrate innovators, entrepreneurs and explorers. The bold individualism of our world is quite different from the quiet agrarian life of the Amish. It is also quite different from the life of the Taoist wanderer, who prefers nothing better than to peacefully fish in a mountain pond.

There is profound wisdom in the slow corners of the world, where letting things go is a way of life. Some of that wisdom should be allowed to influence the contemporary world. Gelassenheit is a concept that ought to enter into our moral vocabulary.

We ought to learn to say, “Thy will be done.” We ought to learn to flow like water. We ought to learn the wisdom of leaving things alone. When people complain about stress — when they are angry, resentful or aggressive — we ought to say to them, Gelassenheit — let it go, leave it be.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/10/17/4184601_simple-spirituality-can-teach.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

 

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There’s still a long road ahead to find peace

Fresno Bee, September 20, 2014

Thirty years ago the United Nations declared Sept. 21 as an International Day of Peace. We’ve still got a long way to go.

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Human beings are the most violent animals on the planet. No other species kills its own members in large numbers on a regular basis. And yet, no other species reflects upon its own behavior or loves itself as much as we do. Hope for peace can be found in our capacity for reason and our ability to love.

Quite a few people claim that love provides the path to peace. Bumper sticker wisdom proclaims, “No love, no peace — know love, know peace.” Martin Luther King explained that love cuts through evil and hate. He said, “Love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe.” Love moves us to sacrifice and care for others. It connects us to each other in a way that should promote harmony and peace.

But love without reason is blind. Love usually stops at the front door: we love our family but not our neighbors. Sometimes we do “love our neighbors.” But love rarely extends beyond borders. We may love those who share our ethnic, national or religious identity. But it is difficult to love humanity as a whole.

The best teachers of love want to extend it broadly, even maintaining that we ought to love our enemies. That is a radical idea, which may be impossible for mere mortals. But reason does tell us to extend love in a universal direction. A moment’s thought tells us that we are all members of the same species, despite our differences. Reason tells us that racial and ethnocentric biases are unjustified. It points toward an impartial and universal point of view.

We might supplement King’s enthusiasm for love, then, by claiming that reason is also a creative and transformative power in the universe. Reason’s virtue is its demand for objectivity and justification. Reason directs us away from nepotism, ethnic chauvinism, jingoistic patriotism, narcissistic pride and other malfunctions of love.

If we admit that love without reason is blind, we should also admit that reason without love is heartless. Warmongers often make cold-blooded arguments to support their violence. The same is true for murderers, torturers and the rest of violent humanity. Explanations and rationalizations have been employed in defense of all sorts of brutality.

Some arguments in defense of violence are better than others. But things go horribly wrong when callous arguments and cold rationalizations ignore the common beating heart of human experience, which is love. The tragedy of reason is its tendency to become cruelly inhuman and unloving.

A further difficulty is that violence is often justified in the name of love. Reason tells us that we ought to defend those we love against our enemies. But those enemies are also motivated by love and by arguments of their own. All human beings love their families, friends and ideals. Even the suicidal terrorist thinks that he’s justified. The deepest difficulty of violence is that it can be fueled by love and reason — the very things that should prevent violence.

The good news is that many of us are increasingly skeptical of traditional justifications of violence. Domestic violence, for example, would have gone unremarked upon in previous generations. Recent outrage about highly publicized cases of domestic violence is a sign of progress. There is similar outrage about war crimes and military aggression around the world. A growing number of us believe that violence is an irrational remnant of the youth of humanity.

To make further progress we have to link the objectivity and impartiality of reason with the passionate motivation and empathic connection of love. We need universal and reasonable love; and we need benevolent and compassionate reason. We need to love better and think more carefully.

Violence — like hatred, stupidity and ignorance — is easy. Thinking and loving are harder. It takes persistence and patience to love, to think and to build peace. Humanity has slowly worked its way toward a global society, through millennia of horrors. We are making slow progress. But piles of corpses and oceans of tears litter the way. The hard work of the next 30 years — and the next millennium — is to make ourselves more loving, more reasonable and more peaceful.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/09/19/4133666/theres-still-a-long-road-ahead.html#storylink=cpy

 

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Recent Nobel winners echo King’s wise words

Recent Nobel winners echo King’s wise words

Fresno Bee, January 14, 2012

Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.  In December of 2011, the Peace Prize was awarded to three women: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia; Leyma Gbowee, a peace activist from Liberia; and Tawakkol Karman, a leader of the Yemeni version of the Arab Spring.  These women represent the power of women’s movements for peace in Africa and the Middle East.  In their Nobel Prize speeches, they each cited Martin Luther King as a source of hope and inspiration.

Gbowee’s speech recounted the terror of war in Liberia, which included rape and sexual abuse.  Despite the horrors she had witnessed, she remained hopeful that nonviolence can improve things.  She quoted King’s words: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”

Sirleaf spoke of the need for continued expansion of democracy and women’s rights.  She said, “I urge my sisters, and my brothers, not to be afraid. Be not afraid to denounce injustice, though you may be outnumbered. Be not afraid to seek peace, even if your voice may be small. Be not afraid to demand peace.”  And she cited King’s optimistic idea that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Karman is the youngest person, and the first Arab woman, to be awarded the Peace Prize.  In her speech she said that King’s idea of “the art of living in harmony” remains the most important thing we need to master. She expressed her hope as follow: “Mankind’s feeling of responsibility to create a decent life and make it worth living with dignity has always been stronger than the will to kill life. Despite great battles, the survival of the human race is the clearest expression of mankind’s yearning for reconstruction, not for destruction, for progress, not for regression and death.” Despite obstacles in Yemen and elsewhere, she foresees  “a humane, prosperous and generous history full of love and fraternity.”

The spirit of hope in the face of violence and injustice is central to King’s message.  In his last sermon in Memphis on April 3, 1968, he acknowledged the threats against him.  But he explained that the struggle for justice was more important than his own life.  King concluded: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”  He was killed the next day at age 39.

In that last sermon, he explained how moral courage works by retelling the story of the Good Samaritan.  In Jesus’ original parable, two people—a priest and a Levite—walk past a wounded man on the road to Jericho.  Only the Samaritan stops and helps.

King suggests that the first two men were too afraid to stop.  The road to Jericho was dangerous—a prime place to be ambushed.  The priest and the Levite may have been concerned about their own safety, possibly worrying that the injured man was faking it in order to take advantage.

King explains that they may have thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”  But the Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

This reversal is the key.  When we stop asking, “what will happen to me?” and start asking, “what will happen to him?” our perspective is changed. Suspicion is replaced by care.  Fear is transformed into hope.  And self-interest becomes compassion.

It is hazardous to help others and to speak out against injustice.  Evil dictators crush resistance; and bad guys do take advantage.  But people who risk doing good, tend to experience the world in a hopeful, optimistic way.

In his own Nobel Prize speech, King admitted that “those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms and painful threats of death.”  But in the end King says that it is possible to see “a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair.”  The fact that this message is being shared in places like Yemen and Liberia is good reason to remain hopeful.