Prepare For Peace: A presentation by Bernadette Wyton at the Nov. 14 interfaith launch of the Peace Train in Vancouver.

 

Perhaps peace is slipping out of our culture because people haven’t stopped to think about what it is or what allows it to flourish. At first thought, peace is often regarded simply as an absence of war, a neutral pacifist state, or a utopian wish.

But we are here to bare witness to peace as a fundamental condition for survival and optimal functioning in our world. It is the domain of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

More than an achievement or a destination, peace is a way of being in dialogue, relationship, and harmony. It is a relational field held by the truth of our inseparability: there is one suffering, there is one love.

Peace is a process of constant adjustment toward enduring balance, stability, and security. It is like the process of homeostasis that allows living systems, like those inside our body, to regulate and respond to each other for highest overall health and functioning.

In this sense, peace is a relatively stable state of dynamic equilibrium. The dynamic part is the ongoing response to the challenges of constantly changing variables. The equilibrium part is the resilient tendency to heal; to bounce back into balance and harmony.

The state of our living earth, personified as Gaia, reflects how we choose to nurture this gift of life or turn away from it. Clearly, our choices have led to an unprecedented disregard and disruption of global homeostasis throwing multiple life-systems out of kilter and into terminal tipping points.

The ultimate affront to our grieving Gaia is war. War is disease. To quote Doug Roche, “War causes starvation, deepens poverty, ruins environments, forces migrations of peoples, wrecks the rule of law, multiplies the gap between rich and poor, and causes prolonged misery for the most vulnerable.”

This contagion is spreading right now due to a failure of leadership, a distracted populace, and the avarice of an unchecked super-spreader, the military industrial complex. It destroys trust, security, and social cohesion. It ruins hearts and minds, even of the so-called victors who take their own lives at an alarming rate every year. 

Today, tragically and pathetically, war is blocking the timely, global response necessary to address the meta-crisis at hand.

To choose life, we must choose peace. This requires that we recognize and respect the inter-relation and inter-dependence of all life. These values have been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in 1948 from the ashes of our earth and sixty million human lives.

A war-weary world came together to declare the fundamental rights and freedoms that belong to all of us, turning to diplomacy and a shared ethical framework to ensure that history would not repeat itself. 

Canada, once a poster-child for human rights, is now obstructive to global peace initiatives, including its rejection of the UN Declaration of the Right to Peace and its refusal to sign onto the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, intended to protect us, our children and all forms of life from the most toxic weapons ever created.

Meanwhile, out of 62,000 uniformed peacekeepers, Canada has collapsed its contribution from well over 3,000 personnel deployed to UN peace operations to only 26.

We have also lost capacity for peace building with the demise of independent national peace centers including the once-lauded Pearson Peacekeeping Center and the highly regarded Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security established by Pierre Elliot Trudeau in 1984.

We need to get peace back on track.

We need our best minds applied to advancing human rights and the conditions for peace and we need a Centre of Peace and Justice to accommodate them.  

Peace is not pretty. It is shaped from the raw materials of disagreement, discord, and disaster. It grows out of the compost of our mistakes; humbly allowing that we all make them; courageously agreeing that we all can learn from them.

Peace is not perfect. It is an intelligent perspective gained by constant surveillance, not to search and destroy difference, but to seek and discover a middle way forward, a shared path on the common ground we all stand on.

Peace is possible. Once the ice of othering and me-first is melted, peace can flow like one of Gaia’s mighty rivers. And we have seen it can be pulled from the ashes of post-war trauma by the power of wisdom, truth and reconciliation.

Peace is near, but it may take a long time. We Peace Trainers are joining millions of citizens around the world to stay the course for as long as it takes – working together to generate creative, cooperative responses to the troubles of our time.

Peace by nature is universal. As we enter that realm, let us declare:

I am not alone. I am not separate. There is one suffering. There is one love. May all beings be free of suffering. May all beings be brought to love.

Bernadette Wyton is a co-organizer of the Peace Train.

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