George
Soros quotes
An Inward Journey toward Peace (February 1, 2009 by Nancy Irish)
Once upon a time, I called myself a peacemaker. My quest for peace through justice began in 6th grade, on the playground of Woodward Elementary School, when I led the other 6th grade girls in a successful struggle to win equal playing time with the boys on the school’s best ball field. Later, I joined my parents in their involvement with our Methodist church’s sister church in the inner city of Detroit. In high school, I lived with a Brazilian family as an exchange student to broaden my mind and open my heart to people different from myself. I worked on rebuilding a cabin with a family in the Appalachian Mountains who called themselves hillbillies and taught me more than I helped them.
In college, I worked in solidarity with American Indians in the 70’s, when their right to openly practice their spiritual traditions was just being regained. I engaged in a fight for the release of an MSU Palestinian-American student who was falsely accused of being a terrorist, and I traveled to Israel to visit him in prison, and his family in Ramallah, on the West Bank. I was part of a band of civilly disobedient Michigan State students who took over the International Center on campus when the MSU trustees refused to stop its dealings with the Shah of Iran. (Please don’t mention that to my parents – they still don’t know about that one!)
In Boston I sang in the subways and in other minor venues in the early 80’s with a women’s chorus about women’s issues and gay/lesbian rights. I was active in the Sanctuary Movement of the mid-1980’s, defying American law to harbor two political refugee families from the violence in Central America. I spent years as a nutritionist and a food coop manager working to raise awareness about the costs to our planet of the typical American diet. I’ve marched on Lansing and Washington and on New York City, and have felt the thrill of being one of a million voices crying aloud for justice.
In short – I fulfilled the unwritten requirements for being called a peace activist. But what I didn’t comprehend all those years was that my outer actions eclipsed an inner disquietude. For none of all that righteous peacemaking prepared me one iota for what followed, when I found myself in my forties embroiled in a horrific situation that resulted in the implosion of a local Marquette peace group called Peacecamp. It was a peace group with a proud lineage, having emerged from an earlier peace group called WAND – Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament - which was, in turn, inspired by a visit to Marquette by Helen Caldicott in the early eighties.
The Peacecamp group worked together for more than a decade, organizing an annual summer Peace Camp for children. Many of us shared many aspects of our lives beyond Peacecamp. The last five years, the camp was held on my family’s land that is known to many as Big Creek, for the small river that runs through our valley. Hundreds and hundreds of children and parents participated in Peacecamp through the years. It was a beautiful thing.
Yet, after teaching children about peacemaking and finding peace in the natural world for a dozen years, the adults of Peacecamp went to war. It was such a devastating experience for all those most intimately involved that, like a child who has watched her family die as her home burned down, a silence descended upon us all which has persisted to now. Twelve years later I am still occasionally asked, “What happened!?” I usually reply simply that the adults went to war, and leave it at that.
And so when I was asked to speak recently about peace and justice at a community Shalom service organized by local peace activists, perhaps you can imagine my struggle to find a topic that I could speak to with a sense of integrity. Every topic I tried on led me instead to a sense of hypocrisy, until I concluded that I won’t be able to speak in public about peace in the world until I have told my story of just how difficult my struggle has been to achieve peace with my self.
Almost twelve years later, I am ready to speak about my awful, amazing journey toward inner peace that I was sent on by the Great Peacecamp War of ’97. Very simply put, what happened quite literally blew my mind, and eventually led me to clarity, and into an indescribable connection with the Spirit of Life, the Divine, the Creator Spirit – that mysterious force known by many names. Finally, twelve years later, I can say that the journey was worth the cost of it, for the deep inner calm it has brought me to.
Why do I choose to tell this story now? First, and most importantly, because that experience is what has taught me the most about what genuine peace is about. Second, because I consider my struggle – my private inner jihad, if you will - to be a sacred one, and I want you, the spiritual community I serve , to understand the main reason I feel called to do work in the realm of the spiritual. Simply put, I want to be part of a community that makes and nurtures connections based in reality rather than in illusion.
Please forgive if I don’t tell my story well. What I’m trying to express and explain is nothing short of the most complex, dramatic, bizarre, painful, terrifying, and incomprehensible experience of my entire life, even including parenting. It has been a formidable challenge to put it all into words without digressing into what is only relevant for me personally.
It is not my place to relay the details of the actual Peacecamp War in public, and when all is said and done, they don’t really matter. We were all simply participants in the human condition, doing the best we knew how to do at the time. I will say that by the end of it, the professional counselor we hired to help mediate helped us to come to the fascinating understanding that each one of us had recreated and played out the childhood role we had played in our families of origin. In other words, we all contributed one way or another, and placing blame serves no purpose. As my son said once about blaming other people for our troubles….if we’re going to blame someone, we’d have to go all the way back to Adam and Eve!”
After the external battle was over, I found myself in a downward and inward spiral that quickly led to an urgent need to shut out the world for a while. I felt like a soldier lying on the bloodied battlefield, barely breathing. The ugliness of the conflict literally blew my mind, and I went mute. If I couldn’t trust the people closest to me, who and what else couldn’t I trust? I didn’t only lose trust in my closest circle of friends; I lost trust in humankind.
When I turned off my phone and stopped answering my door on November 17, 1997, I had no idea it was the beginning of what I now call my seven year Sabbatical from the world – a long Dark Night of My Soul. I gradually understood through reading sacred texts and other writings of saints, psychiatrists, and sages, that this was the age old spiritual journey of death and rebirth I had embarked on, through no choice of my own.
Carolyn Myss wrote that the sacred journey, which contains an element of what she calls “spiritual madness,” usually begins when we have been deeply betrayed in the human realm. Matthew Fox, excommunicated Catholic priest, writes about being emptied. Aldous Huxley and others called it “self mortification.” I described it in my journal as being reamed out….disintegrated mind, body, and spirit. It was bizarre beyond imagining and excruciating beyond belief, but I began to understand that my Dark Night of the Soul was a gift of grace in a very painful, costly package.
The question I had to answer first was this: “what in me contributed to this hellish war that blew apart a circle of long time friends committed to making peace?” I shut out all external distraction, sat in the dark silence, and began to listen to that still small voice within. Once I started listening to that silent voice, the floodgates of self-knowledge then flew open, and began to wash me clean with a barrage of painful understanding. I soon understood that the saints and sages’ directive to “know thyself” wasn’t talking about knowing what I wanted to do for work, or what talents I was hiding from myself or the world, or where I needed to live to be happy.
Knowing myself was about exposing the blind spots I had about myself…shedding light into the darkness of my subconscious. Ouch. We hide things from ourselves for good reason! I pondered long and hard the meaning in the yin yang, which I began to understand as symbolizing reality…and that when the dark shadow isn’t acknowledged, it grows.
The first thing I realized about myself was that I had no psychological mechanisms whatsoever for self-protection – in common terms, I had virtually no boundaries. I began to see that I had a tendency to put other people on pedestals; that I was often motivated by an deep unconscious desire for external approval. I did not allow myself to feel anger. My family culture, embedded in the culture of the American Midwest, did not allow anger, and so I learned not to feel whatever was unpleasant to feel. Woe to any adult who has not learned to feel what she feels.
At first I examined my behavior within our peace group, but eventually my self-examination extended to my whole life. I saw for the first time that although I could be friends with all kinds of people, I was as guilty of judgment as anyone, including judgment of myself.
I pondered judgment for a month of Sundays, as the saying goes. Having been raised a Christian, the teachings of Jesus about judgment were naturally foremost in my mind. I had left organized religion in large part because of all the judgment I’d experienced within the church, but I began to see that I had found the same kind of judgment among the people of every movement or peace group I’d joined after leaving the church. I realized that each group, each dedicated to a kind of religion of its own, drew a line around their own beliefs and self-righteousness to create an “us” and a “them.” They don’t recycle. They don’t homeschool. Did you hear that atrocious grammar? They eat jello and call it salad. COUNTRY music?? We don’t use half the fossil fuel those people do.
And I was party to all of it. How horrifying it was to begin to understand precisely what I had contributed to division among people…..to an us and them mentality that divides rather than unites. How utterly humbling to realize first hand that war begins at home. My home.
After a few weeks of silent retreat, I got down to the root source of my illusions, which, as most of us know by now, begin in our childhood training ground. I don’t wish to bore anyone with the details of my childhood, which was beautiful and good in many important ways. Yet, it is vitally important that we understand just how much childhood experiences dictate adult behavior until we bring them to light and heal them. Unless we see the consequences of our own upbringing at a deep level, we are likely to pass the same on to our own children. The meaning of yet another Biblical passage I’d heard for years became clear to me: the sins of the father shall be visited upon four generations.
It had been an openly acknowledged but mostly ignored fact in my family that I was my father’s least favorite of his five children. To use the archetypal term, I was the family scapegoat. I learned from my father not that he was incapable of loving me, but rather that I was unlovable. I had spent subsequent decades trying desperately to feel loved in the human realm, and my mind and my personality had contorted around that prime directive. In actuality I had always received plenty of love from countless people, but I was unable to trust it and take it in to my bones….so although I hid it well from most people, my need for love was insatiable.
Those mental contortions, those illusions, were at the root of my main contributions to the Peacecamp War, which dovetailed with the illusions and contortions of others involved in such a way that it became something like a perfect storm. We each contributed to a dynamic of abuse in our own unique way, much like in Nazi Germany, or in a family of an alcoholic.
The further inward I went, the more I began to study the sacred texts of all faith traditions for insight about what was happening to me, and for guidance about how to get through it to clarity and peace. The more I read the sacred texts, the closer their essential message seemed to be to one another.
If I had to sum up the underlying message I found in all great religions, and in the deepest meaning and purpose of my horrible gift of a journey, I would quote Huston Smith, who writes extensively on comparative religions. He wrote that the ultimate spiritual journey is about getting real. Losing all falsehood, all pretension and illusion, and living in the present moment. It sounds so simple, but is oh, so difficult and painful to achieve.
I knew all along that I could not live in isolation forever, for to me the sacred essence lies in connectedness, which must include the human realm. There is just too much work to do, and fun to be had. Reconnecting with the outer world, though, was a long, slow, and disorienting process. I officially ended my Sabbatical about five years ago with a “coming out” ritual gathering, seven years to the day from the day I unplugged my phone and retreated from the world. I was returning to the world a different person, solid and calm inside, but with my social confidence deeply shaken. Most people I knew were mystified about what had happened to me. They knew only that I had changed.
Along with the death of my former self had inevitably come the death of many relationships that no longer fit a healthier mindset….the greatest cost of my “pearl of great price.” My closest definition of a divine spirit had long been simply creative, loving connection – the kind of connection which makes us one. There was nothing more sacred to me than connection with other people. So for me, there was nothing more tortuous or hellish than disconnection. The grief over all I had lost was overwhelming for a long, long, time. I will probably never fully recover from it. Yet…the inner peace that clarity has brought is, indeed, priceless.
Upon my re-entry into the outer world I had a whole new set of questions. Would I know what people I could trust? Would I ever get close to anyone again? How would I maintain the clarity and calm I had lost so much to gain?
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Looking back, what I didn’t yet understand when I came out of my Sabbatical is that achieving inner peace and one’s real self is not a one-time deal. One has to devote one’s life to it. For me, maintaining my inner calm and clarity requires regular spiritual practice, including generous doses of silence, solitude, and contemplation alone in the Natural world, where human ego loses its dominance. I’m not talking about contemplation in the sense of rumination, but rather the kind of contemplative and meditative stillness that quiets the noise of one’s ego long enough to be able to hear that still small voice within – that silent voice that speaks wisdom beyond words, and leads us to what the Buddhists call right action.
Today, I hardly feel like the same person I was before my Sabbatical. I am still at a loss to put it into words. For one thing, I feel quieter and simpler….not simplistic, but simple. I feel clearer inside, but paradoxically, less opinionated. I feel less swayed by my own and by other people’s passionate emotions.
I found a description of the symptoms of inner peace online by author Saskia Davis, whom I know nothing about, but which I think describe inner peace quite well:
Symptoms of Inner Peace
A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experiences.
An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
A loss of interest in judging self.
A loss of interest in judging others.
A loss of interest in conflict.
A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
A loss of ability to worry.
Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.
Frequent attacks of smiling through the eyes of the heart.
Increasing susceptibility to love extended by others, combined with the
uncontrollable urge to extend it.
An increasing tendency to let things happen, rather than make them happen.
Of course I haven’t fully achieved any of these, but another delicious symptom of inner peace is accepting one’s human imperfection. What blessed relief! But I can say that my inner self is much more like that description than it was before, and for that I am very grateful. It’s simply easier being me than it used to be.
What I still have the hardest time with sometimes is anger. After having suppressed anger for most of my life, it’s still a foreign emotion to me, and I don’t always know how to deal with it wisely. Anger can be a valuable teacher, but sometimes it is still my boss.
I still haven’t returned to calling myself a peace activist. First, because I have become too painfully aware of what I contribute to conflict. And second, because I can no longer separate action from contemplation from action…or rather, I choose not to. I don’t call myself a contemplative, either, for the same reason. Contemplation without action is indulgent; action without contemplation is risky. Only from a contemplative state in which my ego loses its grip on my faculties can I make a major decision I can trust about how to act.
Ideally, I will continue to move toward a balance between contemplation and what the Buddhists call right action. I am deeply moved by people connecting and acting as one to promote beauty, truth, and justice, from which peace can blossom. I’m just a lot more cautious about what I do and say.
So what’s the ending for this cautionary tale?
There’s a part of me that appreciates the irony of a peace group going to war over something as timeless and mundane as the human condition, and that part of me wants to shrug my shoulders and join Bette Middler in singing, “if that’s all there is to war, then let’s keep dancing….let’s break out the booze and have a ball….” It would be a relief if I could feel that way. But I can’t. I am still too deeply saddened by the loss of many relationships, even the ones that weren’t healthy. Too many people were hurt; too many lives, disrupted. With other, bloodier battles raging around the planet, I just can’t be light about the root causes of any war.
As I sit in my upstairs study trying to find a thought, a quotation, an uplifting word to end this story, I look out the window down onto Big Creek. I can almost hear the echoes of the laughter of the Peacecamp children in what was always their favorite activity – playing in the creek.
Children! There is reason enough for our adult-erated minds to have hope.
The Tao te Ching says:
Being the stream of the universe,
ever true and unswerving,
become as a little child once more.
Jesus of Nazareth said:
Unless we change and become like children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
May we, together, learn to be the stream of the universe, and become like children once more. May we study war no more.
Pondering judgment, I also realized how often I had been judged, and even found some comic relief in the ridiculous. I had been judged for being too radical, and for not being radical enough. For being vegetarian, and for not being vegetarian. For caring too much about making my home beautiful, and for not caring enough. For being too frugal, and for indulging in frivolous spending. I have been judged for spending too many years on higher education, and for not pursuing a PhD. For shaving my legs, and for not shaving my legs. You get the point. The point I got from pondering all this judgment was what the saints and sages have always taught: it is not my place to judge, and also that it is folly to base one’s actions on the judgments of others. How freeing!
This journey I had been sent on was a terrifying, bewildering, and excruciating process, and for months and months and even for years, I shed a daily monsoon of tears as I lost my illusions about my childhood, and about who I had become as a result.
I could only keep still and silent, and asked my then husband to bring me sacred texts, from any religion. He brought me the writings of the medieval Christian mystics, Meister Eckart, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechtild
of Magdeberg, whom I affectionately dubbed Mechtild of Mouthful.
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.”
There are no waves in the depths of the sea; it is still, unbroken. It is
the same with the monk. He is still, without any quiver of desire,
without a remnant on which to build pride and desire.
Buddhism. Sutta Nipata 919-20
Author-Saskia Davis
Let us go forth into the world
Let us go forth into the world through a door of hope for the future, remembering these words by Martin Luther: "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." So may it be with us.
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“If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else” |
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Hindu Prayers for Peace
Oh God, lead
us from the unreal to the Real.
Oh God, lead us from darkness to light.
Oh God, lead us from death to immortality.
Shanti, Shanti, Shanti unto all.
Oh Lord God
almighty, may there be peace in celestial regions.
May there be peace on earth.
May the waters be appeasing.
May herbs be wholesome, and may trees and plants bring peace to all.
May all beneficent beings bring peace to us.
May thy Vedic Law propagate peace all through the world.
May all things be a source of peace to us.
And may thy peace itself, bestow peace on all,
and may that peace come to me also.
