Peace: An Impossible Possibility

Mahatma Gandhi is credited (apocryphally?) with saying, “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

Collectively we need to start believing this: about money, about power, about food, about water, about work, about freedom. I believe that peace starts here.

Peace

Peace is hard to come by. We want to protect our stuff: our reputations, our houses, our jobs, our cash, our power, our influence.

The problem with violence is that it works.

One of the things I hate about myself is that I will quickly resort to yelling if my kids won’t listen to me. Then, miraculously, they respond! It’s like rewarding me for my bad behavior. And then I get annoyed with them when they yell at each other. And probably yell at them to get them to stop. Awesome.

There’s global conflict in miniature.

Some patterns are learned, some are innate. We want, we take, we force, we strike back. And most of it begins with the assumption that I have to have one particular thing in order to have enough for me, to have my needs (read, “wants”) met.

Here, too, we have to reprogram our collective way of being. We have to be willing to patiently talk and listen. We are only about a century into the science of psychology along with the self-awareness and instruction in listening to ourselves and others that it’s bringing us. Maybe as we learn to listen to ourselves and our lovers and families we will learn to speak and listen in ways that make peace on a larger scale.

In fact, I know that this is happening in some corporate spaces. People are getting training in how to talk and listen to clients and colleagues and bosses and patients. There’s hope for the way of peace to bring about a better world in the corporate office or board room or hospital.

Maybe part of what people are learning here is that giving away the power in a conversation or encounter creates a better world than clinging to it and attempting to control the situation? Maybe we’re learning that there’s even enough control to be shared and for everyone to have enough.

Unlearning

The things we didn’t have to learn are the hardest things to unlearn. That’s why we have to keep telling stories of enough.

As Christians, we should be the shining light on the hill with this stuff. We should not be lured by the siren song of acquisition but compelled by the five thousand fed, the hundredfold harvest, the four thousand fed, the table that keeps getting larger and larger as a gracious God adopts more and more children to gather ’round.

We should find our compulsion in the quiet confidence of Jesus who refused to compel but invited, gave, and submitted–knowing that there would still be life and rule enough for him on the other side.

This is truth in the Christian story that is good news for the world. It’s a journey that we can invite our neighbors to join us on whether they want to follow Jesus or not. But first we have to believe. We have to believe that there is enough and that living into that abundance frees us from having to get our way.

Go back