Peace

By Ayesha Foot

"I don't like the idea of peace," someone said to me, "all those people walking around with fixed smiles.."

Picture - Samuel L Lewis

It is a word we use so often, but I suppose there are as many different ideas of what it means as there are people. Certainly it is frequently on my lips, for I am currently preparing for a weekend workshop called Planting Peace, and helping to organise an international camp, Peace through the Arts, which is focused on Dances of Universal Peace. So her comment made me stop and think.

My understanding of peace is not just absence of war. Still less is it a scenario in which people hide their feelings of animosity under a veneer of being nice to each other. It has been hard for me to learn that suppressing one's opinions for fear of provoking conflict is not a road to peace, for I was brought up not to upset people. Peace is something much more positive, something which doesn't really have an opposite.

Samuel L. Lewis wrote

"Inner: This is the real Peace. Words are not peace. Thoughts are not peace. Programs are not peace. Peace is fundamental ..... It is from this that everything was, or let us say: In the beginning was Peace and Peace was with God and the Peace was God, and out of this Peace has everything been made that was made."

The Logos-Peace is fullness, the working together of millions of individuals like cells in a body, "in and with God and under God". It is like the primordial flow from which all creativity comes according to the Sepher of Moses. The experience of this peace is an experience of truth. Yet it becomes more and more difficult to find in an environment of ever increasing stimulation and excitement.

I have recently watched the first two programmes of Canticle to the Cosmos, a video series produced at Holy Names College, California by Brian Swimme, a cosmologist. He tells the story of an unfolding universe of which we are part, which behaves as a whole, and whose unbounded creativity flows through us, and these ideas bring us back to the Logos-Peace described by Samuel Lewis.

This theme of a purposeful universe in which our individual purpose in life is related to that of the whole is an underlying theme in Desert Wisdom by Neil Douglas-Klotz, Thorsons 1995. Yet this requires a huge shift of consciousness, for we in the western world have placed so much emphasis on individuality, we have lost sight of the whole. we TREAT THE UNIVERSE AS IF WE ARE INDEPENDENT OBSERVERS. There can be no genuine peace which does not include both a realisation of our interdependence with other species and true peace within.

May the Being of the Universe
breathe into you the light of blessing and ripeness,
...........
and May it show you its face
of secret grace and silent refuge
in a communion of deep peace.
from Desert Wisdom. p. 251 Harper Collins ISBN