A pilgrim’s progress: Adam Woods takes an inner and outer journey for peace

‘Peace is an eternal process, without an endpoint.’

There is something profoundly liberating in the repetition of walking a long path. Footsteps simplify the world, somehow drawing the soul into sharper focus. Carried forward by the road, each individual step is small and inconsequential, yet one somehow feels oneself transformed. Towns and cities pass, places and perspectives shift, steps weave together, time suspends, and something unspoken happens.

So it was, as a group of peace pilgrims set out on a journey from Oxford Meeting House to the Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair at London’s ExCel Centre last week. We were a small group from different religious and secular traditions, all lovingly united by a desire to cultivate peace. I began the pilgrimage having rarely taken the time to intimately reflect on peace, thus my intention was to give space to this contemplation, and to learn from my fellow pilgrims. I am grateful that the week became a rich journey of community, reflection, and transformation for us all.

Surprisingly, my most profound learning experience from the week came not from my fellow pilgrims, but from the words of two women we met along the way. Around an evening bonfire just outside London, a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian woman vividly recalled her experiences of war in her home city on the Ukraine-Russia border. She spoke of her shock at how quickly the daily threat of war became normalised. It took her three months to ‘accept the new reality’ of the conflict, but this meant constantly being forced to confront her mortality. ‘Now I know what it feels like to live every day thinking that I could die at any moment’, she told us, ‘and I feel guilty because I had to leave my mother behind’. She was forced to flee her home last December when the winter became too hard to bear, but her mother is a still working as a nurse in the warzone, and she worries about her every day.

The following evening we were fed and hosted by Jaqueline, a community-minded vicar in West London. Jaqueline grew up in Uganda, amid nights filled with gunshots and the chaos of conflict. She remembers arriving in the UK, surprised that she was able to sleep through the night; before this, she didn’t believe that there was anywhere in the world free from conflict.

The impact of these women’s words was humbling. Having spent days in abstract contemplation and discussion of peace, they highlighted the stark contrast between mere contemplation and direct experience of conflict. I considered how these alternative realities of war are dangerously intangible to us as western Europeans. For an unthinkable many on our planet, these questions mean very little; they are usurped by a more immediate reality in which fear, death, and uncertainty dominate daily life. Increasingly, I find that my experiences in the presence of the Divine draw me away from these abstract, philosophical conversations, towards a greater desire to live and embody my faith in the world. I am drawn to Advices & queries 31: ‘We are called to live “in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars”… Search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war.’

Throughout the pilgrimage, the relevance of this Quaker testimony sowed something new in the depths of my heart. How often do we offer thanks for the relative peace of life in the UK? Despite incessant political fighting, a hostile environment for migrants and refugees, and the increasing economic hardship experienced by so many, we rarely collectively experience the panic and chaos of a direct existential threat. Sitting united in this opportunity for stillness might bring us closer together. If peace starts as a seed in the heart, it must ripple through layers of community before being sown in the wider world.

One thing I came to believe on our journey is that peace is an eternal process, without an endpoint. It is a pilgrimage of the heart. It is not merely the absence of conflict. Peace is a verb; we cultivate peace through doing it. That is why the lives of figures like Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu and Thich Nhat Hahn radiate endlessly, because their faith and wisdom unite in an endless cycle of inner cultivation and devotional action. The inner and outer worlds reflect each other, each sustained by the growth of the other.

Often, at the start of Meeting for Worship, I find myself overwhelmed by a feeling of inner noise and conflict. In stillness, the obfuscated chaos of the inner world rises and demands to be acknowledged, and I mistakenly judge this as the antithesis of peacefulness. But I realise that the real work of peace happens in this transition – not in spite of the noise but because of it. The inner conflict is an invitation to be inquisitive about my inner world, and the work towards peace is seeded right there in the chaos. Peacefulness is the transition from chaos to clearness, from confusion to insight, from noise to silence. And in the resulting stillness emerges the true sceptre of peace, which is a heart of infinite compassion.

The countryside appears like a triumph of peace,
and our footsteps crown it in silence.
In the timelessness of ancient trees,
we hold our breath, we climb these hills, and pray.

There is a world beyond solace
of bird’s eye views and radar,
where metal beeps and sheds its skin
to burn the Holy Earth.

Planes like knives spit fire in the sky,
and we scream and name them
The Enemy of Harmony,
The Antithesis of Peace.

But what is peace?

It is not lack of conflict,
for the forest is swimming with death.
We have seen birds kill,
and we have called it beautiful.

Perhaps peacefulness may be:
when we do what is asked of us
when we honour the Way
when we go towards conflict with open eyes
and emerge holding limitless love.

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