Thought for the Week: Being a peacemaker
Eleanor Nesbitt reflects on resolving conflict
The city of Coventry is delighted to be preparing to be the UK City of Culture 2021. Coventry is known internationally, too, as a City of Peace and Reconciliation and it’s also a City of Sanctuary, welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. Here, in Coventry, as in localities throughout the UK and, indeed, worldwide, we daily experience how our local community is stronger and more vibrant thanks to its diversity.
In the 1640s, a Leicestershire weaver’s son, George Fox, contributed a thread to our city’s rich religious history, noting his visits in his Journal. He recalled one intense discussion of religion with a local cleric, which ended acrimoniously, with the priest ‘in a rage’ because he had accidentally trampled on his flowerbed! George Fox was, of course, the key founding figure of the Religious Society of Friends, whose members are now better known as the Quakers.
One central Quaker concern is peacemaking, often through active conflict resolution, which is usually carried out behind the scenes and away from the cameras. Quakers are also committed to equality and justice, truth and integrity, and to a simple lifestyle that respects the environment. Today’s news – and every day’s news – is a prompt to work harder for a peace-filled world in which these qualities are strongly interwoven.
We tend to think of peacemaking predominantly in terms of the international stage – the ending or avoidance of wars between and within nations. Striving for peaceful cooperation is demanding: demanding for international negotiators and for more local mediators and activists. Educating for peace is challenging. For Quakers, peacemaking begins at home, and in our families. We need to support each other – and, at the same time, to be self-aware. Peacemaking and inclusion start with us – and they start deep within ourselves. To quote New Zealand Quakers in 1987: ‘We must relinquish the desire to own other people, to have power over them, and to force our views on to them.’ Being a peacemaker means acknowledging our own prejudices and negative thoughts. It means we try not to stereotype other people or assume that they are to blame.
Instead, I believe, it’s about committing ourselves to resolving conflict, wherever that may be – perhaps in our own immediate family. It’s about bringing a strong, creative peace into all our relationships with others.
A revised version of the ‘Thought for the Day’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 19 July.
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