Thought for the Week: Practising peace
Jane Pearn reflects on peace as a practice
I have a confession to make: I’m reluctant to wear a ‘Quakers for Peace’ badge. Like ‘god’, peace means different things to different people. To some, it is avoiding or burying differences; to others, making things right after conflict; for some a state of perpetual (and probably unachievable) harmony; while for others it is simply the lull between wars.
In the course of all the conversations I’ve had over the years, no one has ever told me that they were against peace. So, to declare oneself ‘for peace’ can seem a bit glib, and can be easily misunderstood. Pacifism may be mistaken for passivism. For me, and I suspect for many Friends, peace is not an end-state to be achieved, but an activity to engage in constantly. It’s about relationships, and how we manage the spaces between individuals, between nations, between ideas.
Friends understand peace to be more than the absence of armed conflict. War is only the tip of a very large iceberg, made up of ordinary people like you and me, the way we perceive the world and other people – and the way we relate. What matters is how we communicate our differences, how we understand what lies beneath words and actions, however difficult or unpalatable we may find them; how we acknowledge that others have a different experience of life, and a different perspective.
It is about listening, negotiating, together finding routes through difficulties, all too evidently needed in our country at this time. It’s the process – active, dynamic, engaging – of managing to live together on this somewhat overcrowded planet. That’s probably as close as I get to a definition of peace.
I haven’t got it right. I’m constantly failing, and trying again. I’m practising, in both senses – it’s my practice, what I do, and in recognising my shortcomings I acknowledge the need to keep practising.
‘Quakers Practise Peace’: now that’s a badge I could happily wear.
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