The Springtime of Peace The deeper beauty of spring is its process. In winter's last days, as
sun warms earth, each root and branch awakens to patterned memory of who it is and what it can be. Life stirs and nature's growth in turn awakens all of us to glories of being fully alive.Consciousness awakens in much same way, doesn't it? One moment, everything is dark and still. Growth begins and we are excited by movement and its vibrant promise of what is to come.
I have a sense of our world awakening to peace: not a blind pretense that we are coming up roses, but a soul-deep vision of seeds of peace within us, just waiting for warmth and light needed for them to flourish. In quiet stillness of centering prayer and meditation, we connect with this warmth and light, and become it. Our joy sweeps across green valleys and white-clouded blue mountains kiss sky.
That's how it was for Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mohammed, Mother Theresa, Buddha and so many others who became our great peacemakers. They were divinely illuminated in silence and carried this peaceful inner light back into our world.
I remember power of this impulse in 1960s and see it taking hold again today, as people tire of war and destruction. It is a telling co-incidence that Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" comes along now to rip away veils concealing our brutality. When people see in this movie raw atrocity of violence, and know it for monster that it is, then perhaps we will begin to reject it on our airwaves and refuse war in our lives and as a nation.
This awakening to peace is deeply needed in our suffering country, and I believe our silent prayers have brought an opportunity to choose a new symbol of who we are, in U.S. Department of Peace. It is an impulse whose time has come, for within it is potential to shift consciousness of war to peace.
The Department of Peace, initiated by two spiritual peacemakers, Marianne Williamson and Dennis Kuchinich (D-Oh), holds peace as an organizing principle in our society. The DoP would teach conflict resolution in schools; address domestic violence, child abuse, mistreatment of elderly, and other issues of cultural violence; monitor arms sales and weapons of mass destruction; and in every way seek to prevent conflict, determine root causes of violence, and increase our national security.
