Reflection on world peace

This reflection on peace is offered as an earnest heartfelt call for peace today, especially for the children who are refugees, strangers in a strange land. They need our love and our prayers, more than ever. In these days of war,  we are all refugees from the terror that stalks us everywhere.

We are all seeking a new world, a paradisio, in which we can create beautiful lives, a new home that honors life itself.  It is that seeking that gives us hope for a better day - for us, our children, and our world. It is the most ancient human journey, that searching that has driven us for millennia.  Today is no different, but where we are going is. We are going to become One, at last.

I pray we are all lead by the divine light of love and that deeply profound and generative inner peace whose light we can all chose to live by, be guided by, enriched and healed by. I pray, and invite all of you to pray and live in love and peace.  It is the Christian's good fight. It is all of humanity's shared global destiny.  It is our holy peace, waged with love and prayer on our knees.  It is our true essence to which we are all called.


The lovely thing about thinking of ourselves as artists is it cuts us some slack against that persistent plague of self recrimination waged by an inner critic, who is too quick to condemn us, beat us into submission to the world's "norm," which is anything but normal. 

If we each tuned in to our own center, listened to the heartbeat of God which is one with ours, the sheer levels of joy and freedom, wisdom and power would open our minds to levels of experience formerly unavailable to those who wander the barren plains alone, without comfort or counsel from the Holy Spirit, who lives within, wedded to the Great creator of life.

Artists have a reputation for being raw, real, outspoken and almost self indulgent with their art.  They have "poet's license,"  unspoken permission to be true to their art at the expense of good manners. They are purveyors of an inner truth and prophetic in their art.  Why is it OK for them to express their truth prophetically on canvases, films, books, dance, music and not we, ordinary, folks?  That question answers itself.  It is OK for us to express our deepest truth in our lives, which is our art.

Because authenticity is a kind of birth right for artists, they can get away with irascible behavior.  If we all claimed to be artists, since the world is comprised all of artists, rather than warriors (which is outward directed holy war, rather than inward where it needs to be), we would all be on a fast track to authenticity,  and I bet the human race would accelerate in its spiritual evolution almost over night. 

We have, from the beginning of history, been heavy on projection rather than introspection.  We project our inner world outwardly.  And, while that's great if your inner world is fully enlightened, self realized, beautiful, radiant and whole, but when it's wounded, fragmented from years of individual and collective abuse, the outward projection pours too much blood on the battlefield and leads us to build walls (as in big houses with tons of stuff) against each other, because we're steeped in fear.  That fear is a phantom from within, not a real threat from outside. 

I think if we reflected on that and reached for it,  the time would quickly come when Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jain's and the hundreds of other religions, would find that at their deepest, most inner core is the same "voice."  We are all connected to God, to Allah, because we are all the same.

If we could see ourselves individually as artists, is it even remotely possible that we could see "our self" as a single human being, a single Self, that one face that emerges when we merge all 6.8 billion faces together and come up with a composite face. In that face, we see the child of God, who is an artist.  As we grow up individually, raise our individual awareness and liberate ourselves from the controls on us, set by tradition, old religion, clan or tribal culture, styles, fads, materialism and capitalism, and reach for what is true, we will come together.  We will find the common denominator that makes us human.  

I think that when we put aside all that is foreign to us, and reach for what is common, we may all find ourselves at a kind of communal table, sipping wine (or grape juice) and sharing bread (or rice cakes) and hugging our children and participating in a great banquet of life, like a wedding party, simply celebrating the happy times, the good food, the great music, the dancing, the singing, the laughter.  Listening to the stories of the old people and watching the children play and grow, holding our husband or wife, loving the animals, watching the radiant sunrise and amber sunset. 

Life is so beautiful and when we step into what is common, the shared life as artists, who have that unique vision for life, for peace and for love, the whole world would change in a single heart beat.  

I think the one obvious thing we all share is life together on this beautiful planet under the same sun.  It is the Earth herself that we all share and as we war among ourselves, we are not only risking running ourselves into extinction,  but we are killing her. By facing down what separates us, and clinging to what unites us, what we share in common rather than what we hold differently, we may be able to grasp a vision for our future together.

I wonder if we can share that vision?  I wonder if we can face down our own inner "holy wars" to heal and evolve those parts of our collective (and individual) wounded psyches that react to others who are different?  I wonder if we stopped fighting externally and rather, faced the demons within, would all wars stop?  Would they?  Is it possible?  Can we look out into our own life canvases today, and ask ourselves where do we react?  to whom do we react?

We all have so much work to do.  We have many "holy wars" to engage in within ourselves.  Holy war was never meant to be fought outwardly, if we are honest with ourselves.  Among Sufis, holy war is an inward struggle to holiness. We must all give each other a break, enough of a break to stop, gather our thoughts, center more, speak more lovingly, speak more truth, go to those deepest plains of truth within, and come back out to the world and share what we find there, even if we have to paint it, sing it, dance it, write it.

Top Picture is from  children.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/01/30/907/  

(Please check out their website.  It is a beautiful, elegant call for peace, love, if only for our children, who are suffering everywhere on the earth.  It begs us all  to wake up.)