Making Peace
The slow dance of making peace asks us to hold everything.
It’s OK to feel joyful and sad at the same time. It’s ok to feel anger and bliss. It’s ok to feel held and shattered.
It may even be the case that our collective wellbeing depends on the ability to feel complexly and know the truth in all the flavors at the same time.
I woke to a stunningly beautiful sunrise. I woke feeling Israel and Gaza with my entire body — the people, the “sides,” the rubble, the dust, the emotion, the calcified layers of history and trauma multiplied by fresh layers of trauma and rage and loss, insinuating themselves in real time onto whole peoples and landscapes.
Joy and sadness at the same time.
Bliss and numbness at the same time.
Gratitude and a quiet scream at the same time.
One of my practices is to embrace complexity of feeling. First I hold the sensations and thoughts bound up with the feelings in emptiness, softening attachment to them. Once I have done this, then I cultivate an attitude of curiosity towards the feelings, trusting they are wise. I attend to the content they hold for my more integral intellectual AND emotional sense making.
Today this writing is what is emerging from this practice.
The wheels are turning, and we are all here, all of us on this one small planet at a time when there is no “away.” The daily workings of our globalized civilization obviate our interbeing, yet still we fight. Still, we operate according to the logics of tribalism, nationalism and inter-family feuds, all of these forces triangulated by the capitalism’s multi-polar, zero sum game. Still, we fail to understand each other’s needs or words, hopes or fears. Still we ghettoize lands and people. Still we buy and sell and commodify.
I cannot say that I understand the historical or cultural complexity playing out in the Middle East. But I can work to grock it, to attend to it. I can soften and open in a curious humility that cares for all the lenses, all the possible defenses, all the possible unwindings of defense. I can be both shocked by atrocity and absorbtive of the intelligence within motives deeper and different than anything I have knowing within my own life context. I can patiently strong-man other peoples’ perspectives.
There is a growing sense that we are one species, one Human Family, on one small planet, all of us interconnected in an existentially binding contract to GROW UP.
What does this look like? It starts, perhaps, with this ability to feel complexly, to hold And-And within ourselves, both emotionally and intellectually, and to Grock (to feel in fullness) people and situations that are commonly beyond our view. From here, we may be able to wisely (not rigidly, but with fluid responsivity) take responsibility for the webs of causality that flow from our choices and actions, both individually and at all orders of scale, and to HOLD all that needs to be upheld if we are to unwind these wicked knots in the One Human Heart.
The making of peace is an ancient prayer. The making of war is an ancient curse against that peace. How can we break that curse this time? In this fragile generation when all of life hangs in the balance of human hubris or wisdom?
To make peace is to be one willing to do the sacred math — to discover the bio-psycho-social-ancestral-spiritual algorithm that binds you to the curse, and thus to unwind your own collusion with ongoing war.
The Essenes, whose destinies were bound up in the same lands now under assault, taught the Seven Fold Peace. This is a seminal teaching in “doing the sacred math.” Peace begins within, then is made in relationship. In the Ancient Essene framework, we make Peace with:
• Body
• Mind
• Family
• Community
• Country
• Planet
• God
These are the valences, or the circumferences, which must be brought back into wholeness, back into resonance, back into a felt sense of peace, in order to nourish the potential for coherence, harmony and generative creativity that doesn’t keep breaking the world.
Be with each one, one at a time, perhaps not all at once. Slowly, surely, we discover what is ours to unwind and ours to embrace.
Making wholeness is both an unwinding of trauma/tension/rage/projection/fear/ignorance/hatred and a reconnection, a restoration of communion, with the object of our unrest. To make peace is to fall again in love with the other and know it as a part we can be whole with — whole in our own center of self, whole in the context of a shared reality, within which we are two distinct parts who share a larger interning, and whole in the sense that each of us, in some way, contains the whole Whole.
Slowly, we make oneness with everything. We become available to undivided communion with everything.
As you do this peace making, don’t collapse into the easy story that “we are all one.” Why? Because that statement triggers great pain when unity is not felt. And, while “we’re all one” is true at the level of the Totality of Reality, it’s also untrue at the level of the uniqueness of subjective experience. Such a statement then becomes a lazy, hazy, unsafe form of oneness when what is needed is a deep care for all the details of difference that both divide us and which might enable the holy rainbow of a diverse planetary unity.
Each of us is a unique instance of God, a part of the whole distinct from all others. Our uniqueness is sacred and must be upheld and elevated if we are to truly know peace. For example, Peace doesn’t mean collapsing the Muslim worldview into a Jewish or Western Scientific Materialist or Eastern worldview. We aren’t all here to function according to some logic. To try to make that possible would be rigid, puritanical and soul-killing. The goal isn’t to all have one perspective. The goal is to create spaces within which diversity can know unity. I use communion to describe this sacred practice: common-union, or union with, a sharing of love between two or more subjective selves. Communion is an embrace of the larger wholeness that holds us all.
“We’re all one,” is true at the level of undivided consciousness, but thankfully, gloriously, miraculously, consciousness has divided itself into an infinity of unique perspectives so as to learn more about consciousness. It seems to me to be more, or equally, true that we are all connected, all bound in interbeing, as uniquely subjective instances of that which makes it all possible. Thankfully, consciousness continues to divide, not so as to conquer, but so as to Sing the ever emerging Symphony of Life. This, I believe, is the Uni-Verse’s truest prayer for itself.
Increasingly, I think of all systems change as ceremony. Let us engage these tender moments with a sacred attitude, with willingness to interact with “others,” whether that other is another person, a foreign idea, or some other place or being we haven’t yet recognized as an extension of ourselves.
As we grapple with current events, with the rending of senseless deaths and the helplessness that can arise when we have no ability to influence the levers of power, let us each do our part to make peace — both within and in all the ways we co-architect our shared social and material world.
Thank you for reading.
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I love you.
