Patricia Schoonstein is an award-winning writer to lives near our home. As does Margie Orford, who writes chilling crime fiction as though it was happening to you! In one of Patricia’s first and most beautiful books, Skyline, she has some mothers who have just arrived in Cape Town as refugees saying this:
Turn our desolation into something memorable. That it may not have been in vain to lose what little we owned. Make for our lost children a chime of gentle sound that they might follow it and escape, one day, from the plateau of war. (Skyline p 49)
One thinks of the mothers around the world, in Japan, in Libya, in Sudan and in so many other places whose words these are today.
I have come away from a recent conference in Washington DC recently with a new commitment to deepen my work for peace in the world. (For details of the conference – see the page “What I am doing now…”) We have no other way. In everything we do, we have to work with each other to find and build and guard peace. One way to work for peace is to see everyone as belonging to one interconnected community. We are one and from one source. We are inseparable and are profoundly related in all we do. From this point of view, we take action simply as brothers and sisters – as family.
I came across a quote from Andrew Cohen – I quote him often – he is a spiritual writer and leader in the USA. Without his permission but with due acknowledgment – here is a quote of his I have edited significantly so that it reflects what I want to say at the moment:
If we are trying to create a new future, to genuinely pioneer new ways of living together, we have to be agents of transformation – and this means we have to be willing to live on the creative edge of community life, of social conventions, of old cultural ways of doing things… for creativity always comes from the edges, not the centre. Otherwise, we are going to be followers of “the beaten path”, living out the patterns that have been formed by countless others – patterns that come from contexts that no longer give life. So many of us feel it is not up to us to define or re-define these old patterns and so, without knowing it, we end up unconsciously repeating them, following ways that separate and divide us. But many believe we are being called to create new ways of relating and to unlock new patterns of being and new potentials from within our communities. But for this to occur, it requires rare and heroic women and men who have awakened to the conviction that this next step needs to happen now and each day and that we’re the ones who have to make it happen!
