Witnesses of Mercy for Peace and Reconciliation

76 WITNESSING MERCY FOR PEACE AND RECONCILIAT ION he 14th Dalai Lama said that “love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive”. Peace and reconciliation – are they political tasks or spiritual exercises? Or a combination of both? This is a question stirring deeply inside me in the midst of a 15-year journey as a peacebuilder in an Asian context. In my search for peace, I came to an under- standing that it is a combination of political, intellectual, emotional and spiritual disciplines and actions. Then I wanted to understand that which emerges as the strongest base or the fertile foundation for promoting peace and reconciliation. Over an exploratory period of four years through experiential learning and understand- ing, I now realise that spiritual growth is the strongest base on which a true peacebuilder can stand. If there is no spiritual base, there is no peacebuilder. Of course, one could take a different path and become a political activist or analyst, freedom fighter or NGO worker. What does it mean to be spiritual? Does it mean that if we are religious, we are spiritual? Not necessarily. It is far beyond being religious. It is partly our capacity to see others through our own eyes but, more importantly, to see ourselves through the eyes of others. This seeing, in the true sense of that word, connects with one’s own natural being and with that of the Other. In peacebuilding we call it empathy. In the Abrahamic tradition, we call it mercy. In Buddhism we call it com- passion or loving kindness. As a person nurtured in the Buddhist tradition but living as a secular humanist, I have begun to see the connection between empathy, mercy, compassion, peace and reconciliation. As a secular humanist, I see the world as a web of connections. The beauty of this web is that it is invisible and that it makes us whole, an entirety, a totality. The rule of interdependence is the core of our life, the core of our universe but, sadly, the world has been wedged between two ends: dependence and independence. We are on an impossible mission without the support of the core of our being. Forgetting, or going against this very nature of interconnectedness, human beings have created a world which is about to explode. But in our traditional wisdom, this interconnected- ness exists and thrives beautifully and it has been the foundation of community living. For instance, there is a concept called ubuntu in the cultural traditions of Africa. “I am what I am because of who we all are.” The Native American Indian, Chief Seattle says: “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” What did we do to the web? This is the question hit- ting hard right between the eyes of human civilisation. Since we have been disconnected from our traditional wisdom we want to re-invent the wheel of life. As a result, we are increasingly becoming divided and dis- connected from everything human. In that pattern of thinking, we have forgotten the beautiful diversity within and around us. We have for- gotten the very essence of fundamental values connecting us to this web of relationships – empathy, compassion and mercy. In the second half of the processes of our civilisation, religions spoke about these concepts. When religions became instruments of state power and key institutions of the system, they ended up promoting the words but not necessarily their meanings. Then we were trapped into an illusion giving us a false sense of intellec- tual knowledge of noble religious concepts. We thought that knowing the concepts was equal to practicing them. The more we were getting connected to the head, our brains, the greater was the illusion in believing that thinking, knowing, understanding, realising, internalis- ing and practicing are the same. We failed miserably to see the gap in between. The world abused these terms more than ever making us believe that preaching is more important than practicing. It is in this confusing, cloudy and fragmented cir- cumstances that we, at the Centre for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation (CPBR), wanted to initiate this new discourse among religious leaders from the four tradi- tions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity to understand the gap between preaching and practice. Dishani Jayaweera T