by Gail Unterberger, Ph.D.
interfaith counseling services
gaithersburg, md

1.  What if you went back to school this next fall and took a course that looked like this:

FRONTIERS 100.005 PEACE: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Description:

"Everywhere you look, violence is looking back at you.  It's in the news, on the television, and at the movies.  There are wars and bombings, batterings and school shootings.  Even the drivers you meet on the freeway seem ready to fight one another for a few extra feet of pavement.  At the same time, countries, presidents, prime ministers and militaries all say they 'want peace,' believe in peace,' and 'are working for peace.'  What is this 'peace' everyone wants?  This course is not about violence and wars.  It is an exploration of this amazingly exciting and complex thing called 'peace.'

"The course begins with the notion that we all know very little about peace, and that it is much more than the absence of war or violence.  That it is much more than an absence of something: it is a presence of something.  What is peace?  Does it have many faces?  What do they look like?  Does it have many voices?  What do they sound like?  Can peace be found in our everyday lives, in the world around us, in history?  Can it be found in film, in television, in novels, in poetry, in art, in music?  What does peace look like in different countries, cultures and languages?  Peace is the next frontier - and in many ways, the final frontier - for humanity to discover."  (Taught by Professor Dewit, Goucher College, Fall 2002.)

Last week my daughter graduated from high school with a full scholarship to a small liberal arts college in Baltimore, MD.  She registered for classes the week before and this class was among the mandatory classes she would take all her semesters, a series called "Frontiers."  She opted first for Frontiers in Education, since she wants to be a teacher.  But she is thinking of getting a Peace Certificate in conjunction with a semester of studies at American University in Washington, D.C.

I think everyone should have this class mandated for life starting this fall.  I notice that in our community there are disaster training courses given to anyone who wants them, through the churches and civic institutions.  But that's the reactionary response.  What can we know at all about peace?  We should have a comprehensive course like the one above, where we could really immerse ourselves not only with the literature, but also film, art, music and all of the various media through which peace is mediated.  It could include dreams, visions, storytelling and that which must be coming up through the roots of the people the world over, if we are to avoid global annihilation.

2.  I've been serving as a consultant to a nearby church which has had an angry faction for a long time, but who recently turned on a "stepfather" of a pastor, never having grieved enough when daddy left the pulpit a year ago.  It is an ugly situation, some of the behaviors are bordering on criminal between the two factions.  "Peace, peace," they cry, while there is no peace.  I have facilitated a group entitled "Healing Together', which is about the grieving and healing process.  The one powerful and moneyed faction of about 40 members has left the church.  It seems they are withholding their tithes until the current pastor is scapegoated out of the church through lack of salary.  The structure of the hierarchy and the processes of this denomination are very new and so their process is betraying them as well.  The differences between the two groups become stronger by the week as rumors and emails, and "bad behavior" is on the rise.  Some actions thought to be used to strangle the remaining churches finances border on the criminal.  Analyzing the situation from a systems point of view reveals that they are almost at disintegration in the cycle of organizational structure.  Blame and fear abound.  Using Friedman's Generation to Generation, Alban Institute material, Steinke's How your Church Family Works: Understanding congregations as Emotional systems, and other materials, we have worked on using a systemic understanding rather than point-for-point arguing, the latter primarily brooding on the real and imagined mistakes made by the current pastor.  Of course the problem remains that if the pastor leaves, the remnant will be so angry that the other group "ran him out" that coming together in peace will be very difficult.  Nothing less than a miracle in personal transformations and conversions plus strategic interventions of growing quickly a new leadership that is prepared to move on, heeding the new members needs for the fighting to end, will suffice to create peace.  In the long run, I believe that God intends for the extraordinary church to continue in history, whatever the short course of action.

3.  Lastly, I have been interested in the Global Non-Violent Peace Force which calls for a Nonviolent Peaceforce of a strategic number of persons in a Brigade of peace as human shields to study, train and pray together to form a human chain of shields.  These peace warriors would go directly to the battlefields to provide an intervention.  The group led by David Hartsough, need many persons to have a force fully operational with 2,000 active members, 4,000 reservists and 5,000 financial supporters.  This group would study the 300 paged document on what has worked, what hasn't, and what has never been tried by the forces of Peace Brigades International.  For more information on the Global Non-violent Peace Force, visit www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org or email: info@nonviolentpeaceforce.org.  As I turn fifty, having raised my children to college age, I am intrigued as I always have been in reading about the resistors for peace.  My family reminds me, however, that I have always intuited that I would die of torture, also my greatest fear - and to join the active force might make that premonition a much more likely scenario (though no one in the organization has been killed thus far).

We need to be subjects in history, makers of history, not just reactors. Peace is a way of life that with God's help can be built, gather force, and work to change the tide of human events now, before it's too late.

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