Sabbath Devotional :: Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Women . . . Part 1

At this season of wishing for peace on earth, perhaps the word seems overused (and the goal elusive). Yet our own MWEG Proclaim Peace podcast this year has focused, from two dozen different angles, on the concept of finding and making peace, personally and globally. They’ve only begun to mine the topic with so many inspiring guests.

For the devotional this week and next, I’m going to present the collected wisdom from this year’s interviews on two questions: How do you define peace? And how do you personally find peace? It is remarkable to read through these varied and insightful responses, and recall the broader context of the podcast conversations here.

We have many different ideas (some edited for clarity/brevity), and I invite you to add your own at the end.

How do you define peace?

1 Emma Addams: At this point in my life, I would define peace as what I experience when I’m linked to and following God’s will for my life. It’s when I’m making decisions, large and small, that are based on a connectedness to spiritual things. And that’s not dependent upon circumstances. In fact, I think as many of us can attest to, I felt some of my most peaceful moments in the midst of the storms. And it’s really a sense of being solid and loved and pointed in the right direction, even if I’m not exactly where I want to be at that moment. Peace is not dependent upon where I am now, it’s dependent upon where I’m pointed and the sense that I know where I’m going (or that at least I know I will know where I’m going).

2 Jennifer Finlayson-Fife: Let me start with what I think it isn’t. It isn’t the absence of difference. It’s not the absence of conflict even. I think it’s finding a way to really be able to accept difference in ourselves, in others, and to work collaboratively towards a shared goal. The body of Christ metaphor is such a beautiful one. To me, that’s emblematic of peace: that we are playing different roles, understanding things from different perspectives, but working together and having no one in the position [of saying], I have no need of thee.

3 Clair Canfield: I used to think peace is what happened when you didn’t have conflict. But I’ve since come to see it as an enduring commitment to nonviolence, even in the face of interconnectedness and interdependence. When you have that interconnectedness, and people influence you and you influence them, you’re bound to have conflict. And so peace isn’t a lack of that interconnectedness and influence, but rather when we choose to be non-violent with each other, even in the face of those differences and that influence.

4 David Pulsipher: Peace has become such a multifaceted thing that it’s hard to nail down. I have to give an increasingly more complex answer to that question, but increasingly I come to a more simple notion that, for me, peace personally is when my heart and soul are aligned with that of God, as best as I can tell. And I think that also is the way I feel about societal peace, is that when we are aligned as societies and communities with God. For me, peace is not the absence of conflict. It’s about achieving the right balance and achieving conflict in a creative and loving way, both in our society, but also the ability to hold kind of paradoxical ideas within my own heart and mind. And so both my inner peace and my societal peace is increasingly about division, but division that is held in a unifying spirit of love.

5 Emily Taylor: I think you’re correct in saying it sounds simple, but it’s not. How I’ve come to understand it is rather than the absence of conflict or difficulty or tension, it is a state of calm, understanding, and perception. So that can be experienced as an individual, and it also can be experienced as a collective. But we start with the individual. But it’s not just the absence of bad things. It’s the inclusion of that state of understanding, light, truth, to a certain extent.

6 Chad Ford: Every day, the answer is different. And I think that’s because it is simple, but complex at the same time. Language becomes this really interesting way to talk about concepts. We’ll have [BYU Hawaii] students figure out the term, and often there’s a deep embedded meaning within that term. And as I was thinking about that this morning, the words that I said to you really came to my mind, aloha. And this is a Hawaiian word that means a lot of things. You may have heard it say hello or goodbye, or it means I love you, or having aloha could mean having charity or peace. But a deeper look at the word itself, I think, is a great definition for peace. Aloha is actually two Hawaiian words. Ha is the breath of life. It’s our spirit. It’s what animates us. Every human being has ha, and it’s sacred. And alo means to share. So you share your breath of life. And so when someone said aloha to each other, pre-colonization [times] in Hawaii, they would touch foreheads, and then they would breathe in each other’s ha. And then they would say the words, Aloha. And when you did this, it was really a sacred moment where I breathe your spirit into me and you breathe my spirit into you. And then we make a commitment that we’re going to help each other along our life journey. We recognize the divinity, the spirit which is within you. We recognize that you have important things that you want to accomplish. You have dreams, desires, hopes that you want to achieve. And now I’m committing to you that I’m going to be helpful to you in that journey. And to me, that takes peace and makes it very active. It’s about how we take in others, how we share our humanity back out, and then a commitment that we make to each other. And that is when we experience peace.

7 Eboo Patel: I define peace as the right relationship between people. I think you can include in that right relationship between people and the earth, right relationship between people and animals, right relationship between people and God. But peace is the right relationship between people. I love that.

8 Michalyn Steele: Peace is repose. It is comfort of the soul. It is, to define it by its lack, the lack of agitation. And so it’s calm. It is a fruit of the spirit.

9 Annie Bentley Waddoups: For a lot of years, I went to this particular moment right after I graduated from high school, and I was relieved of all the pressures, and I had the best nap I’d had in years. And that felt peaceful to me. But as I have learned and grown, I’ve realized that peace is much more complex and has a more elusive definition. I draw a lot from my studies in human development, and think about peace being a zone of sustainable connection and growth and meaning, ultimately connection to God, but on a pragmatic level also to a person, to music, to nature. Peace feels like a flowing adjustment to any of those toward an inner equilibrium.

10 Emile Kayitare: According to me as a Rwandese, also as a young man who grew up in Rwanda after the genocide we had in 1994, I have found peace to be living without the fear of harm because of others’ bad intentions.

11 Becca Kearl: We often get caught up thinking about peace as a state of being, or the absence of conflict and tension, but really I have experienced peace as more of a process. It’s something that you seek for, work towards, and create, which is why I really like the term peacemaking, because it acknowledges that kind of effort and intention. We work with leaders of different faith communities and higher ed and other people who want to lean into dialogue and connect across difference. And this quote from a faith leader we’ve worked with always comes to mind. He said, “There’s a difference between making peace and keeping peace. Keeping peace avoids conflict, and making peace means moving toward conflict.” So in a way, peace is always tethered with conflict. You need them together to have peace. You need to have healthy conflict and be able to work through it to really get there. So very active, very intentional is how I see peace.

12 Eva Witesman: I really think about peace at four different levels. So we talked about international peace (1), which includes the work of diplomacy and peacemaking and peacebuilding. We also, I think especially in an MWEG setting, talk a lot about interpersonal peace (2), where we’re connecting with one another. At the international level (1), we’re looking for things that reduce human suffering and increase human flourishing, ways of being interdependent as nations that maintain our national sovereignty but allow us to use our resources in a way that really benefits all of humankind. When we move to an interpersonal level (2) of peace, that’s where I see us building something that is beautiful because of our differences. So it’s not just the absence of conflict, but it’s better because we’re different. In my marriage with my husband, we’ve built something together that is more than the sum of him and me, and I think that’s true of my colleagues at work, my relationships with my friends, that’s how I think about interpersonal peace (2). Then we also talk about what I’m going to refer to as intrapersonal peace (3), so peace within myself. That’s my opportunity to experience joy, even when the world is chaos, even if there’s war, or I’m experiencing trials and tribulations. So there’s that level of peace. The last one is what I’m calling interfactional peace (4). Because I think sometimes when we think about big picture peace, we jump immediately to discussions between nations (1). And then when we zoom back a little bit, we jump immediately to our interpersonal relationships (2). But there’s this intermediate space where our groups disagree and our identities disagree. And I think there’s a lot of space there to do the same thing as we do in the other areas of peace, where we get to build something that’s better because we have different perspectives, even if those perspectives disagree wholeheartedly. And I think that’s the space, that interfactional space (4), where our interpersonal peacemaking skills allow us to interact with the national and international levels because we practice, and we engage in peacemaking with those who have strong differences of opinion.

13 Sarah Perkins: What peace is not is the absence of conflict, or complete and unmitigated conflict resolution. And I also don’t think it’s what happens after you’ve won your side’s political victory or social victory, because that can change really quickly. As soon as the next election happens, those can be reversed. Supreme Courts can change. And so I think more often peace is achieved when you move beyond your base and reach people who have really different sorts of experiences and perspectives than you. And people who are able to push against your ideas and ensure that the peace that you imagine works for more people and will last beyond the current election cycle. And so in that sense, I think I would say peace is lasting. Peace is something that in practice is usually pretty loud, because it requires really good people with really different ideas of how to do good in the world to be able to come together and tolerate each other well enough to practice effective conflict mitigation, conflict management, conflict control, so that they can create an environment whereby a pretty diverse society, people in a really diverse society can live meaningful and fulfilling lives and actually be able to do good in the world.

15 Thomas Griffith: The easiest answer is absence of conflict. And maybe that’s sufficient. Maybe that’s enough. But I think not. When President Nelson asks us to be peacemakers, he’s saying something more than just avoiding conflict. He’s talking about something positive. To me, it reflects a generosity towards others, that I’m situated such that I’m thinking of myself as someone who’s looking for ways to help others. And I think that’s the orientation of a peacemaker, which, by the way, that’s a definition of spirituality that I once heard Elder Eyring give. He said, true spirituality is when we think of ourselves as people who are looking for ways to help other people. And so I think that captures what I think a peacemaker is, at least what I someday hope to be.

17 Thomas McConkie: I don’t often define peace, so I appreciate this invitation to try. For me, in a way it comes in two parts: 1. peace, like eyes-open orientation to the world, to what’s the situation, what’s so, and then 2. to trust that I can respond to it in the appropriate way and the most loving way possible.

18 David Pulsipher: The way I define peace right now is kind of counterintuitive to most people. I don’t define peace as the absence of conflict. I define peace as conflict that has been transformed through love. There’s no way to avoid conflict. Therefore, peace is not the absence of conflict anyway, but it’s a conflict that’s being engaged in and through and informed by and infused with love. So maybe another way of saying it is relationships built and organized around the principles of love. And that can be individual or it can be community. So when there’s love in the relationship, then we have peace.

20 Elray Henriksen: My go-to would be a Johan Galtung-ian kind of approach first, which is: there’s a triangle and on each side of the triangle there are ways by which peace can be addressed. So, for example, the ABC triangle is the way he says that you have the Attitudes, the Behaviors and the Conditions (or the Contradictions depending on what is there). This is a dynamic triangle. It’s not static. Do you have peaceful behaviors and do you have peaceful conditions? At the time when I first learned about it, it reminded me of the Book of Mormon. At the end of King Benjamin’s talk, he actually warns us about the many ways by which we may sin (“If ye do not watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God, and continue in the faith of what ye have heard ye must perish. And now, O man, remember, and perish not” Mosiah 4:30). So for me, our thoughts are the Attitudes we have. And then, our words are the Conditions that we establish for other people. And then, our Behavior is really the deeds that we do. And if we don’t watch how we interact with each other on those three levels, peace might be difficult to attain.

23 Grant Madsen: In my mind, I draw a distinction between social peace and individual peace. I think most of us understand individual peace to be something like, there is no internal conflict. Some people might call it flow, or different terms to capture this idea that I’m in alignment, all of my emotions, my goals, my mind, we’re all kind of headed in the same direction. Socially speaking, and especially in the realm of political philosophy, peace is really simply defined as the absence of war. So when there’s no violent conflict, then you have achieved peace. And you want to draw that distinction in political philosophy, because there is a difference between having no conflict and having no peace. The Anglo-American political tradition is all about figuring ways to allow for maybe a maximum amount of conflict while nevertheless preserving as much peace as possible. I think that’s why it’s important to draw the distinction between if we’re talking about social peace or individual peace.

16 Julie Rose: Peace, I think in its perfect form, is Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. In his perfect love for all of us, his perfect grace, his perfect ability to see in all of us our divinity, our truest potential. And we know that when we are in that position of being able to embody that same perfect love for others, or as close as we imperfect humans can get, we know that that leads to a lack of contention and disputations — the words that we get in 4th Nephi after Jesus Christ comes to the Americas. And that there is also a lack of war and a lack of rumors of war. So I guess for me it’s the love of Jesus Christ and a state of peace is when all of us have that in our hearts.

There are as many answers as each one of us. How do you define peace?

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Anita Cramer Wells is the faithful root senior director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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