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Vision for Peace by Reverend Josette Jackson

Reverend Josette Jackson is the senior minister of Unity Church of Ottawa. At the 2005 Peace Song Circle on Parliament Hill she gave an inspirational "Vision for Peace" that riveted everyone's attention:

Cycle of Violence

A little boy was born on the 20th of April in 1889 to an impoverished family. He was cute and smart, and when in school he did well. However, at home his father physically abused him regularly and his mother was unable to control him. As he grew older, he too turned to abusing animals and others. With an inadequate education, abusive history, deflated sense of self-worth, above average intelligence and brilliant stage presence, he grows up to lead an army on a binge of hatred, cruelty and destruction that kills many and changes families and the world forever. And, when his power and authority began to wane, Adolf Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945.

Here we are in 2005, our lives and our world are not without peace. Look at us gathered here today, of our own free will and without fear for our safety. Is this enough? For many, some in our very own families, our children in schools and our bothers and sisters in other nations, violence in the form of abuse, poverty, inequity, genocide and war is very present. There is an urgent need to foster even greater peace. First and foremost within ourselves, for when we foster greater inner peace, peace spreads to our families, into our community, throughout our country and across the world. Violence experienced at the individual level propagates itself. The abused child becomes an abusive parent and spouse. Abusive adults can affect their community by fostering injustice and intolerance. When a community values inequality, injustice and intolerance, a community can give rise to a leader who will spread this harmful mindset throughout a country. This can lead to a country using force to gain power and wealth and punishment to control other nations. The horrors of war can leave individuals physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually shattered, burying any sense of inner peace… and the cycle of violence continues.

Flow of Peace

A girl child was born on August 27, 1910 into a modest family. By the age of 5 and a half, her heart was filled with a great love and calling to be a missionary. With ordinary intelligence and beauty, she grew up happy and found it difficult to leave her family to go to school and teach. She was divinely inspired and guided to be of service to the poor. This unremarkable woman spent the rest of her life amongst the poorest of the poor. She shared their meager diet and rough clothing, wiped their leprous sores, and endured the agonies of the dying. After a long life and becoming a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Mother Theresa died quietly on September 5, 1997.

Do not think that we are no different than the Hitlers, Mother Theresas or any great figure or mystic. As conscious, multifaceted beings using the power of our minds, we too can impact our lives, our communities and the world by co-creating our reality. Do we want to co-create from a place of violence or peace? When we choose peace, we are choosing to replace the cycle of violence with the flow of peace. And, it begins right here, within each one of us. The new physics shows us that at the deep sub-nuclear level of reality, we are one. Research shows us that positive thoughts of unconditional love and acceptance of ourselves affect us on a cellular level generating a greater sense of connectedness, harmony and well being known as inner peace. Inner peace experienced by an individual can bring greater love, value and safety to a family. A community of peaceful families will value equality, justice and acceptance, and give rise to leaders who cultivate a mindset that values all life throughout a country. A country that knows peace, values human life and puts the rights and well being of everyone above all else. Living in harmony supports an individual's sense of self-worth and fuels greater inner peace. And, like the strong, ongoing flow of the Rideau and Ottawa Rivers, the flow of peace continues.

When I stand on the top of a mountain in the Rockies and see the sunrise and hear the wind speaking through the treetops, or when I am sitting during the early morning hours in prayer and meditation, I experience the greatest sense of awareness, oneness and harmony with all creation. I experience what I call "God." When I return to my family and community after these experiences, I have a greater understanding of who I am in this creative process call life and have greater patience and acceptance for myself and others. My desires and actions move me to live in a nation that fosters beliefs in equality, justice and cooperation. My world becomes an abundant world of peace and beauty, where everyone's needs are met and dreams are fulfill.

Think and Act Peace

Each year during the Season For Nonviolence that runs from January 30th to April 4th, many Unity, New Thought and other communities throughout the world encourage individuals to think and act peace. Imagine with me:

Imagine individuals, choosing positive self-talk to affirm their value and worth.
Imagine families, choosing to sit and eat one meal together.

Imagine communities, choosing to say "yes" to ideas or actions that respect and value all community members.

Imagine countries, choosing leaders who listen, speak without defending, offending, or judging, and treat the environment with respect and care.

Imagine the world, choosing to challenge violence in all its forms and to hold a belief in abundance for all and act out this belief through a more equal distribution of wealth.

What We Can Do

Fellow peacemakers, coming together in fellowship today can be the start of yet another flow of peace that reaches around the world and reduces the odds that another Hitler will be created. The flow of peace begins within us. When we leave here today, let us leave with the words of a peace song on our minds and lips and greater unconditional love and acceptance for ourselves and others in our hearts, and the peace within us will blossom, grow and beautify like the very tulips we see all around this fair city. We… ARE the greater peace!

Bruce Cockburn
Vision for Peace

At the 4th Annual Peace Prayer Day, organized by Friends for Peace on October 21, 2006, in Ottawa, Ontario, Bruce Cockburn was introduced by Susan Walsh, the Executive Director of USC Canada and received a Peace Award from Friends for Peace

My thanks to the work of USC Canada, though my role is of more or less a mouthpiece. That involvement has led to some great adventures as well as the odd desperate moment and now and then a song. I have done what I could to help, but I feel like I have gained more then I have given. I’ve had the sense of being involved in something meaningful; the opportunity to travel, to see things up close, to understand - more then I ever could have otherwise - the way things work. I am grateful to USC. I am grateful to Friends for Peace for this chance to celebrate the work it does. Work that make the hard lives of some, a little bit easier.

A few months ago, I was standing at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, “the city of peace”, and I was thinking “There’s never going to be any peace”. There in that vortex of human spirituality that is the “holy city”, every shade of Christian, Arab, Jew and who knows what else, can been seen - must be seem is more like it - as everyone is out in their team uniform making sure no one can be mistaken for each other. Side by side with the richness of history, the richness of beliefs, stands the madness of tribalism and fear of beliefs one subscribes to, producing instant anger, fear of ‘the other’. Readiness to kill over whose approach to God is more perfect. Each gang claiming to be one of peace.

A few years back, traveling in Mozambique in the aftermath of that country’s twenty five year civil war, I had the feeling that peace is the breathing space between bouts of war. The natural state of human kind is conflict. The casual glace at history or a newspaper will tend to bare that out. Peace is about survival. I look around at the world, the globalized world, the world where what goes around comes around. A world of the 6th great extinction. I wonder how many species will be lost and I cry for the passing of those that have gone and those that we can see disappearing before our eyes. Is that what Noah’s flood looked like just as it was starting to rain? If I were God, surveying my beautifully and terribly balanced creation – Earth – what would I think of my pride and joy – humanity – who has taken my gift of light and potential and rendered it obscene – pathological with the technology of destruction? Would I be the old testament God and in a cold rage, turn my back and busy myself with new creations elsewhere in the multi-verse? Would I be Kali, the Hindu Goddess of destruction aroused by so much death, would finish off what humanity has started?

Humanity. When I wrote “ If I had a rocket launcher’ back in 1983. I was trying to catalogue and share how shocked I was that I was willing to kill the Guatemalan soldiers who were perpetuating atrocities on the Mayan people, among whose refuges I found myself. I felt those soldiers had forfeited any claims to humanity, and should be put down like rabid animals. I was wrong of course. Far from forfeiting their claim to humanity, they were expressing it, and so was I. We use the word humanity to refer to an attitude of compassion, to refer the to the study of esthetics, of ideas, but surely we are the greatest liars. No species but ours makes war, slaughters its own. Lays waste the earth, poisons the air and water it needs to live. The quick examination of any newspaper will show us that men, and occasionally women, will commit unspeakable acts, in the name of God, country or imperial hegemony and they’d better have reasons for these acts because they are living examples of why humanity should be a failed genetic experiment. The things that get done horrify us. Fill us with hatred and anger at the perpetrators who harm us. When we’re gone will there finally be peace?

I say these things not to incite despair, but to point out what we’re are up against when we campaign for a peaceful world. Our real opponent is the pathology that dwells in the human heart. For further proof look at the number of us who are willing to die for war in the aid of whatever the cause. How many are ready to die for peace? Some for sure. The Christian Peacemakers Teams and other courageous souls who show up here and there - but how many? When those of us who will die for peace outnumber those of us who will die for war… will we then have peace? In the mean time though, we still must struggle on. At the very least the efforts to build up a culture of peace may help to keep things from getting even worse. If we are to make war on war, step one is to know the ending. That is to know that we’re all broken. Nobody is holier then anybody else. It is in our brokenness, our scars, that we find common ground. Grounds for compassion and love and forgiveness. It is in the light that shines through those broken places that might, if we are lucky, find the way back and our fanciful definition of ourselves can be made a reality.

Friends. Even as we gather here in the name of peace, we are at war. It is hard to imagine for those of us who arrived after the end of World War two. We have never known a Canada whose troops are anything but peace keepers. At least that was our image of ourselves. The men and women in uniform have seen it differently. What the world calls peacekeeping is really an exercise in PR which consists of putting our loved ones in between belligerents whose intensions are far from peaceful. But right now we are not even dealing with the pretense. So we must ask what is the ultimate meaning of this war? Is it as stated, to make Afghanistan safe for people to go about their lives free from organized violence. Is it the necessary prosecuting of the war on terror – Washington’s name for a complex scenario which only tangentially involved an extended response to 9/11 or would it have at last as much to do with the Bush administration’s vision of Christian hegemony under the US flag.

I respect, admire, I love our Canadian men and women who give their lives for whatever it is. The million dollar question is, What is it? If we’re getting our kids killed for oil, for the friggin economy, then lets bring them home and lets use those resources in the search for a sustainable future. If we’re engaged in a struggle against forces whose intent is to make the world safe for the subjugation of women or the intolerance of their particular reading of their particular scriptures, then we have to resist that. We need a world where we do not have to answer to an ideologues frightened ego.

So on a planet populated, maybe dominated, by ideologues with frightened egos, we have to seek out that broken place in our hearts where the light shines through. Where we can hear the cry from the hearts of those that oppose us, and address that cry. There is nothing easy or simple about this. Whatever tools you’ve got; prayer, self analysis, a body to put in the way of bullets, a donation to an organization that works for social justice, whatever, use it now and use it hard. - for the time is short.

Maybe we are done as a species, but maybe not. If we want a chance at a tolerable future for our children and grandchildren, lets get on with it. I don’t even know how deserving I am of this. There are a lot of people who’ve given you more then I. Some gave their lives, some I’ve had the privilege to meet. Margaret Hassan, Director of the Iraqi Red Cross abducted and killed in Bagdad. The young many who’s self appointed task it was to search out and document the dead victims of government abductions in El Salvador whose storefront Human Rights office was bombed. But I am grateful and proud to be part of this public testament to the side of the human heart that is not pathological, the side that loves, that holds beauty higher then fear, the side that hopes.

In Baghdad, as in all the other zones of conflict I’ve been in, I was humbled and emboldened by the spirit people showed. By the resilience and even the capacity for joy in the face of hardship and chaos. If we can find that capacity while confronting the demons in our own hearts, we have a chance. Thank you

Creating a Culture of Peace by Ian Prattis

As we walk, talk, go about our daily lives and busyness – do we consider that peace begins with each step, with every breath and with every personal action? Extending such awareness to family, friends and community reinforces the process of creating a culture of peace. This is what Peace Prayer Day is all about. The third annual Ottawa Peace Prayer Day is held at City Hall, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm, on October 22, 2005.

It reflects the new, broad based peace movement that is emerging in the National Capital. Although the war in Iraq is declared over, local peace efforts continue to grow with Ottawa’s annual Peace Prayer Day. An all day, family event, which takes place every fall season. Recently the mayors from the cities and towns across Canada signed a Peace Proclamation to support our peace day, so this humble event is now a national concern. Those in attendance will experience communications of peace in a multitude of forms, opening with pipers for peace and First Nations drum circle, continuing with sacred dancers, yoga demonstration, magnificent choirs from the Ottawa area, Peace Prayers, meditation, local bands and musicians, and so much more. The day includes a silent auction and a kitchen stocked with delectable food items donated by city businesses. During the day, prestigious Peace Awards are presented to notable local citizens who have devoted their lives to creating peace. Past recipients include Max Keeping, Fred and Bonnie Cappacheno, the late Pandit Madhu, Grandfather William Commanda, Jean Goulet, and Tone Magazine. The 2005 recipients are Marion Dewar and Murray Thomson.

Peace Prayer Day is open to all who want to see the culture of peace flourish in our homes, communities and world-wide. Friends for Peace is a coalition of environmental, meditation and peace groups. It organized silent peace vigils across the National Capital Region before the Iraq war (4,000 participants), and organized the Peace Song Circle on Parliament Hill after war had broken out (5,000 participants on a miserably wet, cold day). Friends for Peace supports the campaign to extend the mandate of the Canadian War Museum to include a focus on peacekeeping in addition to many other local peace initiatives. The annual Peace Prayer Day brings individuals and groups together for inspiration, communication and creative collaboration through music, dance, prayer and Visions for Peace to share our interconnectedness and then take action on the local, national and international stage. Its intent is to create a different form of peaceful expression – a celebration by Ottawa’s cultural and spiritual diversity - that appeals to a broad section of Canadian citizens. We are working to make these events happen in other countries. Please support the fostering of a culture of peace by coming to this wonderful event on October 22, 2005 at City Hall. Without you it cannot be effective. The event is affiliated with the UN’s annual day of peace prayer.