Dear Friends,
Greetings of love and peace from Kottarakkara, in Kerala State in southern India – a land local people refer to as “God’s Own Country,” at least in part because of its lush green beauty.
Abraham Karickham, URI’s Coordinator for Southern India, Executive Secretary for URI Asia and moving force behind URI’s evolving Traveling Peace Academy picked me up yesterday at the airport in Thiruvanathapurum at 5:15 AM. When we arrived at his home a little after 6:30 AM, I had been in transit for nearly thirty hours, and Abraham, such is his gracious hospitality, had missed most of a night’s sleep to meet me.
The day unfolded with a tour of Karickham International Public School (KIPS), founded by Abraham, which has 300 students and is growing; a visit to the URI office and International Peace Research Institute (IPRI), which are in a building next to Abraham’s home, where I will be staying during my time in India. We will be inaugurating the IPRI on Saturday, the opening day of the Fourth International Interfaith Conference on Holy Books. All of this, plus a remarkable flowering of URI Cooperation Circles across southern India are tributes to Abraham’s remarkable blend of vision and an uncanny ability to translate vision into reality.
An enjoyable lunch that included Shin Park, an energetic young leader from Seoul, Korea, Galina Ermolina, one of the founders of a new URI Cooperation Circle in Siberia and Sujatha Wijetilleke, a URI leader from Sri Lanka who was part of the Moral Imagination Peacebuilding Training Abraham held in Sri Lanka a little over a year ago. One of the always moving gifts of URI’s global community is to be part of the coming together of such diverse people from different parts of the world who are united by their URI membership and in their commitment to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.
During a largely free afternoon, I took a walk down the narrow sometimes concrete, sometimes dirt lane that leads past Abraham’s house down hill through lush land of banana and rubber trees and all other manner of vegetation I can’t identify, past large, well maintained houses to ever simpler dwellings as you descend the hill to a small stream at the bottom before the lane climbs again toward large houses nestled in the midst of Eden-like lushness.
A tall, bearded white man is curiosity on this lane. Clearly curious and equally friendly people smiled and bowed or waved in response to my greeting of “Namascar.” At one point, four little children, the oldest six years old, came running out to the lane and accompanied me a short distance. Like the students at the KIPS, they were keen to know my age, as if somehow that would explain the mystery of this strange looking man’s improbable appearance. As I’ve said many times over the years of my URI work, I wish everyone on Earth who is privileged to be part of a majority culture, could have the humbling and revelatory experience of being a stranger, a minority; and to experience the warm and curious hospitality that often goes with it.
Dinner was joyous as more old friends – Vrajapati and Varun from Iskcon, Meher Master Moos from the Zoroastrian College in Mumbai – arrived and I had the opportunity either reconnect with or meet for the first time some local URI leaders, including C.N.N. Raju, a URI leader in Bangalore. He and I talked about a pioneering Indian philanthropist in Bangalore, Azim Premji, and began hatching a process to prepare for a trip I would take to Bangalore in 2012 to connect with a range of people there who could be instrumental in helping to fund URI’s work in India.
Today, Abraham and I led a one-day training in the Moral Imagination approach to peacebuilding. About 50 people, including teachers and students from KIPS, participated. I had been eagerly anticipating this time of teaching for months, and had re-read John Paul Lederach’s extraordinary book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Peacebuilding on the long flight over.
We began the day, held in a room at KIPS, with five people lighting wicks of sacred flame, and then forming a circle outside to ground and focus our day together. Back inside, after brief self-introductions, I provided a brief history of URI’s focus on peacebuilding – dating for me back to that day in the spring of 2000, a few months before we signed URI’s Charter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in India’s Manipur State, when Radhamohan Das asked me, “What will URI do to help us end religiously motivated violence?
I then provided a brief overview of the Moral Imagination approach to peacebuilding, characterized most essentially by the capacity, while firmly grounded in the geography of a conflict, to imagine and help bring into being a better future. The four disciplines at the heart of the moral imagination are the ability to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemy, to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that doesn’t cave into the urge to resort of a dualistic polarity, to cultivate our creativity, and to risk the journey toward peace, one step at a time.
After this overview, we divided into several small groups where people had the opportunity to share their experiences from previous MI trainings or to share about an experience when they had been a peacebuilder. With the youngest participants 14-years-old and the oldest over seventy, these exchanges were a wonderful experience of cross-generational learning that empowered the youngest and inspired the oldest.
After brief sharings of highlights from these conversations, Abraham led a teaching session focused on Conflict Analysis and Transformation. In responses throughout the rest of the day sparked by his presentation, it was clear the most of those present valued the insight that conflict can be a vehicle for constructive change if it is faced in a forward looking way that seeks creative, nonviolent solutions rather than resorting to violence.
Abraham’s teaching and the group response to it were divided by lunch, an opportunity for the type of informal conversation that is a wonderful way for participants to claim what they are learning in a deeper, more personal way. I’ve neglected to say that music – ranging from live music performed by local musicians, to recordings of Herm Weaver singing Dream of the Light and the late Dr. T.D. Singh chanting joyously and lovingly to Krishna, was woven throughout the day.
In the final teaching session of the day – Dreaming the Light – after playing Herm Weaver’s song, I spoke about three dreamers: Mother Theresa, who would have been 101 years old today and who received the dream that would become her life’s vocation when she was the same age as the students participating in today’s training; Bishop Swing, whose 75th birthday is today and whose vision invited other visions from around the world and created URI; and Martin Luther King. Then Abraham led a 20-minute silent walk through the lush green, during which everyone was invited to listen to their hearts to hear dreams wishing to be claimed.
Once we were back from the walk, everyone had some time to reflect in writing on any insights that had emerged during the walk, beginning with the line – I have a dream that… They were also asked to reflect on what commitments they would make to help their dream come true. T.D. Singh’s beautiful chanting filled the room as we wrote. During a brief time of sharing, a few people shared their dreams, which showed how the day had inspired them to deepen their commitment to URI and to their own vocation – whether they were a student, a teacher, a business person or a community activist – as a peacebuilder.
After providing time for everyone to fill out a brief evaluation form, we completed the day by once again gathering outside in a circle to express our gratitude for this precious day and our commitment to take our learning forward into the dayliness of our lives, in solidarity with URI members around the world and supported by the sacred source of all life.
Love,
Charles
