As I write, the sun is shining out my office window on Tuesday, 20 September 2011, and our sisters and brothers in Australia are awakening to the International Day of Peace, 21 September 2011.
So, I write to wish all the members of URI’s global community a blessed IDP.
While we all yearn for peace, and the justice and healing that must necessarily accompany it, we have different ideas of the specific actions that we believe will lead to peace, justice and healing.
Acknowledging the many causes of division and violence in the world, and the many forces working for peace, justice and healing, I believe there may be no more symbolically important focus at this moment in the quest for peace than the drama unfolding at the UN in response to the Palestinian demand to be recognized as a sovereign state with full rights of participation.
I am not a student of the intricacies of international diplomacy or of Middle East policy; but I am someone who cares deeply that my sisters and brothers who are Palestinian and Israeli might live together in peace and be a model of peace for a world so weary of violence and so desperately in need of cooperative efforts to address the urgent needs of our Earth community.
There has been so much talk over the past several years about a two state solution to the crisis in the Middle East. It seems obvious that for there to be a two state solution, there must be two states. I trust that reasonable, peace seeking people can disagree about the best course for achieving two states living side by side in peace, in a region at peace.
My prayer is that the deliberations at the UN around the Palestinian demand speed the day when Israel and Palestine, two sovereign states, live in peace as neighbors and offer the world a model of cooperative effort for the mutual benefit of their respective citizens, the larger MENA region and our world.
This past Sunday, 18 September 2011, marked the 50th anniversary of the untimely death in a plane crash of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN’s esteemed second Secretary General. In his remarkable book of reflections, Markings, Mr. Hammarskjöld said:
I don't know Who — or what — put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
My prayer, on this International Day of Peace, is that more and more members of the human community say Yes to the goal of dedicating their lives to peace, justice and healing. I pray this spirit informs deliberations at the UN, in the Middle East, and all over the world.
I close with another quote from Dag Hammarskjöld that means a great deal to me personally:
You are not the oil, you are not the air — merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency — your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.
I wish each of you and our world a blessed IDP.
