Let Peace Prevail on Earth

Leo Tolstoy didn’t do us a favor, writing War and Peace.  He led us to associate the word peace with the word war, a too-easy association that may dissuade us from looking deeper.  This third “fruit of the holy spirit”, third litmus test of our energy source, is so much more than the absence of war. 

Shortly after 9/11 when the terrorists struck in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, “Peace Poles” began sprouting across the globe, in front of schools, churches, and community centers.  “Let peace prevail on earth”, its message, was printed in more than 100 languages.  That phrase was popularized decades earlier by Masahisa Goi, (Click to learn more about him)  a teacher, philosopher, poet, and author who began a world peace movement after seeing the destruction caused by World War II. 

Prevail is from the Latin, pre-valere, “before power”, or “greater power”.  What is the power of peace?  I think of Alicia Renee Farris, an Adjunct Professor at my lifetime school, University of Detroit Mercy.  Adjuncts are paid a small fraction of full-time faculty.  But Renee came to campus year after year from the other jobs to teach our students about peace through non-violence.  Fighting illness, tragedy, and pushing away poverty in her own life, she would be there in her classroom in the late afternoon, sitting in the stool behind her podium, smiling warmly, lovingly at each of her students as they walked in, equally exhausted, from their day jobs. On the first day of class, Professor Farris would give her students a choice.  “You can, if you choose, write a twenty page annotated research paper on one of the topics we cover in class.  It will count for a significant part of your grade for this course.  Or you can spend fifteen hours in service to those who are pushed to the margins of our society, who are subjected to the violence of inequity, or its eventual result, physical and psychological violence.”

Masahisa Goi was Japanese.  The violence and destruction that he witnessed was nothing less than the atomic bombs dropped on his family and friends.  And the kanji, the Japanese characters for “peace” consist of two characters, hei and wa.  

Wa consists of the symbol for grain (rooted, growing, yielding) and a mouth (the open square).  Peace begins with people having what they need.  It is more than the absence of war.  Peace is a way of living in response to the needs of people.  Goi lived with “heiwa” all of his life, and knew that peace would prevail by moving not against war, but toward providence and human welfare.  

But how can all of the hungry(and all hungers) be fed?  More than this, how can all of the hungers, be fed?  Where would all of this come from?  He lived with the answer to that, tooHei consists of a symbol that includes a “+” symbol for threshing, with two grains “ '  '  “ flying off, and the source is heaven, symbolized by the line above the cross.

Christians seek this Spirit, this “Holy Spirit” left to them by Jesus, their heaven-sent Christ, who died on a cross, who shed his blood, the blood he had told them to “take and drink” that they might live.  And here in the pre-Christian kanji that guided Masahisa Goi, is this symbol of this same providence, this same source of peace, this feeding of all of us, all of our needs, all of us – Christians and Muslims and Jews and Athiests, Black, White, Yellow, Brown, and White.  

Peace will prevail on earth when we look to our shared heavens for this fruit of this same Spirit.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.