What happened in the Seminars
Page 2

Reflections by Hugh Wire, HR, S.F. Presbytery, one-time colleague with Jay Rock in Church World Service, more recently called to peace building through living and teaching in China.   [8-28-07]

"Mercy and Truth will meet;
Justice and Peace will kiss each other,"

But grasping this reality of peace building is complex. Students and faculty from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley initiated Bay Area walks against hunger in the ’70s. But in the early 2000s JSTB was a mainstay in demonstrations against the School of the Americas and not much interested in hunger walks. Why? They might say what had caught the attention of their predecessors was the injustice of children starving in the Sahel while Americans had plenty, just as now the wild abuses of power of SOA’s graduates demand demonstrations to force America to face its accountability.

So "Peace" and "Justice" might bring people to the same action, but they seem distinct impulses that can lead us on different paths. One friend was arrested 276 times over his lifetime for acts of civil disobedience resisting acts of injustice, finally spending 6 months in jail for having trespassed at the School of the Americas. Another spent a month sharing the discomforts, fears and hopes of Salvadoran refugees in a camp on the Honduran border, a defining moment in her leadership in the Sanctuary Movement of the 80s. Were both following the same impulse, or was one following Justice, and the other Peace?

In Psalm 85 the words "peace," "justice," "truth," and "mercy" can be heard as similar signs of the transcendent reality of shalom which we hope for. But should they also name different visions contending in our hearts for primacy, leading us on distinct paths? Which one draws me? Which vision needs more space to so that through the "meeting and kissing" of visions I find my true place among shalom’s pilgrims?

Sara and Jay invited us to explore various ways to capture facets of this journey, challenging us to join them in a work in progress as they reviewed their own peace building work over the years. They had been stimulated and challenged by John Paul Lederach’s work in The Moral Imagination: the Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford, 2005), and by his workshop this spring at Eastern Mennonite University. After 25 years training peacemakers in classrooms and in situations of conflict, Lederach urges practitioners to explore how peacemaking is more a matter of spiritual formation than mastery of technique, more a matter of who one is than what one knows, and more a matter of openness than certainty, of serendipity than achievement. Yet it still calls us to sustained discipline and focus.

One exercise Lederach urged, and Sara and Jay invited us to practice, was to write haiku. One morning one of our our group wrote:

Building skills to respond to comments and "hard questions" such as these was at the heart of the seminar on Israel and Palestine at the recent Week of Peace at Ghost Ranch, facilitated by former PC(USA) mission personnel Marthame and Elizabeth Sanders. The nineteen attendees, some with decades of experience and others new to these issues, shared with one another their own "hard questions." Through the workshop’s five days, they discussed and wrestled with Christian Zionism, the history of the region, the history of Presbyterian actions, anti-Semitism, occupation, violence and terrorism, the Christian presence, and the broader Middle Eastern context.

Of particular interest was the session about General Assembly actions in the region from 1948 to 2006. The session clarified that the Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) committee’s current work — initiated as "phased selective divestment" in 2004 — was not halted, but rather reframed and more explicitly articulated by the action in 2006. As always, the objective of MRTI is improved corporate behavior, with selling of stock as the last possible resort. MRTI’s progress as it continues to engage five companies about their role in Israel and Palestine is available at www.pcusa.org/mrti.

As participants considered what they could do, they heard from The Israel and Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) and the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF), both sponsors of the workshop. The IPMN has ongoing projects in education, partnerships, advocacy, housing, travel, positive investment, and marketing of local handicrafts and other products (click here). And the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship is offering two trips to the region in the coming year.

report by Teri Conrad, who is Chair of the Social Justice and Peacemaking Committee of the Grand Canyon Presbytery     [8-28-07]

Each night during our week at Ghost Ranch, we sang about letting the fires of God’s justice burn. Each morning in our seminar, we stoked the flames. I attended a session entitled "Advocating for Justice and Peace," led by Chris Iosso, Coordinator of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy of the PC(USA). Our group was diverse, including pastors, lay people, veterans from the Civil Rights struggle, and idealistic newcomers.

Many of those same concerns framed the conversation for a discussion the following day, on post-war Iraq. We analyzed a paper, written by Ed Long, "Courage to Change Course, and Wisdom to Know a Difference, Withdrawal from Iraq: A Wise, Moral, and Legal Approach." Some of the participants disagreed with the author’s assumptions, methodology, and conclusions. We felt this subject might be addressed better by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, through an overture to the 2008 General Assembly. We also discussed the issues of torture and war profiteering, with smaller groups agreeing to continue working on those issues.

Because we were so interested in this topic, we continued the discussion on the third day. During the second half of the session we talked about electoral reform and voting rights. There was a broad consensus on the subject, so we did not devote a whole morning to it.

On the fourth day we talked about the response to the Katrina tragedy. The storm exposed environmental, engineering, and social failures. We discussed how peacemakers should respond to the current needs and how we can use the difficult lessons to promote progressive solutions.

We were scheduled to discuss globalization on final day, but took some time to share our stories about successful peacemaking efforts. They ranged from working for integration in the 1960s to community involvement in local environmental issues. We concluded the day by discussing one participant’s suggestion of an overture on "repairing America." It would encompass many of the issues we talked about during the seminar and also address ways to incorporate a culture of peace in resolving our differences. Some participants will continue to work on that subject, seeking ways to make it part of the consciousness of our church.