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Laying Down Arms by Maia Duerr, BPF Executive Director August, 2005 This month, many of you will be joining in events across the world to mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a few days, I will travel to New Mexico to be with Roshi Joan Halifax, BPF board member Joshin Althouse, Ryumon Baldoquin, hibakusa (survivors of the bombing), and many others to bear witness at Los Alamos, the place where the atomic bomb was born. BPF Senior Advisor Alan Senauke will be present at the Nevada Desert Experience near Las Vegas. BPF’s theme for the year has been “Cultivating Peace, Dismantling War.” In light of this, a news story this past week is truly significant: the Irish Republican Army’s declaration to lay down arms. Sometimes an event is so momentous that it can easily be overlooked. I’d like to take a moment to reflect what a remarkable story this is, and how it might lend us hope in these dark times. As a young girl growing up in the 1960s and 70s in a fairly privileged neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles, I was worlds away from Northern Ireland. But the story was always on the edge of my awareness. I remember sitting front of our family’s black and white television and watching the evening news. Nearly every week, it seemed, footage of bombings and deaths in that far away land flashed across the screen. For reasons unknown to me, I had a strong sense of connection to Ireland and always wished that I was Irish (there isn’t a drop of Irish blood in me – my ethnicity traces back to Slovenia and Germany). The stories of the hunger strikers and Bernadette Devlin fascinated me. But the endless string of bloody bombings horrified me, as I’m sure it did many others. Back in those days, the dilemma of Northern Ireland and the violence between Catholics and Protestants seemed a given – an unbearably sad story that would have no peaceful end. In some ways, it resembles the tragedy of Israel and Palestine, though of course there are differences as well. But over the past decade, often quietly and without a great deal of news coverage, the story has been re-written. And this past week, one of the main players in this centuries-old drama, the IRA, has chosen to take on a very different role. In its statement on July 28, the IRA issued a formal order for
I find this story remarkable because it illustrates the capacity of people--and nations--to change. It shows our capacity to find the courage to face entrenched patterns and choices that have led to immense suffering, and to make different choices. To find, I dare say, our buddhanature, our innate ability to touch peace within ourselves and with those whom we may have long been estranged. Undoubtedly, hundreds of causes and conditions have led the story of Northern Ireland to be rewritten, some personal and some political. Coincidentally, I’ve heard about two of those conditions through my involvement with dharma circles. Several years ago, I listened to a presentation by Paul Haller of the San Francisco Zen Center and Michael O'Keefe of the Peacemaker Circle about meditation and dialogue circles they had helped to organize between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. I was moved by the stories of ordinary Catholics and Protestants sitting down together in the midst of violence to create a space of peace. Last winter, I attended a planning meeting of the International Buddhist Peace Service. During the course of the meeting, Richard Reoch, president of Shambhala International, related to us a story of how George Mitchell, in conducting peace talks between Northern Ireland and England, required that the two representatives of each group spend a period of time simply living in the same space before addressing the details of the negotiations. Mitchell’s point was that the two had to come to know each other and work together as people before they could approach the task of brokering a political agreement. The barriers in the negotiating process fell away as they began to experience their common humanity. My own personal tendency in peace work is often to hold a line of active resistance and to take a warrior stance. One of my heroes is Arundhati Roy, who exemplifies this fiery brand of resistance and activism. But today, I’m reflecting on the idea that peace work is just as often about laying down arms, slowing and stopping ourselves, resting in a place of peace rather than fighting for it. Here's what I'm musing on: Peace is most likely to happen when we are able to drop our notions of defending our own, separate "selves" and can release into trusting the interconnected nature of life. It seems that something like this release is what helped to support the shift in Northern Ireland... many years in the making, but a shift nonetheless. Laying down arms can happen in a thousand different ways, many of them quite poetic. We may do as my friend and co-worker Diana Lion is now doing – by listening to the physical distress of her body, wracked by toxic chemicals, she is understanding the necessity of stopping work and going on medical leave. You may wish to read about Diana's reflections here. We can question even the notion of “working” for peace, as BPF board member Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey does in this article. As Jesse points out, sometimes the most radical thing we can do for peace is nothing. My friends at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery are engaged in another form of laying down arms by living in a monastic community and walking a path of non-harm and sustainability on the earth. On a political level, we can encourage our government to make more peaceful choices, to lay down arms and begin a conscious and mindful withdrawal of troops from Iraq – we’ll have an opportunity to do so the weekend of September 24-26 in Washington, D.C. We can call for a reduction and eventual elimination of the U.S.’s huge stockpile of nuclear arsenal. We ourselves can become conscientious objectors and refuse to fund this level of weapons by withholding our taxes. But it’s the paradox of socially engaged Buddhism that our most effective actions for peace will have deep roots in a place of non-action and non-grasping. In the spirit of laying down arms of all kinds, internal and external, I like to remember the words of Ajahn Chah:
Maia Duerr is BPF's executive director. From 2002-2004, she was the Research Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, where she led a study on the use of meditation and other contemplative practices in the workplace. She is the author of "The Contemplative Organization," published in the February 2004 issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management. She has also worked as a mental health professional and was active in advocating for the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities. A Buddhist practitioner since 1993, Maia received lay ordination from Roshi Joan Halifax into both the Order of Interbeing and the Zen Peacemaker Order. She is currently a student in the Soto Zen lineage of Suzuki Roshi, and has lived and practiced at the San Francisco Zen Center. She has also been involved with Thich Nhat Hanh's Community of Mindful Living. Maia has been part of the BPF community since 1999, first as the associate editor of Turning Wheel and then as a board member. She is committed to exploring the intersection of social change and dharma practice, and engaged in her first civil disobedience during a March 2003 action at the Westover Air Base in Chicopee, MA, at the start of the Iraq war.
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