About 10 years ago I saw the caption 'No God...No Peace on the front of a tee shirt , and 'Know God...Know Peace' on the back. This past Saturday I was invited to the 'Peace Summit of the Americas', held at a community center in Carson, CA, and sponsored by The Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light. A Korean War veteran and religious leader, Mr. Man-hee Lee, founded the organization in 2009, in the hopes of uniting the people of the world, in spite of their differences, for the purpose of establishing planetary peace.
At the summit, Mr. Lee, through an interpreter, asserted that wars are caused by religious differences, and proposed that religious leaders come together to reread and reassess their respective scriptures, then find and focus on the common thread that exists in them all, rather than the differences that bring about denominational conflicts. Because of the difficulty inherent in translating words verbatim from one language to another, I'm not going to discuss whether or not wars are caused by religious differences, but I will say that religions are used to justify them. In terms of religious leaders coming together, I totally agree and am grateful to have been given the opportunity to be a part of that first discussion to be held at a later date..
Getting back to the captions 'No God...No Peace /Know God...Know Peace', I must say that no truer words have ever been spoken in regard to our quest for harmony. I also assert that God and Peace are one, and that their quest begins and subsists from within. We must first know God, not from someone else's interpretation, but from the one on one interaction we have with the ONE SUPREME BEING we choose to call______. Once we develop and live to maintain that relationship, peace is inevitable. From time to time we might lose our peace of mind, or that peaceful interaction we've had with others, but as long as we can re-establish our connection with the ONE... it's all good. Knowing however, is not predicated on saying we know, it's based on and sustained by living like we do.
Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, Islamic Imams and all manner of clergy must practice what we preach. If world peace is to become a reality, we cannot justify preaching from a 30 million dollar edifice, when we are not adamantly pursuing employment for our jobless parishioners. or not seeking equitable living conditions for inhabitants of the third world countries that Christian missionaries promised would experience peace on earth and good will toward men. We cannot condone supporting an Israeli government that is still doing to the Palestinians in Israel what second generation Americans did, and are still doing, to the native Americans in this country. There is no way we can accept that the Islamic belief in complete submission to God is being practiced, when the age-old atrocity of slave trading still exists among some who claim to be muslim. No matter what our denomination, we can claim to know God, but if we're not living like we know the One Who created us all, then we're only participating in a demonstration of the adage 'No God...no Peace'.
What we gon do? In every war ever staged, the majority of the soldiers were the youth. Back in the day the leaders fought alongside them, but today they lead from secretive and secure 'war rooms' located as far away from the conflict as possible. I say we participate in this quest for harmonic co-existence from the participatory perspective of..."I'm not going to just tell you how it's done, I'm going to show you." We can start by not allowing our own material assets to outweigh our spiritual condition. We can then refuse to gauge the merit of someone's message by the number of people who listen and adhere to it, rather than by how we have personally questioned the God of our understanding as to their validity, and heard the response 'That is my child, in whom I am well pleased".
None of us is perfect, but we will 'Know Peace' when we are honestly seeking progress from the process of trying to 'Know God'. Each of us has got to go inside ya'll. We can only find peace in that place where 'GOD IS'...and then...and only then can we share that peace unconditionally. Not only with ourselves mind you, but with all with whom we come in contact.
I'll holla...
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