“Everything begins with a dream” – Rumi
This dream stays with me as we observe more days this week in which the decisions of various leaderships, who seem never to meet each other, kill other people and their children; destroying homes and communities.
Through the UN Secretary General there is to be a UN Summit of the Future in late September.
It is a precious opportunity, as others like Alison Brionowski have conveyed.
Meditating at the weekend, we imagined a line of sight to world leaders sitting in a large circle at the UN. Their stillness and silence together is deep. After meditating in the silence, each according to their spiritual practice, they visually take in each other’s presence. Thus prepared they focus on this question:
How do we make the most of our time on this earth
and in leadership now as peacebuilders?
Always we have the question of how we live a beneficial life. But this is the question for those leaders who will soon share September days in New York, at least in our meditative imagining.
Of course it is a dreamer’s dream, a childlike imagining, that the perennial wisdom of meditators, across centuries and spiritual traditions, will now find a timely place in the UN’s Summit of the Future.
What is clear is that this September opportunity is not one to waste. As our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Penny Wong, said in February at the Indian Ocean Conference, “across our region, we see military power is expanding, but measures to constrain military conflict are not-and there are few concrete mechanisms for averting it…Peacebuilding today must rise to this potentially catastrophic challenge.”
Nothing better will happen unless leaders actually meet in ways that make for healthier relationships.
What we have learned is that, once we are practiced in meditative stillness and silence, we are better able to do the listening that can lead to a renewed culture of dialogue.
With our line of sight, can we then see world leaders reaching agreement on initial trust building steps that take us towards a better future? Towards an enchanting and sustained peace?
Not easily, obviously!
There was a Roundtable last week in Canberra on Australia’s possible contribution to the UN Summit of the Future. Intentionally it was on 6 August, the 79th Anniversary of Hiroshima.
Everything conveyed comes down to the choice before us.
Do we choose life or death; to heal or to harm; to repair relationships or to destroy each other?
Professor Tilman Ruff encouraged Australia to give bipartisan support and join the other 50 nations which have already ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
He put this in context:
- all nuclear weapon states are currently expanding the lethality, the reach and speed of their arsenals;
- there is an increasing risk of more nuclear weapon states, given the depleted framework of Treaties to contain this;
- there is a heightened vulnerability to cyber attacks on current protections against a mistaken, unintended use of nuclear weapons. We are thus facing a greater risk of nuclear war by mistake.
These bleak deteriorations are elaborated by Ramesh Thakur who has followed these matters for decades.
Tilman’s haunting presentation came after a session on Lethal Automated Weapon Systems, led by Matilda Byrne, Stop Killer Robots Campaign.
She described us as being in an Oppenheimer Moment, still with an opportunity to prevent Autonomous Weapons that attack without human input and could proliferate to drug traffickers; those engaged in illegal fishing and other non-state actors.
What is already placing us at risk is mad enough. What term do we use for the delegation of decisions on life and death to machines which operate without human decisions or control?
So, briefly sketched, this is the context in which our choices must be for life, not death; for peace, not more war.
It seems like our world is like a large therapy centre, full of people who are traumatised and traumatising.
The steps needed for better engagement and diplomacy are clear enough: steps that reduce risks by greater transparency and a promise of no-first use of these terrible weapons; the revitalisation of arms control negotiations, etc.
But these steps require that leaders meet and shape relationships of trust and integrity.
Our learning is how meditative stillness and silence makes this more possible. Of encouragement, when sharing with an international zoom gathering of Christian meditators about our Australian Meditations for a beneficial UNCOP29, folk on the call went from one story to the next of similiar initiatives.
The same dream is in many hearts.
Philip Huggins
Bishop Philip Huggins Director, Centre for Ecumenical Studies, Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, August 25 2022
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
