Understanding the Quaker Peace Testimony

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Transcript:

JOSEPH IZZO

For me, the peace testimony is essential. The peace and equality testimonies go together. If we’re all equal within the Divine Spirit, then we don’t kill. We support each other for full life. Because I believed, even before I was a Quaker, that the Divine and Spirit lives in everyone, that killing another human being is wrong. I opposed the death penalty, I certainly opposed war, and all we have to have is evidence. Look what’s going on in Gaza. Look what’s going on in Lebanon and in the West Bank. Look at what’s going on in Ukraine. Innocent lives of men, women and children being destroyed. For what? That’s really what led me to Quakerism

In my life, the peace testimony oscillates from the micro to the macro.

DAQUANNA HARRISON

An example of where the peace testimony is individually bound for me is my mindfulness work. Different ways to engage and interact with myself in positive ways. Making sure that I am with in myself peaceful. Shutting down negative thoughts, finding lessons instead of feeling like a failure. That’s peace within me.

PRADIP LAMICHHANE

If you feel peace within yourself, that’s the great thing [that] I am experiencing currently, whether there is an issue in family, issue in church, issue in meeting, issue in office. But within myself, I feel peace. So from that power, I will try to fix the issues outside of me. Sometimes I fail. That’s okay! Being fail okay. You do the mistake? That’s okay. You can do a mistake. You can fail. But you need to talk to God again. He will help you to overcome that fail and this will be going until we die. Sometimes it is very difficult. Very difficult.

RASHID DARDEN

I apply the peace testimony with great difficulty and challenge every day. And the reason for that is because I was born into a capitalist nation based upon slave economies from which the nation still has a problem extricating itself from. The peace testimony is also something I grapple with because I am descended from people who were victimized by the transatlantic slave trade, by racism, by Jim Crow laws. I am descended from rapists. I am descended from lots of people who committed various atrocities in their own names, in the name of God and in the name of this nation.

WINDY COOLER

I feel like the more I tried to deny the violence inside of me and the violence around me, the more stuck I got and the less peaceful I actually was To be peaceful, to me, does not mean to be placid. It doesn’t mean to be still or quiet. It means to feel contentment and satisfaction in my heart, to feel in my relationship with other people.

ABEL SIBONIO

I do apply the peace testimony in my all activity works. Sometimes, even if I get a phone call from someone who is harassed, I will stop what I’m doing and I said, “I needed to go into support and to comfort that person.” That is the way we bring peace. If someone, just young people, just use rude words, I don’t have to wait. I said, “You don’t have to fight. Let’s talk quietly and sort out the issue.” So we try to help to avoid all of those conflicts wherever we are.

RASHID DARDEN

I would also say that there are ways in which friends grapple with the peace testimony in and of themselves because there’s an idea that conflict is violent. Conflict is often necessary to our understanding, and just because two people have a disagreement doesn’t mean that they are at war. I think that if friends learned how to disagree with one another in love and in peace, that you can have moments of disharmony that come back to harmony. You can have moments where friends don’t agree, but are able to convince one another of their viewpoints.

WINDY COOLER

To be in right relationship with other people is never a peaceful enterprise. When I think about being in right relationship with my family, that requires constant negotiation, constant introspection. Peace is not a peaceful thing

PRADIP LAMICHHANE
So even in the family, you can’t accept things every time in your family. There is no one in the world whose couple has not fighted. The husband and wife, the son and father. That’s natural. That’s normal. That has to be there. Otherwise, you are not family.

RASHID DARDEN

Even as a black man in America that was raised on playing the dozens, if you will (one could say is the art of the insult). But not only that, in the gay communities of color, there is shade, there is reading, and these things happen in black communities as a way of surviving the violence that has been foisted upon us by the society at large. There are ways of being that don’t feel peaceful when you’re outside of the group, but that feel very much like home when you’re inside the group. I don’t feel that I have to turn that off when I’m in Quaker spaces, but I am judicious about when and where I engage with others on that part of my personality, my background, my ways of being.

PAULA CHRISTOPHERSEN

I practice in everyday life, unlearning the violence that might have crept into habits and use of language — questioning where harm may be perpetuated — and then changing the way I act and speak to be harmless in what I say and do. And at the same time, in recent years, I felt that peace when you look at community.

DAQUANNA HARRISON

But I also really consider like the community level of peace and what that looks like. It might be something as simple as really taking the time to talk to someone in my community; as I am grocery shopping, someone in the same aisle with me. Having that moment of, “So what do you want to do with spice?” A piece of peace is the more connections we can have — the more tiny little strings there are from me to you, to this person to that person. Peace as a testimony, as a founding and grounding place for us to do our work reminds us, even, of why this work is important. How can we ask someone to give us that little piece of peace in the grocery store when they’re budgeting and know that they officially don’t have enough money to buy the food that they actually need for their family? Our work at all of those levels affect our peace testimony. It is about the way we engage with ourselves. It is about the way we engage with others. It is about the work that we do to ensure that the larger community in a larger world can have peace.

Discussion Question:

• How do you live out the peace testimony individually?
• How does it shape the spiritual life of your meeting?

The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.