Sowing the Seeds of Peace
4 – 11 September
Green Christian is supporting the Peace Pilgrimage. The main one is gathering in Oxford, at the Oxford Quakers, on the evening of Monday 4 Sept and arriving in London on Monday 11 Sept. there are other local pilgrimages as well. All are welcome to join for the whole way or just for a day or two.
Sam Donaldson, one of the organisers, writes:
“To be a pilgrim is to be on a path of adventure, to move out of our comfort zones, to let go of our prejudices and preconditioning, to make strides towards the unknown. If we want to tread the pilgrim’s path, we need to go beyond ideas of good and evil, and to be dedicated to our quest – to our natural calling. We need to shed not just our unnecessary material possessions but also our burdens of fear, anxiety, doubt and worry; in this way we can find spiritual renewal and enter on the great adventure into the unknown.”
Satish Kumar
In just under a week, a small group will be setting off from Oxford to London on ‘Peace Pilgrimage‘, walking to arrive in time to join a silent vigil at the entrance of the DSEI arms fair in the Docklands, on Monday 11 September.
Why are we choosing pilgrimage as a way of sowing seeds of peace, in the face of the immense greed and violence of the arms trade?
Pilgrimages have been going on for as long as human beings have been around, and despite being outlawed in England by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries, today they are experiencing a revival. Why this revival is happening is hard to say, but there is a mysterious, and counter-cultural, power held in this ancient spiritual practice. In our frantic, goal-orientated world, where everything has to be justified in terms of outputs, effectiveness and speed, where the great temptation is to jump in a car or a plane to get from A to B as directly as possible, pilgrimage invites a different way of being.
By choosing to walk this peace pilgrimage, we are setting off on a slow, unfolding adventure, with deep spiritual intention. We are choosing to honour our true human essence, and to take time to become fully present to every step of the journey, the tough and the easy, the beautiful and the ugly. We are committing to creating the space we need to reconnect with our deeper, wilder, more adventurous selves, and to invoke a deeper humanity within us, and among us – in a few simple words, we are choosing to embody peace!
We recognise that walking pilgrimage is only an outward manifestation of a deeper pilgrim mindset, highlighted by the poet David Whyte in his brilliant book ‘Consolations’:
Pilgrim is a word and a name that every human being might be given, at least temporarily, as an accurate assessment of their essence: a stranger to be waved at in passing, or met along the way; a someone always passing through very quickly; a someone on their way to somewhere else, never quite knowing whether the destination or the path stands first in importance; someone who underneath it all doesn’t quite understand from whence they came or quite where they are going, and many times from where their next bite of bread will come from; someone dependent on help from other strangers and from those who will meet them along the way.
Alongside walking this upcoming peace pilgrimage from Oxford to DSEI, we are also hoping to encourage people to organise and walk their own local peace pilgrimages across the country. If you are interested in the idea of organising a local peace pilgrimage, we have produced some resources that you can access here. And if you are in need of some profound inspiration, we were fortunate to be able to interview the remarkable peace pilgrim Satish Kumar, who walked an epic pilgrimage from India to Moscow, Paris, London and Washington, to deliver tea-bags to the four leaders of the four nuclear powers at the time. You can listen to his wise words here.
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