Every heart a peace factory!

Whew!! I just finished the painstaking process of going over the page proofs for my upcoming book Amnesty After Atrocity? Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes. The page layout looks really good… very readable indeed.
The hardback is priced ways high for my taste. I need to look at the contract to see when Paradigm are planning to put out a paperback…
Anyway, I am really happy to have done it. By and large the text still reads well. (Though of course I have a l’esprit de l’escalier-ish regret regarding some portions where I wish I had expressed myself better. Too late! It is nearly ready to go– and at this stage, changes that I request start costing me heavily– as well as, always, introducing the possibility of further glitches and infelicities. Mainly, I just have to trust the careful wholetext edit I did back in February.)
Anyway, working with the material has also been a great retreading of memory lane, and has once again reminded me why I thought this material and this project was important.
Two of the most inspiring people I interviewed in connection with it– two of the most inspiring people I have ever met in my life– were the (Catholic) Cardinal Alexandre Dos Santos and the (Anglican) Bishop Dinis Sengulane… both in Maputo, Mozambique. They and a small group of other church leaders had all played a key role in starting/enabling the direct Frelimo-Renamo peace talks that in October 1992 brought an end to the 15 years of atrocity-laden conflict that had wracked their country. Dos Santos, who was already nearly 80 years old when I interviewed him in 2003, had an ethereal, almost pure-spirit air about him. Sengulane was probably 20 or so years younger, but also extremely wise.
One of the many memorable things Sengulane said was at the point when he was describing the role the Mozambican churches had played in building popular support for the 1992 peace. He said,

we from the churches went to the places where the war had happened and we talked with the people there about making our hearts into ‘peace factories’.

What a beautiful concept! It’s so completely Christian, so completely Buddhist, so completely true. Hostile acts start with hostile intent, and peacemaking acts have to start with peacemaking intent.
It’s true, good intent is never enough on its own. But it is an indispensable starting point… and it’s not one that’s necessarily always easy to achieve. In the book of Henri Nouwen’s that I commented on here not long ago, Nouwen pointed out that many people who want to work for a peaceable world use scaremongering (and in his view, counter-productive) ways to do so:

Panic, fear, and anxiety are not part of peacemaking. This might seem obvious, but many who struggle against the threat of a world war not only are themselves motivated by fear but also use fear to bring others to action. Fear is the most tempting force in peacemaking… We need to be reminded in very concrete ways of the demonic power at work in our world, but when an increase of fear is the main result we become the easy victims of these same powers. When peacemaking is based on fear it is not much different from warmaking… (Peacework, p.35)

The radical Quaker activist of the 1930s A.J. Muste captured something of the same insistence on the organic unity of ends and means when he said, quite simply: There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
But I like Sengulane’s formulation, too. It reminds us (well, me, anyway) of the need to continually audit my own intentions and practices, to try to make sure that my heart really is a peace factory. As the old song goes, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”