Difficult Conversations Pod Club: On Being’s “The Art of Peace” with John Paul Lederach

Every so many months, there’s a poem I post on Facebook, William Stafford’s “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” a sort of ritual reading in and of itself.

The title alone is nearly enough for me. It is a reminder that we are to be reminding each other of things, it is a reminder that we are prone to forget. A ritual, a ritual to be read, a ritual that is reading, may be the way of our remembering.

In a 2012 interview with Krista Tippett, peacemaker John Paul Lederach frames the art of peacemaking in the context of the development of moral imagination. He recalls the stories of a variety of people groups he had been involved with, and noted that one of the primary elements that enabled the workings of a moral imagination was the “ability to imagine yourself in a relationship with your enemy and that if that’s not present peace-building itself collapses.”

I listen to Lederach and I remember the first stanza of Stafford’s poem—

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

It’s true that I do not, in general, think of other people as enemies. It is more an outcropping of my good fortune than my good character that even as I sit here, I can’t think of a person I’d understand in such terms. But I do, of course, know people with whom I disagree, and deeply. Enough that there can be wide separations. Stafford and Lederach tell me the same thing about these people: our circumstance (and the wider circumstance for those with whom we move and live) is not well served by our failure to properly imagine ourselves in relationship.

MS. TIPPETT: You’ve talked about how you’ve seen that violence destroys a person’s capacity to perceive themselves as an integrated part of a whole, and that makes it difficult for people to see themselves in a web of relationships that has to include their enemies and some imagination about their enemies’ grandchildren, right? I mean, it’s almost like you’re asking the impossible of people.

MR. LEDERACH: Well, it’s — it’s the impossible until you consider the alternative, which we’ve watched now evolve in so many places across decades, half-centuries.

Peace-building collapses. We miss our star.

Stafford goes on:

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
A shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

It is helpful for me to use Stafford’s words in understanding Lederach. This is interesting, because I have had people ask me, after I have posted the poem, what it means, and I am unable to explain. I cannot say with any degree of certainty what is our star, what are the horrible errors of childhood, what is the broken dyke. But there is an understanding from the depths that reaches well beyond words that makes me approach the poem with such clarity as I rarely have about any ordinary thing. The irony is not lost on me that poetry, what I once derided as “cryptic nonsense,” now represents the most effective decoder of the world around me that I have at my disposal.

Lederach has discovered the unique power of poetry to facilitate understanding of great complexity, especially through haiku, which he observes “is an ability not to simplify the complex, but to some degree the haikuist is constantly trying to capture the full complexity of a human experience in the fewest words possible.” To do so, he notes, amounts to “a kind of a way of being in a context, particularly nature for many of the haikuists, the link between the human experience and the experience of the richness of nature, in a way that you could fully capture the moment, the season, the human experience, but in this very short five syllable-seven syllable-five syllable kind of a format.”

He goes on, describing his own experience using poetry to sort out complexity:

And that is what the haikuist is after. So I do a variety of things. One of them is that I’ve become much more respectful of, I think, the link between appreciating being in and feeling nature and noticing things that we’re involved in when we’re in settings of violence. For me it’s like a recuperation of sorts. But the other is that as I travel in work, I listen for haiku in people’s conversation because what I find is that quite often when people say something and we all have a kind of an a-ha moment around what was said, it often is a capturing of the complexity, that simplicity on the other side, and it comes out very close to, if not actually in the form of, a haiku.

Lederach gives an example of a haiku he wrote following a meeting in Tajikistan related to conflicts stemming from the borders drawn in Central Asia during the Stalinist period.

Gods and men love maps
they draw borders with pens that
split lives like an ax.

It all seems fine and well, I suppose, for me to consider some altogether theoretical way that poetry and ritual might help build peace. But Lederach has the goods. He tells the story of work his daughter was doing in West Africa with reintegration of child soldiers into their communities. He explains:

And so you have an identity of being a victim, but you also are brought into a fighting force where you become a part of something that requires you to do violence for survival, so you become a perpetrator. You are a motherless child mother.

What she saw rather clearly in the work that she was doing, that in the times when they were interviewing young women who were child mother soldiers about their experience, they found a very sort of flat effect reporting of their life story. A number of them could not read or write, but poetry permitted them to bring forward a voice that was nowhere present in the interviewing format. On the other side of that coin was how, particularly, mothers and communities brought child soldiers back into communities that they — that is, the child soldiers — had actually violated.

In his daughter’s work, they found that rituals of rebirthing, especially those that involved singing and drumming (which he notes have “sort of this vibrational component to it that sits at a much different level” than more traditional therapeutic approaches) were effective in restoring these communities.

Stafford understands the way communities are formed, perhaps even something about the way certain voices—could it be singing and drumming?—call to our deeper selves.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

So I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

There is nothing new to our warring, whether with physical weapons that spill physical blood or with words and ideas and policies that cut cross-hatches in myriad other ways. Still, it seems possibly more important now than ever that we find our rituals to read to one another, that we listen to the poems beneath the surface of another’s words, that we hold tightly to the tail of the one before us, that we find ourselves awake, and that we do not miss our star.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

***

We’re discussing the On Being interview The Art of Peace with Krista Tippett and John Paul Lederach as we embark on our October theme of Difficult Conversations. Listen to the podcast and then share your thoughts around these ideas of peacemaking, poetry and ritual.

Photo by Mobilus in Mobili, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Willingham. Poem “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Latest posts by Will Willingham (see all)

• Earth Song Poem Featured on The Slowdown!—Birds in Home Depot - February 7, 2023
• The Rapping in the Attic—Happy Holidays Fun Video! - December 21, 2022
• Video: Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience—Enchanting! - December 6, 2022