WE ARE ALL CAPABLE OF GREAT HARM

And, we are all capable of extra-ordinary good.

As many of you know, we are committed to lifelong learning as we go about our work in ADR, Mediation and Peacemaking. We always have more to learn. Through our programs, we empower or trainees and our panellists with head knowledge, heart knowledge and practical know-how. Pedagogy and Praxis.

I am becoming more and more convinced that both our pedagogy and our praxis should be love. Taught by Love itself.

We commit the first part of our day to stillness, prayer, meditation. Since 2020, when the world changed, I have a standing and open invitation for any and all to join me in this daily morning devotion. My faith has been the fuel that has carried me forward through life’s highs and lows. My Christian Faith informs my understanding of justice: the Cross points to and models a justice that restores.

In our morning devotions, I seek out the wisdom of other faith traditions which always fortifies my own:

-the story of the Sufi master that loses his keys to his house and goes looking for them in the long grass outside. His students join him to look and ask him where he lost them. ‘Inside the house’, he says. ‘Then why are we looking out here?’ they cry. ‘Because there is more light out here’ he says. And they carry on searching where they know the keys cannot be. Like the parables of Jesus, stories like this can be perplexing, and in the tradition of Judaism, a truth, like a diamond, can be turned over and over to reveal something new. For me, the truth of this story is that when we have lost something, there will be many willing to help us seek in the wrong place, the easy place.

-the Liberation Journey as taught by Rabbi Nahum. We get to understand how the Exodus story is the story of many of our lives on so many levels and that true freedom lies in a knowing and a being. The knowing being that the Great I Am loves each one of us unconditionally just as we are and it is this knowingness and beingness that dismantles the propensity each one of us has for harm. I am more convinced each day that the extent to which each of us knows that we are loved and the beloved of the Source of all that is the extent to which we cease being potentially harmful in this world.

-The Kiva and the Ladder to the Light, in the tradition of the Navajo people. As taught by Steven Charleston, we climb from the darkness to the light by climbing the ladder to the light: the rung of faith, the rung of blessing, the rung of hope, the rung of community, the rung of action, the rung of renewal, the rung of transformation. This morning we climbed the rung of hope and we were reminded of signs of hope:

‘The signs are all around us. We can see them springing up like wildflowers after the prairie rain. People who had fallen asleep are waking up. People who had been content to watch are wanting to join. People who never said a word are speaking out. The tipping point of faith is the threshold of spiritual energy, where what we believe becomes what we do. When that power is released, there is no stopping it, for love is a force that cannot be contained. Look and see the thousands of new faces gathering from every direction. There is the sign of hope for which you have been waiting.’

Easter, in my faith tradition, is a season of hope: ‘it may be Friday, but Sunday is coming’, we might say. It is a reminder of the death and resurrection and seems to be the way that the whole thing works. Things may look bad now, but we have hope.

My hope for you, in this season, is that you see that the way things are is not necessarily the way things should be or will be and that each thought we entertain, each word we bring forth and each action we carry out affects the whole thing.

When our thoughts, words and deeds are rooted in the hope of something better all kinds of possibilities manifest.

When we took our first breath we had infinite potential for extra-ordinary good. Our morning reflections have taught us some of the traditions of Celtic Christianity and the many teachers who would dare teach original blessing rather than original sin. The theology of original sin seems to have emerged in the 4th Century when the Church got mixed up with Empire. Those who dared teach that we are uttered forth or spoken into being from the very substance of God were tried, often convicted as heretics and either cast out or killed. The message was clear, Empire, and the centrality of its abuse of power is threatened by Love. I’ve capitalised ‘love’ pointing to Love as the source of all that some of us know as God. Empire had to crush our understanding of Love otherwise it (Empire) would not survive. In the 4th century three things happened: Imago Dei was crushed (you cannot control masses who know themselves to be uttered forth from the very substance of Love itself or in the likeness of God), the feminine was subjugated in the systems of power over and there was a permission to exploit the earth and all her creatures.

And here we are, our systems still bare the mark of the unholy alliance between church and empire. If you have been into a court lately and had the sense that at the deepest level you do not feel safe there-whether you are a party, a lawyer or part of the judiciary-something about the adversarial system, you can feel, is not supportive of anyone’s well-being, then you may be sensing that the way things are is not the way things need to be. That whilst each of us may be capable of great harm, the first part, the original part is that we were literally uttered from Love Itself and our real self, who we really are, is capable of, and moreover, created for great good.

ADR is the ground of being of the next legal system. Rooted in restoration, transformation and healing, we need systems created and formed in what always was from the beginning: original blessing. I’m with the ‘heretics’ on this. I refuse to continue the ruse of the Caesars and the Herods of today. We can restore the template. We can re-create all of our systems in Love.

Easter is a reminder of how Empire tried to kill Love and it’s a reminder that Love will have the last say.

We choose the many proliferations of death and destruction through our co-operation with the adversarial system or we can say no, I will not conform to the patterns set in place and retained in place by the Herods and Caesars of this world. I will not aid them in their sleight of hand that has me conforming to their way.

May you experience, in the very depths of your being, the wisdom of Easter, the ancient knowledge of the paschal mystery at its centre, the message that is for all of us: the way things are is not the way things need to be.

Peace, grace, hope, Love

Sheena Jonker