Fraternity, the Foundation and Pathway to Peace
In this, my first Message for the World Day of Peace, I wish to offer to everyone, individuals and peoples, my best wishes for a life filled with joy and hope. In the heart of every man and woman is the desire for a full life, including that irrepressible longing for fraternity which draws us to fellowship with others and enables us to see them not as enemies or rivals, but as brothers and sisters to be accepted and embraced.
Fraternity is an essential human quality, for we are relational beings. A lively awareness of our relatedness helps us to look upon and to treat each person as a true sister or brother; without fraternity it is impossible to build a just society and a solid and lasting peace. (…)
The ever-increasing number of interconnections and communications in today’s world makes us powerfully aware of the unity and common destiny of the nations. In the dynamics of history, and in the diversity of ethnic groups, societies and cultures, we see the seeds of a vocation to form a community composed of brothers and sisters who accept and care for one another. But this vocation is still frequently denied and ignored in a world marked by a “globalization of indifference” which makes us slowly inured to the suffering of others and closed in on ourselves. FULL TEXT
In this new interview we welcome the invitation to share our Anti-Slavery campaign with people from all cultures and religions. This time we are interviewing Jennifer K. Lynne. She is a buddhist and a peace builder.
In our attempt to deconstruct today’s energies of enslavement, we shall explore with her how we can become enslaved of internalized mental constructs that keep narrowing our sense of identity; also how we risk to be enslaved of the illusion of being separated from the world. She shares with us her Engaged Identity Theory. Her theory “suggests the cultivation of the capacities for listening, patience and respect as foundations for conflict transformation and peace building. The idea is that through listening, patience and respect we expand our identities to see that ‘other’ is really a form of self in a different expression of experience and perception. (…) It is just a way of looking at our human experience that acknowledges things like change and root causes of suffering and suggests the development of three basic human capacities as foundations for engagement.” FULL INTERVIEW
Missionaries of Africa - SAP Province 