Peace and Love: The Foundation by Rene Wadlow

Peace and Love: The Foundation
Rene Wadlow

It is relatively easy to describe a non-peaceful situation: It is a situation in which human beings are damaging each other’s potential for fulfilment and development in any number of ways: not merely by killing and maiming, but by oppressing, exploiting, manipulating, cheating, making excessive demands on others, corrupting, enslaving, humiliating, deriding, frightening, or deceiving. These are all forms of violence, of violating a person, of doing wanton damage.

In contrast, peaceful conditions are those characterised by both justice and an absence of violence in which a person can develop fully. Peaceful conditions require relations based on mutual respect, co-operation and, above all, love.

Love and peace, however imperfectly we understand them, are the forces which bind us together — a foundation for our common actions for a harmonious world.

With the absence of love, people are separated from each other, divided by hatred, fear, suspicion, by the barriers of colour, politics, religion, caste, class, language or sex. Peace, by contrast, is a condition in which people are united, in which those who were separated are reconciled, in which they are joined together in love.

Love helps women and men to move beyond their painful and artificial isolation to a state of peace in which they are freed from the burden of conflict, doubt and illusion. Love can serve as a mechanism for actualising human oneness, and love gives us a glimpse of the transcendent, the world of the spirit. Love provides within each one of us endless sources of strength and wisdom.