Home | About Us | Album | Ordination info | Virtual Knighthood | Bishop's College | Business Network | Pulpit | Donate| Poetry & Cartoon | Archives | Contact & Links | Correspondence |Hosting| Join | site map
TREATY ON PEACE
PERSPECTIVE The Heritage Sept, 2005 p7
TREATY ON PEACE
By GENESIS API DAWUDA
“Misery breeds war. You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty”
Prof. Stephen Leacock
(1869 1944)
Peace. This five lettered word is the platform upon which families , clans , towns , organizations and Nations thrive or perish for want of it.
I will not take my time trying to define what peace is rather as I address the issues of that vice ,the enemy of humanity ,the messenger of death called war ,we will then understand what it's absence causes in a viable economy
When the sanctity or sacredness of life is down-played that is where war begins. When the Hitlers advocate ruthlessness as a political policy ,when the Lenin's send one million seven hundred thousand Russian victims to their doom, in addition to the millions who died of starvation, in which Lenin stated that “what does it matter if ninety percent of the Russian people perish provided the surviving ten percent be converted to the communist faith?”. Peace is usually crippled in such communities.
War is brutal and brutalizing. The absence of worship in a community leads to the presence of “war-ship”. According to Mary S. Wood, “the descending scales is easily traced; forgetting God, trifling with sin, yielding to sin, habitual yielding to sin, slavery to sin, tempting others, hell. In days of war, human wickedness always increases. “Kant wrote, “war makes more bad men than it takes away”. No wonder Shakespeare had to write, “ O, war, thou son of hell”. “what greater calamity” wrote Emerson, "can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? then all things go to decay…. Literature becomes frivolous and society lives on trifles.” Mary S. Wood further added, “the behaviour of people is determined by the nature and quality of their faith, and the measure of its practical application to daily life. But today man have lost their sense of God, with the result that they have lost their reverence for Him and His laws. “ Hence “evil men and seducers wax worse and worse deceiving and being deceived”. (2Tim. 3:13)
One of the major crisis of our lifetime is the middle-belt ( I mean our stomach) as it's always said, that a hungry man is an angry man. In Prof. Leacock's words, “what I mean in a plain way is that we must enter on a vast, titanic struggle against poverty and want. What we United Nations did in war we must do in peace, the same union of hearts, the same purpose for all.”
For peace to be entrenched we must not be as careless as a Raven but as committed to global peace like the Dove which brought back a message of goodwill bearing an olive-branch in its beak. Everybody is a stakeholder to the global peace “we can have League of Nations if we like”. Says Leacock,” if we do, it will be a consequence, not a cause. Thus will come International Harmony, by not looking for it. So it is with life. Try to bury “peace” (emphasis mine) by the quart or by the yard, and you never find it. Motion it away from you while you turn to duty and you will find it waiting beside your chair. So with Goodwill on Earth. Cannons frighten it. Treaties fetter it. Only God brings it (paraphrased)
Each of us must stand appalled at the further existence, after the war of misery and poverty of lives frustrated by want, of children underfed of people sunk from their birth below a chance to live. We must decide that must not be, just as we decided that savage conquest and brutality should not be.
For our community to be a better place, be it local or global: we must first and foremost reconstruct ourselves a little, shovel up a lot of ourselves and throw it away; knock ourselves down and start all over, not forgetting that the greatest enemy of mankind is “self-seeking”. Attitudes or self aggrandizement.
If every religion will see God as their Father, and creator then we can all say the prayer “ Our father of all the earth, which art in Heaven hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day her daily bread…. For thine is the Kingdom, and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen.
