Once again, we in the United States find ourselves caught in the vicious cycles of violence that seemingly leaves us stuck in the places of rage and hopelessness. Once again, we find ourselves thrust into a whirlwind of polarizing rhetoric spewing from the lips of politicians, the media, religious leaders and the affected communities and grieving families alike. Once again, torrents of socio-political narratives attempt to force us to take sides and to declare our allegiances to the moral high ground being claimed by parties on all sides of the violence. Calls for revenge and punishment rail against counter calls for mercy and forgiveness. Calls for truth and justice fight for recognition over calls for peace and order. It seems that the scripts of “justice” and “peace” (values we all long for) are on two ends of the spectrum in our personal and political lives and there is scant hope of ever bringing them together. The ideals of unity and reconciliation appear to be distant horizons on our societal landscape checkered with racial hatred, public division and private pains.

 

Thankfully, there are voices of calm and reason calling for all of us to step away from the edges of our angst and move to the center of our common humanity. People like Van Jones of CNN who has challenged all Americans to embrace new levels of understanding the “wounds” that we all bear in the midst of shared violence (See: CNN videos). What we need in the US right now is “just-peace”, a term coined by Glen Stassen (1) . The concept of Just-Peace insists that we can satisfy a sense of justice and build peace at the same time. But…you say, how is this possible? For those of us who are committed to justice and peacebuilding we know that peace is not only the absence of war and violence, it is the presence of just relationships and just structures in our society. Yes, this is a long-term view and yes, it will take social architects, advocates, activists, organizers, healers and reconcilers to accomplish the task.

 

I offer the following six signposts that I believe will provide the social, spiritual and practical scaffolding so desperately needed along the way:

 

Signpost 1: Psycho-social Support and Trauma Healing

Violence causes disempowerment and disconnectedness; reconciliation just-peace aims at the exact opposite – empowerment and connection (2) 

 

Signpost 2: Personal and Public Grieving or ‘Lament’

In the process of identifying, naming, and grieving their losses the wronged and the wrong-doer need a safe space to tell their story and a public space where society ‘bear witness’ to the harm that has been caused (3)

 

Signpost 3: Awakening Empathic Responses

Recent brain research on empathy and attachment theory indicates that the human brain is biologically ‘hard-wired’ to make human connections and to build community through social networks (4) 

 

Signpost 4: Facilitating Forgiveness Transactions

“Evil acts create chains that lock perpetrators and victims together, usually in unconscious ways, producing a double history of effects which must be taken into account in reflecting on the nature of forgiveness.  An act of forgiveness must be understood as a complex process of unlocking painful bondage, of mutual liberation.  While the perpetrators must be set free from their guilt (and its devastating consequences), the victims must be liberated from their hurt (and its destructive implications)." (5) 

 

Signpost 5: Facing History & Re-writing Past Narratives

Learning how to “remember rightly in a violent world”  entails dealing with the national-patriotic narratives, the historical memories, the lived experience and the current events (6)

 

Signpost 6: Engaging in Reparative / Restorative Justice

Restorative justice asks what harms have been committed, what needs have been generated, and who is obligated to make things right both at an interpersonal and a systemic level (7)

 

In sum, the end-goal of just-peace is to provide us with the vision, inspiration and ethical guidance on what harmonized relations and structures could look and feel like in our society. Hope remains alive if we can bring together our moral imagination (8) and the necessary skill-sets attached to trauma healing, nonviolent action, restorative justice and reconciliation in order to construct the preferred reality we want to live by.

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1. Stassen, G. (1992). Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace. Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox press.
2. Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and Recovery – The aftermath of violence from domestic
3. abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books.
4. Katongole, E., & Wilson-Hartgrove, J. (2009). Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan.
5. Early, C. & Early, M. (2011). Neuroscience of Emotion – Attachment Theory and the Practice of Conflict Resolution. ACResolution Journal. Summer.
6. Muller-Fahrenholz, G. (1996). The Art of Forgiveness. WCC Publications, Geneva, Switzerland, p. 25.
7. Volf, M. (2006). The End of Memory – Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
8. Zehr, H. (1990). Changing Lenses. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.