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Dear (RantWoman)
 The month-long deliberations of governments in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review
at the United Nations ended today. Just before the talks began, FORUSA staff
participated in the Peace and Planet weekend conference and
mobilization for a nuclear-free, peaceful, just, and sustainable world.
As we reported earlier, the weekend featured an
interfaith service at the UN Church Center, powerful speakers at a mass rally in
Union Square where the Global Wave 2015 -- a synchronized wave from
all over the world to say goodbye to nuclear weapons -- was launched, and a
march to the UN that clearly demonstrated to world leaders that the people want
a nuclear free planet.
I was blessed with the opportunity to deliver the homily at the interfaith
service on the Sunday morning before the NPT talks began. As the outcome of this
five year review appears to offer both hope of progress and evidence that our
work as peacemakers must continue, I'd like to share that homily with you now by
way of offering an ongoing prayer:
 In 1948, three years after atomic bombs were dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the genocidal world war that claimed
the lives of over 60 million had ended, Jacques Ellul, the French
Philosopher and lay theologian, observed that never before had we as a
society given more attention to our security, never had we invested
more in technological solutions to our security, and yet never before
had we felt so insecure.
We have gathered here as the review of the nuclear non-proliferation
treaty is about to begin because we know, as people of faith, that
true security will never come from a weapons system. Security is not
primarily a political issue, it is a spiritual issue. True security is the
opposite of the mad grasping we experience when nation states spend billions on
building and maintaining nuclear weapons systems. True security is letting go,
it is waking up to the illusion that peace can be brought by some external
technological means.
True security is striving instead for life through the truth that we are
all interconnected and interdependent; or, as Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh
says, "We inter-are."
 If we take the focus off security and strive instead to
tend to each other's deep wellbeing, we will find a kind of thriving never
attainable when mere security is the goal.
As has been borne witness to in this conference, the structure of a
society that relies on nuclear weapons for security will play out its logical
conclusions that militarized communities are necessary, that mass incarceration
is necessary, the repression of freedom is necessary, that nature is something
to be used and abused.There is a connection between nuclear missiles in silos in
Wyoming and Colorado and North Dakota and the automatic weapons aimed at
protestors in Ferguson. There is a connection between nuclear arsenals that
could annihilate life on this planet and the climate change we are now
experiencing. This grasping for security is a death cycle.
But the pursuit of peace through an acknowledgment of our interdependence
is a spiral leading to ever greater abundance and life. We are connecting our
struggles, and in so doing, connecting ourselves.
We, as people from all faith traditions and spiritualties, must lift up a
different way, not to death but to life. What is this way? Where does it begin?
As peacemakers, we are called to bring hope where there is despair, faith where
there is doubt, pardon where there is injury. We are called to the work of
reconciliation which begins by bearing witness to the harm that we have caused,
because that harm has not yet been healed.
 On Friday night (at the opening plenary), in sitting with
each other in 45 seconds of silence as Daniel Ellsberg instructed us to
do, envisioning the space between the dropping and the detonation of the bomb
over Hiroshima, we were preparing ourselves to bear witness. In hearing
the testimony of the children of the A bomb, we are not turning away from the
hubris and the horrors of our nuclear past and present. In persevering for peace
by protest and participation in the review conference, we are seeking to make
right the grave moral injury to humanity and creation that nuclear weapons
perpetuate.
The work to create a world free from nuclear weapons is a gargantuan task,
and it is easy to become overwhelmed with it. To be unsuccessful in it is to
risk the survival of our planet, our natural world, our human species. But we
need only to look into the faces of children and youth, to bring the overwhelm
to scale.
 A few weeks ago, my son turned 13. In many spiritual
traditions, this is the age at which persons begin to take on adult
responsibilities within the community, to make commitments and contributions. He
is a person with a peacemaker's heart. He is exploring nonviolence, and he
especially finds comfort in the company of other pacifists. Our work is to
support a vision for his decency and his life, and for the decency and abundant
thriving of all children and youth, all creatures and species who will inherit
the earth. It is individual, it is moment by moment, it is all of
us.
Our gathering here this morning, our proclamation throughout the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty review conference, and our ongoing quest for abolition
through a global ethic of solidarity is the light in the darkness and the hope
in the face of despair. May we be emboldened by that vision, may we be
sustained by each other and may we be empowered by the spirit of life and
goodness and abundance in the universe as we bring to fruition a nuclear free
world. Amen.
In service to a peaceful, just, and sustainable world,
 Rev. Kristin Stoneking
Executive Director
Fellowship of
Reconciliation |
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