December 8, 2020\
I recently increased my daily walk around my neighborhood from three loops to four, and yesterday, as I reached the end of the fourth loop, I found my feet turning to five. It felt as if, having started, I could just keep on walking.
She began walking on January 1, 1953, at the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California. She wore a navy blue shirt and navy slacks and a short tunic with pockets sewn all around the bottom. In these pockets, she carried a folding toothbrush, a comb, a ball point pen, and copies of her message.She walked ahead of the march talking to people and handing out messages of peace. She was 45 years old.
She did this for 28 years, depending entirely on the kindness of strangers for food and shelter and the occasional pair of new shoes and shirts. In 1964, after she had walked 25,000 miles, she stopped counting, because, as she said, “25,000 miles is enough to count.” She called herself the Peace Pilgrim.
Her message was simple: world peace depends upon personal peace. When enough of us find inner peace, our institutions will become more peaceful and there will be no more occasion for war. Creating peace requires being peaceful.
I first encountered this message in college. I think I became a Quaker in intention my first night at Swarthmore when, alone and terrified, I sat listening to the President welcome the class of 1960. We were gathered in the Quaker Meeting House on campus and I took refuge in the beauty and calm of its simplicity, barely listening to what was said, focusing only on what I saw.
Later in my time at Swarthmore I read the Journal of George Fox where I encountered words that have stayed with me and that uncannily echo those of the Peace Pilgrim. Asked to accept a position as an officer in the local militia, Fox replied: “I told them that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.” He did not join the army.
Since then I have been at different times and in different ways a peace activist. I have been an attender and member of various Quaker meetings. I have worked in the Cambridge, Massachusetts office of the American Friends Service Committee, and participated in three AFSC projects. I was active in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the feminist movement of the 1970’s. Again and again, in my personal life I have committed to the way of non-violence.
In all this work, I have learned, again and again, the difference between being a peace activist and being actively peaceful. I have committed and re-committed to the challenge of Fox’s message and have learned its truth more in my failures than successes. I have found it far easier to engage in non-violent resistance than to root out the occasion of violence in my own mind and heart. I am minded of that song my generation slow-danced to at our junior proms: “Whenever we kiss, I worry and wonder, your lips may be near but darling where is your heart.” Where indeed are our hearts? I know where mine all too often resides: in a swamp of new and stale wounds to my self-esteem, in a roil of anger at injustice everywhere, in a cold sweat of fear of what those with more power than me will do to myself and my world. In other words, in the realm of the occasion of war.
It seriously upsets me that I did not know about Peace Pilgrim until long after her pilgrimage ended. It upsets me that I did not encounter her in person. I was, after all, a peace activist during much of that time. How could I have missed her? Where was I? And what difference might it have made to me if I had met her? Especially if I had met her when I was still in junior high and very young? She walked through Indiana more than once and ultimately died there, ironically in an automobile accident. What an opening into a different way of thinking and being her appearance would have been for me then. And if I had met her later in life, what would I have made of her? Would I have been tempted to join her?
Peace Pilgrim spent fifteen years in preparation for her journey. She knew that there is a great deal of difference between being willing to do something and actually doing it. She underwent a process whose last step was so profound she could not find words to describe it.
Few of us can follow in those footsteps and she did not expect us to. “None of you,” she wrote, “may feel guided to walk a pilgrimage, and I’m not trying to inspire you to do so. But in the field of finding harmony in our own lives, we can share. And I suspect that when you hear me give some of the steps toward inner peace, you will recognize them as steps that you also have taken.” Even a small step, she knew, makes a difference: “One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.”
Peace Pilgrim stepped forth in her time because she saw that, with the development of the nuclear bomb, the occasion of war could easily result in the annihilation of our species and our planet. It was also the era of the Korean War and Joe McCarthy, two events steeped in the violence that is the result of the occasion of war in our hearts. Our time calls for a similar response as the dangers to our planet have only increased.
I keep on my desk a card with the words of George Fox written on it. And each time I read his words I am stunned by the message. As we enter this particular season, when the arrival of the solstice brings the promise of rebirth but also often witnesses a return to, as my friend Susan once put, the museum of old wounds, open 24/7, extra hours at Christmas, I think the message is worth repeating: let us look into our own hearts and minds and try to remove from them the occasion of war. World peace can only be made one heart at a time.
I do not call myself a Christian, though I gladly embrace the identity of Quaker. This is, of course, a major contradiction but one I am willing to live with. I seek differently from George Fox the life and power that takes away the occasion of war but I do seek it. And I find it most in my garden, the blessed realm of the more-than-human. Thanks be for grass and chipmunks.
Note: there is a whole website devoted to Peace Pilgrim where you can order a free copy of the book, Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, and where you can learn the many ways in which her legacy is being carried out.
Much of what she had to say on subjects that do not immediately seem related to peace bear repeating. I take the liberty of sharing two that have particular resonance for me, and which, of course, if you think about it, have everything to do with peace.
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“If your life is overcrowded, then you are doing more than you are required to do.”
And my favorite, as it is a warning all writers should heed: “If you have something worthwhile to say, you can say it. Otherwise, why in the world would you want to be speaking?”
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