Wisdom to Know the Difference

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

This was the first prayer I learned. Not the Lord's Prayer. No. In a family of atheists, the Lord's Prayer was never mentioned or repeated by rote at dinner and before bed. But we did have coasters and magnets with the serenity prayer all over the house. I don't know where they all came from; perhaps my grandmother just left behind these odds and ends with the serenity prayer on them on her visits. "When will you leave?" my dad would ask her. And she, to his frustration: "when the wind changes." What time was this? Before scheduled plane tickets? Or was she just above such mundane concerns as being tied to a travel schedule? That had to take some serenity.

Today this prayer has risen to the surface because I have been dwelling on reconciliation. And not just reconciliation, but true reconciliation. What is true reconciliation?

In theology, we know it to be a process. To speak of reconciliation, as if it is a state of being, or an event, is misleading. It would be more accurate to speak of reconciling, of being reconciled, and to reconcile oneself to, with, for. The serenity prayer, while it asks for serenity, courage and wisdom, only asks for those as we accept, change and know. We cannot have serenity, courage and wisdom unless we are living into accepting, changing, knowing. Motion, in other words, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes tangible, sometimes invisible, but always visceral - if we let ourselves really live.

In politics, reconciliation is too often an event- if the word is used at all. More often we talk of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and the like. But these words are about as akin to reconciliation as nonviolence is to satygraha. They are mechanical. And yet, beneath these functional words, there is a fundamental interest in reconciliation. If this were not the case, how could anyone persist in studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the long term?

I spent the morning in my last class at Colorado College, listening to my students present caes of self-determination and intervention throughout the world. Their studies ranged from Kashmir, Bosnia, Colombia, to Costa Rica and Greenland. Most of the students were discouraged by the results of these conflicts, and discouraged by the genuine potential for the peaceful resolution of conflicts internationally. Only one student had the courage to ask, with a smile that indicated he was envisioning something, "what would happen if states actually gave up nuclear weaspons? What would the world be like?"

I am beginning to think that questions like that are the ones that cut through the clutter of conflict resolution and into the true questions of reconciliation. Reconciliation is not a place to arrive at. It is not peace as the absence of war. It is a transformed state of affairs and a transforming process we participate in. Participation is key.

"What if the world actually put down their nuclear weapons?" Why is this question different? Because we do not know the answer. We ask it; we draw a rational blank. But doesn't some image come to your mind?

Ask it to yourself again: "What if the world actually put down their nuclear weapons?"

What do you see?

This is a discernment question. Questions we do not know the answer to are the only ones that help us understand our calls in the world. And we ask these questions in community. We turn to one another and ask each other, "what are your questions?" It matters that we are asking the questions just as much as the open-ended nature of the question matters.

I wonder if these could be the missing pieces: imagination, questions that at first seem to elude us, and asking questions of each other. Could this be reconciliation?