Leadership and Peace
By Dr. Heather Hathaway
Associate Professor of English
Co-director of Honors Program
For about a month now I have been mulling around in my head the suggested
theme for today’s reflection—“peace and leadership.” Of
all the things that have come to mind, the simplest has had the strongest hold—that
peace is leadership.
But what does that mean? Surely there are times when leading involves being
less than peaceful? Surely merely seeking inner peace by meditating alone on
a mountain top isn’t a form of leadership? Or is it?
I believe it is. I believe that we can best pursue peace in the world by first
finding peace in ourselves. Many forms of spirituality extol the virtues of
inner peace as preparation for public action. In the Ignatian spiritual tradition,
for example, the process of discernment can help us come to know ourselves,
and thereby God’s will for us, better. Greater self-knowledge or
awareneness helps us become more calm and centered. Decisions made from this
self—the whole self in which the rational and the affective are integrated,
in which the head and the heart work together, the self which is balanced and
at peace—are invariably better decisions than those made from either
half alone. Thus, the thoughtful decisions that stem from this sense
of inner peace lead to more thoughtful leadership.
Buddhism also emphasizes inner peace as a crucial prerequisite for effective
worldly engagement. Of the many principles of Buddhism that promote the growth
of inner peace, two in particular—interconnectedness and Ahimsa,
or non-harming, are among the most helpful when thinking about peace and leadership.
Interconnectedness involves recognizing that we live in a world in which everything
is related to everything else and simultaneously contains and is contained
by everything else. In Ignatian terms, this might best be translated into the
notion of “finding God in all things.” I like the way that
John Steinbeck describes it in the Sea of Cortez.
“It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most
of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired
reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say
that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality,
known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling
of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles
Darwin, and an Einstein [and I would add a Julianne of Norwich, a Mother Theresa,
a Sojourner Truth, and a Buddha.] Each of them in his own tempo and with his
own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all
things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, shimmering
phosphorescence on the sea and spinning planets and the expanding universe,
all bound together by the elastic string of time.”
The other principle, Ahimsa, means not to harm, to be gentle with,
both self and other. It means being able to accept in ourselves and in others
our very real, wholly inescapable, human failings. In Ignatian terms it is
related to the concept of giving the best possible interpretation to others’ actions.
In more broadly Christian terms, it means to be compassionate and merciful.
Adhering to the principle of Ahimsa allows us to greet the world openly
and non-judgmentally rather than defensively and with aggression. An inner
peace grounded in an awareness of our interconnectedness and a commitment to
do no harm leads to a form of leadership that recognizes the “other” as
the self and honors both fully and equally.
Peaceful living begets peaceful leading. Regardless of the path we choose,
to join others in the ongoing journey toward inner peace is to lead.
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