The Peace Challenge
You are invited to co-create Peace NOW, in 2021, with Humanity Rising and the ChatAction Peace LAB Team. February 2, 2021 begins a 21 Step Peace Challenge. Bring your visions and creative expressions for new life, new Peace, in this new decade by 2031.
Introduction
The purpose of the Challenge is to clear a path to Peace in, through and around you. Each day you will receive an email inviting you to take the next step on the quest into the center of the LAByrinth.
Each Challenge has a beginning, middle and end. The places, spaces and people with whom you are invited to do them will vary. Each of the 21 steps is designed to build on the previous steps. If you are joining us after the Challenge begins on February 2nd, we recommend you FIRST complete the challenges leading up to the step when you join us.
Background
Walking a physical labyrinth is a centering exercise. The path is narrow, so one walks alone, though aware that others are walking the same path, ahead and behind; confident (faith, trust) that the pathway leads to a center, inexorably. (Unlike the walls of a maze that take one down dead ends, and separate from the awareness of others.)
If space at the center of the labyrinth is large and hospitable, pathwalkers can convene, rest a while, break their silence, and share the meaning of their journey before venturing forth (alone again) into the world of their particular responsibilities and calling. Our Peace Challenge invites others to take steps toward the center of a labyrinth we are calling Peace; our Peace Week is a convening at the center of this labyrinth and will end March 5 when we send one another into our worlds again.
The mystery of peace we expect to find at this central convening is described as the mystery of conversation: I don’t know you and you don’t me and we don’t know we unless we encounter the other with compassionate listening and courageous speech.
Einstein suggested that we can’t solve old problems with old mindsets. While we don’t expect some grand new synthesis of “the mystery of peace (that which we do not know)” and the key for “faster and easier” realization of our peace making, our peace building, our peace doing, our peace action; we do hope to create a large and hospitable space where we and our guests can encounter one another and feast on the mystery of me, the mystery of you, the mystery of we, an inexhaustible and ultimately, ineffable mystery – more a matter of receiving and participating than making and building. We can call this Peace, one of the fruits of deep conversation and love.
Get a New Peace Challenge every day …
As a participant in the Peace Challenge 2021, our Peace LAB Team will send you an email every day until the end of February to invite you to take the next step in the Challenge. The creative entries you choose to share will be used as part of the Peace LAB project at Humanity Rising. Watch your email for each day’s new challenge. Remember to confirm your email as soon as you subscribe in the form below.
