Date: Dec. 6th 2013 Session: Interfaith Partnerships: Living For the Greater Good: The Moral Foundation for Inspiring Innovative Change Speaker: Mr. James Patton; Executive Vice President, International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, USA

1. Speech at GPF Plenary Event
JPatton - Kuala Lumpur, 6 Dec 2013.
This conference brings together religious leaders to discuss peace. What does it mean
to be a religious peacemaker? The most common theme I've heard is "shared values"
and "putting yourself in the shoes of the other" - in other words, Empathy. I want to
challenge us as religious peacemakers to truly understand what this means, because
peace is not constructed with our friends - it is constructed with our enemies. It is easy
to work together when you have shared values. The hard work comes with those whose
morality is different than ours. However, if we cannot extend our empathy to those
whose values differ - even if those values are destructive - then we will not be capable
of engaging with them and transforming their behaviors.
My organization, the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy, or ICRD, has
worked during its fourteen year history in over a dozen countries around the world on
ending violent conflict, as well as linking efforts of religious peacemakers with policy
makers. Among those programs, we have worked to enhance critical thinking skills in
Pakistani madrasa religious schools, connected spiritual leaders in north and south
Sudan before the peace agreements there, reconciled Kashmiris, are seeking to
empower Yemeni women peacemakers, and are building a contract for peaceful
coexistence between different ethnic and religious groups in conflict-torn Syria.
ICRD is currently conducting the early stages of a program to support the reintegration
of tens of thousands of actual and potential former combatants into civil society in the
country of Colombia, utilizing women's networks and religious and spiritual leadership.
We are bringing together diverse spiritual leaders- from indigenous holy leaders, or
Shamans - who embrace a cosmology of harmony and healing - to evangelical Christian
pastors - for whom God's command is, in Micah's words, to act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. Despite their spiritual differences, they are working
together to build a spiritual safety net for those broken by the war.
Last month I attended a conference of 50 ecumenical women peacemakers in the hills
of Cauca, Colombia. They were Protestant lay clergy and Catholic nuns, for the most
part. They were rural women from the villages of eight regions of the country that had
suffered serious violence, and each of the participants had stories of personal loss.
I'd like to share a story about moral leadership from that event - it is a Christian story
only because the woman telling it was a Christian, so i hope that those of other faiths
will find some value in it. An energized and flamboyant 70 year old Catholic nun began
to recount the Biblical story of the adulteress in John, Chapter 8, where the citizenry
drag a woman to the main square and throw her down in the dust before Jesus, and the
pharisees challenge Jesus, hoping to catch him in a doctrinal trap, saying "teacher, the
laws say that this woman be stoned, what do you say?" The nun bent to the ground as if
retrieving a stone, imitating the crowd that was hungry for blood. She imitated Jesus,
idly drawing in the dirt before giving his unforgettable reply, "Let the one amongst you
who has not sinned, cast the first stone..."
And then she mimed the townsfolk dropping their rocks and slipping away through the
crowd, lest they be discovered...it was very dramatic...then of a sudden she jumped up,
stepping forward, and said "but there, from the back a woman came pushing toward
the adulteress...and through the air she let fly a stone! And it clipped the adulteress in
the head and a small trickle of blood ran down her cheek, and Jesus stood ...
dumbfounded, and gaped at the woman, and said..."Mom - don't embarrass me in
public!"

2. Now, please recall that my source is a Catholic nun, so any irreverence is her
responsibility - not mine! She is also a woman who had lost a father, a sister, and two
brothers to the long history of violence. Although her twist on the parable had the
women in the audience howling with laughter, she just paused and smiled at them all
and finally said... "beware of the danger of our own holiness."
She followed with an impassioned and very poignant reflection - about the painful
effects of too easily letting our blind interpretation of doctrine cloud our ability to actually
discern the spiritual needs of those with whom we work, of peacemakers working at
odds with one another because of pride of righteousness, and of women undercutting
other women where they seek to have a meaningful and transformative voice in
frequently male-dominated spiritual hierarchies, and of the dehumanizing violence that
we can commit against others, often in the name of a loving God.
What does it mean to be a religious peacemaker?
There are a lot of very practical reasons to incorporate religious consideration into
peacemaking, reasons that I freely evoke when asking the US government for funding
for some of our programs! But all of us here are aware that there is something much
more sublime than the practical
at work in human faith. If we were limiting
ourselves to the logical and practical, then education and vocational training should do
the trick. Religion
is powerful precisely because it functions somewhat illogically.
However, when that lack of logic is applied to dehumanizing another it can encourage
the most grotesque of what humanity is capable of. I don't imagine that those
assembled need examples of religiously motivated violence.
This is the truth of the human spirit.
I recently met for the first of many workshops with former fighters from Colombia's war
who are in jail awaiting justice and reintegration processing, or have already served time
and been released back to their community. Two stories in particular struck me because
of their similarities. Each of those persons has come to be defined by violence, has
been trained and hardened in conflict, one in an attempt to break the government, the
other in an attempt to protect it. Each of them is being offered a new life and training for
a new job. One of them is religious, the other has abandoned religion.
One the one hand, you have a man from an upper-middle-class family who was raised
to be a cattle rancher, who apprenticed under his father to learn the complex details of
the family business, mending fences, herding and butchering animals, and managing
the household economics. One day when he was 8 years old his father was brought in
from the woods by the ranch hands, he had been shot multiple times by what he called
"socialist traitors" who would destroy their way of life. The boy watched his father bleed
out on the couch in front of him...and so he joined the paramilitaries to take revenge.
On the other hand you have an indigenous woman, whose older brother belonged to a
group that called themselves "freedom fighters." They defended the community from
armed thugs who were hired by foreign corporations to displace them, so they could
have unfettered access to their abundant natural resources. He was her hero - he
taught her to survive in the jungle, play soccer in dusty clearings, to fish, to hunt... the
government was largely absent, aside from when uniformed military appeared in
defense of corporate leaders. One day when she was 7 she watched from behind a tree
while her brother, his friends, her family and neighbors were killed with chainsaws and

3. thrown into the village church by self-described Christian paramilitaries, where their
bodies were burned as a warning to others...and so she joined the guerrillas to take
revenge.
What job program will bring these two people, or the tens of thousands of women and
men like them, back into society together? What educational program will allow them to
heal from their wounds - and the wounds that they inflicted on others? How will they find
a way into a society filled with people damaged by the war?
But there is another truth to the human spirit. The one that allows that 70 year old nun
who works for a healed community to meet with those who killed her father, to simply
ask them, tears streaming down her face, "why?" And the one that allows those same
young men to respond, also weeping, that they were truly sorry.
The tool that we hold, as religious peacemakers, can help us cross that great gulf
between being broken in pain and being restored in hope.
Religion can be a safe and trusted institutional third-party, a shared community, it can
also provide the illogic for letting go of the pain of history, the hatred and desire for
vengeful retribution. The illogic of religion allows for a greater possibility than our own
limitations, for acts of charity and selflessness, of forgiveness of both the other and the
self, that fly in the face of every intellectual and visceral reality.
Precisely because there is something larger holding us as we step into that terrifying
breach, because the very principle of a greater love has been demonstrated to work
again and again.
But do not doubt the difficulty of our task. I have heard many people in the last days
saying that we all share a foundation in our faith, but let's please make the moral
journey to the other side, to where our faith might present us with risks, so that we can
truly empathize with those who are broken by conflict.
I end by returning to the nun in Colombia. By returning to John Chapter 8. I ask you to
imagine that the person dragged before Jesus was a militant who had engaged in the
horrors of dehumanizing violence - of rape and murder, of the soulless act of willfully
taking the most precious things that can be taken - dignity, family, security, autonomy
and finally...life...from other human beings.
And in place of Jesus you sit, not only a religious peacemaker, but the victim of those
perversions...the parent of a raped daughter, the sibling of a slain soldier, the child of a
kidnapped and tortured father. All done by the hands of the man kneeling in the dirt in
front of you - who did not in fact come seeking forgiveness, but was dragged. And in the
place of the pharisees stand those who would reject peace, who advocate for policies of
logical vengeance, violence for violence, purging the venom of hatred by acting on it,
institutionalizing it.
Ignore the fact that the parable is from the Christian Sacred texts, whatever your faith,
put yourself there, with that person before you, and that power in your hands. That
moment is where religion must do peacemaking. Not just where the challenge is difficult
- but where we physically burn with the pain of injustice, the bile of disgust, the fire of
anger, where every part of our human self wants to punish the person in front of us,
facing our judgement. We have the stone in our hand, we are right, and we are

4. righteous! Until we can see that possibility in ourselves, we cannot begin to serve those
who have lived such injustice - both the perpetrators and the sufferers.
"Beware of the dangers of our holiness," my nun friend said.
"I will not judge you either," Jesus said to the adulteress.
To love your enemy means to want them healed, and by doing so, to heal ourselves. It
is that empathy in the face of such powerful fear and rage is the basis for a moral
foundation for change, that is what religious faith offers us, and we must act on it in
every corner of our lives - not many could be more difficult than the one we've just
imagined together.
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