“Signal Communities in Witness of Peace”

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2008 Peace Colloquy
Community of Christ
Independence, Missouri
October 4, 2008

Dr. Donald E. Pitzer
Professor Emeritus of History and Director Emeritus of the Center for Communal Studies
University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, Indiana

Introduction

I am honored to address this distinguished international gathering on the vitally important subject of peace. It is of great significance when religious bodies, such as the Community of Christ, give top priority to bringing their spiritual, intellectual, and communal resources to bear in witness of peace. For far too long religious division, religious diversity, and religious exclusiveness have made religions contributors to conflict rather than promoters of peace.

Today, in this time of war, we are assembled to consider signal communities’ witness of peace. Peace is an increasingly more urgent matter. We have split the atom, stood on the moon, and discovered DNA as the building block for life. Yet the world seems as ignorant and impotent as ever about the top item on the human agenda—how to live together peacefully, productively, and happily based on mutually deserved trust. In the supposedly civilized 20th century our wars killed 120,000,000 people, about half civilians. That number equals almost 1,000 Independence, Missouris. How can we make harmony from our diversity, resolve our conflicts with words rather than arms, and empower leaders without reaping authoritarian control, abuse, and aggression? How can we implement the simple but difficult solution of Jesus: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. . . .” (Matthew 5:44)? He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” not blessed are the war makers (Matthew 5:9).

We might hope the world is now ready to consider what small, voluntary communal laboratories teach us in their witness of peace and justice. After all, communities are the witness of peace, the stage for seeking, testing, and acting out peace. Thousands of historic and current communal groups provide that stage for our instruction.

My purpose in this keynote is twofold: first, to place the Latter Day Saints’ communal efforts, and especially the signal communities of the Community of Christ, in the context of this instructive communal legacy, and second, to point out specific witnesses and lessons from communal societies. Pursuit of these lessons has kept me researching communal groups for forty years, thirty of them as director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. I have approached communal societies as social microcosms that test social and political theories, economic systems, and religious doctrines and practices. I have found the lessons they teach to have individual, community, and worldwide implications.

Latter Day Saints in Communal History

Before exploring these lessons let us turn to our first objective—to place zionic Latter Day Saints’ communalism in communal history. The Saints’ communities are part of a social phenomenon with both ancient and modern expressions. Historically, communal societies were organized as communes with common property. We easily recognize many of these: the first-century Christians in Jerusalem; monastic orders; Protestant sects such as Moravians, Mennonites, Shakers, Harmonists, Oneidans, Hutterites, and Bruderhof; and Jews still living in kibbutzim in Israel. During the last century, communal groups increasingly organized with less economic sharing as cooperatives, collectives, joint-stock companies, land trusts, and not-for-profit corporations. Members enjoyed more individual freedom and became more engaged in governance. Groups have preferred being called “intentional communities” or “planned communities” instead of “communes” or “communal societies.” We recognize these today as ecovillages, retirement centers, and cohousing projects, including Harvest Hills as a signal community of the Community of Christ right here in Independence since 1970. Variety, nonviolence, and humanitarian witness mark thousands of contemporary communities.

The expanded forms and uses of communal living have made it difficult for a general definition to keep pace. For decades I required my students to learn a definition that I tried to stretch over all past and present communal groups no matter what they did or called themselves or however they organized their finances. It went like this: “Communal societies are small, voluntary social units, partly insolated and isolated from the general society in which their members practice an ideology, an economic union, and a lifestyle and experiment with their ideal systems—social, economic, political, religious, and philosophical—in the hope that their utopian vision will be realized worldwide by divine aid or human effort.” A few students, or maybe I should say many, found this a little long and a lot complicated. And it proved inadequate to describe the kaleidoscopic changes within the founding movements and over centuries of time.

Thus, the definition is in flux. It is adjusting to include the realities of what I began calling in the 1980s “developmental communalism.” Developmental communalism is a theory that sees each movement that adopts any form of communal living as passing through a developmental process—before, during, and often after its communal stage. This approach views communal living as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Developmental communalism also frees us from judging the success of communal groups by the length of time they remain communal. Rather, it focuses on the movements that establish communal sanctuaries during an early stage—often for security, solidarity, and survival—and then show their vitality by developing into new organizational forms and employing new methods. The communal method necessitates creating and managing a whole social structure on a small scale. This alone can pose an unbearable burden to founding movements.

First century Christians in Jerusalem chose the communal developmental process. According to Acts 2:44, 45, “all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” Some time after Ananias and Sapphira were stricken dead because they lied about sharing all the sale of their land (Acts 5:1–10), the church relaxed the communal requirement to permit believers to live anywhere and to own private property. This developmental move, combined with forsaking the Hebrew customs of animal blood sacrifice and circumcision, liberated the faith to grow into the Greek and Roman worlds.

Early Christianity’s adaptability proved essential to its expansion but raises the specter of what I call a communal double jeopardy threat. Movements lively enough to develop into new organizational structures, ideas, and methods tend to save their movements but lose communal living. Witness the Moravians, Owenites, Inspirationists of Amana, Iowa, and, as we shall see, even the Latter Day Saints. On its other side, the double jeopardy threat dictates that movements that make communal living a required commitment or tenet of faith usually discover they have injured or eventually killed their movement as with the Shakers and Harmonists. Demise is certain for groups like these and monastic orders that demand celibacy unless they gain new members from the outside.

As many of you could detail better than I, the Latter Day Saints’ movement provides a unique example of developmental communalism. Soon after the publication of the Book of Mormon and the establishment of the church in 1830, both the leaders and working class poor who largely composed the membership felt a magnetic tug toward the communal living promises of security, solidarity, and survival. Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. and others knew the communal example of the first Christians and likely the economic success of the Shakers and Harmonists. Early leader Sidney Rigdon had even heard Robert Owen speak about his New Moral World utopia and socialistic model at New Harmony, Indiana. But the plan revealed to Smith in 1830 and 1831 contained novel elements and justifications. It not only brought justice to the poor, it ingeniously combined private enterprise with community of goods. As practiced at Kirtland, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri, in the 1830s, the system of consecration and stewardship provided that members consecrate all their possessions and annually all their surplus earnings to the bishop. In return they received a stewardship in property and funds to use as they chose (Doctrine and Covenants 42:8a–9b).

This arrangement was to restore the perfect social order of peace, justice, and equality that existed for God’s people of Zion in the ancient United Order of Enoch. As stated in the Doctrine and Covenants “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them; . . .” (D&C 36:2h, i). Reviving the United Order also tied the zionic Saints to the millennial purpose of the holy city of Zion—a city built by Enoch and taken up into heaven to become the center of God’s kingdom in Jackson County, Missouri, after Christ’s return (D&C 36:3a–d). Restoring the United Order also placed the Saints of the 1830s in the tradition of the Nephites who, according to the Book of Mormon, enjoyed the blessings of the United Order when they practiced it in America in the first two centuries of the Christian era (IV Nephi 1).

The United Order gave the early Mormon adoption of communal living a divine sanction and infused it with a zeal for the millennial cause of Zion. But it did not prevent the public hostility and perpetual migrations that upset the stability of the church’s financial base. These realities induced the Saints to suspend their United Order communalism. In its place at Nauvoo, Illinois, tithing became the movement’s developmental change that proved to be financially sufficient, less difficult to administrate, and more conducive to nationwide and worldwide expansion.

In its post-communal phase, the Latter Day Saints can be compared to the Amish who for 300 years have lived in tight-knit communities but without demanding community of goods. They and the Latter Day Saints both have practiced the communal ideal of close association, fellowship, and assistance without losing their movement to the communal double jeopardy threat. Regrettably, however, unlike the Amish and Mennonites, the Latter Day Saints lost their peace witness. When the Saints’ movement began, the young Smith advocated the nonviolent stand of Jesus and the primitive Christians, and Sidney Rigdon held to his previous Campbellite pacifism. But mob persecution and militia murders in the 1830s severed this peace commitment and both men ever after justified the Saints responding with “redemptive violence.”

This makes all the more remarkable the developmental process through which the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has come in the last several decades. The very change of the name to Community of Christ in 2001 announced the renewed emphasis on the zionic mission as a witness for peace and justice in community and reflects the early nonmilitant leadership of Joseph Smith III. In March 2007, guidance of President Stephen M. Veazey confirmed the priority of establishing signal communities (D&C 163:2b; 3a, b; 5a). The Council of Twelve was admonished to “lead the church’s mission of restoration through . . . the establishment of signal communities of justice and peace that reflect the vision of Christ” (D&C 163:5a). In one of the most dynamic paradigm shifts and revivals of communal usage within a movement in communal history this guidance further asserts that: “The hope of Zion is realized when the vision of Christ is embodied in communities of generosity, justice, and peacefulness” (D&C 163:3a; see also 2b and 3b, c). Thus zionic signal communities are being created anywhere, everywhere, and including anybody while not negating the prophesied single community of Zion as the future center of the millennial kingdom. According to the Community of Christ statement of faith and beliefs, signal communities are, in fact, using communalism for a new mission—to infuse the realities of God’s kingdom into every human dimension—“families, congregations, neighborhoods, cities, and throughout the world.” Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned the world becoming what he called the “Beloved Community”—“a community of love and justice” where “brotherhood is a reality.” Signal communities can move us in this direction.

Peace Lessons from Communal Millenialism

On this hopeful note we go to our second objective—examining lessons from four dimensions of communities’ witness for peace—from millennialism, humanitarianism, pacifism, and authoritarianism. Beginning on the global level with millennialism we’ll work our way toward the community and individual levels. Communitarians often have found global peace and justice through future divine intervention more easily embraced than peace and justice here and now at the personal level, possibly because peace with one’s self and one’s neighbor is such a daunting everyday challenge.

Millennialism promises peace through the appearance of a Savior, a Godly kingdom for at least a millennium, 1,000 years. This is one of the most potent ideas in history, and its most powerful expressions have come in the Western World. In Hebrew and Jewish faith it has meant that the Messiah will yet appear. Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah and will appear again as the Prince of Peace. Many Muslims look for the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared in the 10th century, to return and rule over a perfect world order.

Christian millennialism became the motivating belief for many religious movements, but a vulnerable communal witness for peace. Millennialist communal groups teach us that excessive reliance on divine intervention to bring peace on earth usually results over time in frustration and sometimes contributes to the decline or demise of the founding movement. Forty celibate male millennialists emigrated from Europe to Pennsylvania in 1694, the year they thought Christ would return. Their commune was called the Woman in the Wilderness after the prophecy in Revelation 12 about the woman who would flee the dragon after begetting the millennial Christ. When their leader, Johannes Kelpius, died in 1708 after claiming to be immortal, the men scattered, some of them so distressed they took wives.

Shakers, officially The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, were optimistic millennialists. The eight who emigrated from England to New York in 1774 believed Christ’s spirit had already returned to earth in the female form of their leader, Mother Ann Lee. Despite the violence of the American Revolution and Civil War, Shakers thought peace would increase as the divine spirit gradually permeated all humanity. Some 20,000 Believers lived in one or another of the Shakers’ 19 settlements, but now only seven reside in their last community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. These remaining few are optimistic still. As the now deceased Sister Gertrude Soule told me in 1983, raising one hand: “Mother said when the movement gets down to the number of fingers on one hand there will be a great revival.”

The Harmonists, who followed their German prophet George Rapp to the United States after 1803, were pessimistic millennialists. Their reading of prophecy indicated that world conditions would become steadily worse until Christ’s return. For a century these celibate Harmonists watched the war weary world deteriorate. Rapp died at age 89 in 1847 still expecting Christ’s return during his lifetime. His Harmony Society ended in 1916.

Millennialism’s lesson about peace is clear. No matter how much a redeemer is anticipated, the solution to today’s problems is not to sit idly by awaiting this event. The witness for peace demands that we actively engage in the nonviolent peace process in the present, addressing the suffering and injustice of our own times.

Ultimately, the peace witness of the shrinking Shakers and defunct Harmonists is judged by their humanitarian deeds rather than by their millennial beliefs. The Kentucky Shakers are celebrated for ruinously overextending their own resources to feed and care for both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. The Harmonists are applauded for generously aiding the Zoarites, Hutterites, and other sectarian immigrants.

Peace Lessons from Communal Humanitarianism

This leads us to our second lesson—the relationship between humanitarianism and peace, that by dispensing justice and mercy to the poor, diseased, and distressed we relieve the suffering that often causes violence, revolution, and war itself.

You might be surprised that secular, rather than religious, communitarians provided the major thrust for the communal humanitarian witness of the 19th century. The violence of the French Revolution and the poverty of the Industrial Revolution brought Charles Fourier and Etienne Cabet of France and Robert Owen of Scotland to found utopian movements that began more than 60 socialistic communal experiments in America and Europe. The Owenites, in and beyond their communal phase, urged emancipation of the slaves and helped usher in modern women’s and workers’ rights, public schools and libraries, and consumer/producer cooperatives.

For centuries monastic orders have understood the immediacy of human need and responded with hospitality, hospitals, and schools. Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for the service of her Missionaries of Charity among the poor and diseased beginning in Calcutta. Her Order’s witness now reaches to 600 missions in 120 countries.

Habitat for Humanity International, launched by Millard and Linda Fuller at Koinonia Partners, is undoubtedly the best-known humanitarian project to emerge from an American intentional community. Koinonia Partners was rightly honored last evening with the 2008 Community of Christ International Peace Award for its courageous initiatives for peace and justice. It’s Habitat outreach alone has built more than 250,000 homes for over a million industrious poor people in every state of the United States and 90 foreign countries. How many here, like former president and first lady Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, have assisted Habitat? If you want to help, just call 1-800-Habitat.

By 2005 Habitat ranked tenth in income among charities in the United States with nearly one and one half billion dollars ($1,500,000,000). That’s a wonderful one and five with eight zeroes. But contrast that with the projected bill for the Iraq war alone—three trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000). That’s a three with 12 zeroes, three thousand billions. If all the Iraqi people were divided into families of four, with $3 trillion, Habitat could build a $422,000 home for each family in Iraq—or a $200,000 home for every such family of four in both Iraq and Afghanistan! What will it take for humanity to come to its senses, beat its swords into plowshares, and use its resources for construction rather than destruction?

The communal humanitarian lesson in witness of peace is that we must first actively address poverty, disease, and despair if we hope to make an assault on abuse, violence, and war.

Peace Lessons from Communal Pacifism

Our third lesson relates to pacifism, the persuasion that nonviolent resolution of disputes is the route to true and lasting peace. Just as Jesus did not resist his assailants and explained to Pilate that “. . . if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight,. . . .”(John 18:36), many communal pacifists have died rather than fight—Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites among them. Many others have witnessed for peace in community—Shakers, Harmonists, Quakers, Brethren, Community of Christ, Catholic Worker’s, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and monastic orders.

But most Christians, despite the example and teaching of Jesus and the witness of the early church, accepted the arguments for participating in a “just war” once the Roman state accepted Christianity. St. Augustine in the 4th century, St. Aquinas in the 13th, and others opened the door for Christians to enter the military. Warfare was justified if the bloodshed was defensive, for a moral cause, and declared by a legitimate governing leader to restore the peace after diplomatic means were exhausted. Much Christian support for war during the last century rested on the assumption that God blessed nationalism, empire building, and defending or spreading democracy.

The witness and actions of pacifistic communalists have modified this trend. They have sometimes helped convince governments to enact laws that respect the beliefs of conscientious objectors and noncombatants and to seek peaceful, diplomatic solutions to international conflicts. Harmonist delegates successfully got a provision for payment in lieu of armed service written into Indiana’s first constitution in 1816. The Zoarites in Ohio declared in their Principles of Separation: “We cannot serve the state as . . . soldiers, since a Christian cannot murder his enemy, much less his friend.” But they later compromised their pacifistic principles during the Civil War to accommodate a few members who chose to fight to free the slaves. The Shakers sent resolutions to President Theodore Roosevelt from their Peace Conference during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. They uncompromisingly asserted that “all wars are equally barbarous and equally unnecessary, their desolating cruelty effecting nothing for the cause of justice or human liberty, and to be regarded only as a return to primitive savagery.” They called for peace conferences to precede military action, international arbitration, armaments reduction, and disarmament. Roosevelt went on to arbitrate an end to the war and win the Nobel Peace Prize. Should we give the Shakers any credit? Maybe.

In 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize honored perhaps the most famous communal pacifistic witness ever, that of the 14th Dalai Lama. This Buddhist and Tibetan leader has nonviolently led the effort to save the culture if not the independence of his native land since the Chinese takeover in 1959. Even the recent Tibetan violence cannot diminish his consistent pacifistic witness.

At a conference with the Hutterites at Bon Homme in South Dakota, we were shown a graphic example of communal pacifists’ witness: graves of two of their young men who were inducted against their conscientious objection stand in WWI. Both were murdered in military incarceration, then sent home in the uniforms they refused to wear. You remember how the pacifistic Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, demonstrated the depth of their nonviolence and forgiveness when a deranged man killed and wounded children in their school in 2006. In their great grief the Amish not only forgave him, they sent provisions to his family, which responded with appreciation to this healing gesture.

I brought my “peace pole” today. It reminds me of the first one I saw in the Atarashiki-mura (New Village) north of Tokyo. Its six-foot-tall pole proclaims in eight different languages “May Peace Prevail on Earth.” With my peace pole came a message that expresses the communal New Village’s faith in the role of the individual as a peacemaker. It states: “We are facing an age where the politics of the world must be carried out by each individual. Every individual who repeats the words ‛May Peace Prevail On Earth’ thus becomes a great force for realizing peace in the world.” As Dr. Dean Ornish observed: “When you embody peace, people around you feel it. . . . When you meet hatred with love, fear with hope, that transforms you and those around you.”

We know that pacifism is a radical position. It raises the troublesome question of if, when, how, and how much force should be used. But its communal witness clearly teaches us to address conflicts on the lowest personal and community scales as soon as possible. Christian pacifistic groups often follow the lowest-level directive for conflict resolution in Matthew 18:15–17, 21–22. Members first are to go alone to kindly discuss a dispute, then to take one or two witnesses, and finally to bring the matter to the community. Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof communities, insisted on this process and reminded the members that “Only when two people do not come to an agreement quickly is it necessary to draw in a third person . . . .” Resolving problems quickly makes me think of something I wrote a good while ago.
In the beginning the wound can be healed by a kiss
In the beginning the flood can be damned by a toothpick
In the beginning the fire can be snuffed by a breath
In the beginning the war can be avoided by a smile
In the beginning

Peace Lessons from Communal Authoritarianism

So let us look at our fourth and final lesson. This one derives from communities’ attempts to control diversity, deviant behavior, and authoritarianism. Communal experience teaches that the more homogeneous the group the greater the conformity, unity of purpose, and longevity. Homogeneous ethnic and religious communities with deep common roots and commitments usually find it easier to achieve that balance between unity and diversity that produces harmony. Heterogeneous groups with fewer common ties and united mostly by secular ideals usually find harmony and longevity significantly more elusive.

All intentional communities—just like society at large—must deal with deviant behavior. Their members are Homo sapiens—people not only with proclivities for cooperation, benevolence, and altruism, but also for aggression, territoriality, and hierarchical dominance. At the end of a tour of the Deer Spring bruderhof in Connecticut, I thanked the community as “a wonderful people.” When their patriarchal leader, Hans Meyer, stood to respond, he said, “We are NOT a wonderful people. We struggle every day to keep ourselves under control and to obey the will of God.”

Communal groups, like other voluntary associations like churches, do have important advantages over the general society. Members make commitments, sometimes vows, to be in accord with the beliefs, purposes, and practices of the organization and to obey its rules. This lays a foundation for order, conformity, and peace. If members do not conform, there are consequences: denial of privileges, shunning as in Amish circles, and ultimately excommunication.

The sobering lesson from communal control of diversity and deviant behavior is that, even with all their advantages, intentional communities still find this a daunting task. And perhaps the greatest challenge is to find ways of transferring communal successes to larger and larger human venues, including nations. In this, we must be realistic in considering the peacekeeping disadvantages that nations face in managing their diversity and deviant behavior. Except in theocracies, governments have no spiritual authority. They can only follow the communal example to a point: making laws and punishing violators. Perhaps shockingly, the United States imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other country, and almost 50 percent of all prisoners worldwide. All nations must accept newborns, legal immigrants, and naturalized citizens. The United States tests the limits and potential of diversity while holding to its motto E Pluribus Unum, “of many one.” China is an amalgam of 56 ethnic groups. Iraq is torn by Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni differences. The diversified and disharmonious Soviet Union lasted less than a century.

Results from communal laboratories suggest that nations should cultivate a genuine harmony in diversity, a genuine unity of hearts, minds, and spirits. India has taken the first bold initiative at a state-sponsored communal experiment to unite international diversity. With the blessing of the United Nations through UNESCO, India founded Auroville in 1968 as “the first and only intentionally endorsed ongoing experiment in human unity.” Seventeen hundred people from 35 nations now live in communal Auroville attempting “to realise human unity—in diversity.”

While we recognize the difficulties communities and governments have in controlling their domains, we can never excuse their descent into the abyss of authoritarianism. Charismatic, ego- and power-driven leaders make unreasonable demands that rob their disciples of their possessions, privacy, independent judgment, civil rights, and sometimes their very lives. We know the celibacy of Ann Lee, George Rapp, and monastic orders; the complex marriage and eugenic experiment of John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, New York; the polygamy of Joseph Smith Jr. and Warren Jeffs, and the suicides of Jim Jones.

If leaders are restrained by consensus decision-making, such abuses might not occur. Born out of the freedom-loving youth movement in 1972, Alpha Farm in Oregon pioneered this method—a process of open discussion with full participation by all members until decisions are arrived at unanimously, if possible. As you can imagine, consensus decision-making can be lengthy, but it can keep the authoritarian demon from the door while emphasizing the importance of the individual in governing, conflict resolution, and peace.

Communal history shouts this lesson loudly: “Beware Authoritarianism!” Authoritarian abuse must be questioned, resisted, and rejected. This is true whether it raises its ugly head in the name of God, of peace, or of security; be it in an intentional community, a Nazi Germany, a Communist Soviet Union, or a democratic United States of America.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the communal witnesses and lessons for peace we have examined today lead us to conclude that even in community, peace depends on each individual. All members are part of the matrix of peace and any person out of order disturbs the peace of all. Each individual must resolve his or her own conflicts within the communal setting and arrive at internal control with the resources of his or her own spiritual, moral, and rational grounding. Albert Bates of The Farm community in Tennessee calls it “Reform by the square inch.”

Yet, we also must conclude that, while peace is rooted in the individual, it can only be displayed in community, in association with others. Therefore, communities are the witness for peace. Communities are the stage for acting out and demonstrating peace, cooperation, and harmony. Only in relation to others can we know ourselves fully and test our moral fiber.

How then can we individually and in community uphold peace, even fight for peace, as contradictory as that might sound? We fight for rights. We fight for principles. We fight for territory. We fight for oil. At this time and this place let us find the resources and resolve to fight for peace. This must mean doing battle armed with love—love for ourselves, our Maker, our neighbors, and our world. Again, Jesus reminds us: “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). As revolutionary as this sounds, if we cannot embrace the truthful negotiation and reasonable compromise that are the basis for mutually deserved trust, we will repeat the misunderstanding, hatred, and warfare that have characterized our traditional fight for peace. In his March 2007 guidance on signal communities, President Veazey urged “redemptive relationships in sacred community. The restoring of persons to healthy or righteous relationships with God, others, themselves, and the earth. . . .”(D&C 163:2b). This will never be easy, but it is the way of all true religion, good government, and proper reason. It is the only way beyond the killing of more in the future than in the past.

Gandhi advised “Be the change you want to see in the world.” St. Francis prayed “Lord make me an instrument of your peace.” Therefore, let us sing out with all our hearts “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.” Let peace begin with me and you. Let peace begin with me, you, and us. Let peace begin with me, you, us, and them. Let us begin!