Peace is Child's Play

by O. Fred Donaldson, Ph.D.

Peace is a place already there in the child, who takes nothing more seriously than what adults dismiss as sentimental and childish.

     I was kneeling on a school playground in Athlone, Capetown, South Africa surrounded by young Black children who were amused, excited, and curious to see, touch, and play with the tall white man on the ground with them.  From the back of the group the smallest boy squirmed through the others until he crawled into my lap. He reached out and wrapped his tiny arms around me as far as they would go and held me tight.  We didn't talk.  He just stayed there, snuggled in close in the midst of the crowding, jostling, and laughing children. The force of his look, his touch, his innocence, and his trust flowed into me warming me from the inside out like hot chocolate on a winter day.  I encircled him with my arms so the crush of other children wouldn't hurt him.  He didn’t ask much, just for me to be there with him. We stayed together until the bell rang and the children ran to the school.  He didn't run away.  He stayed for a moment and hugged. Then he quietly walked away.

       When I returned to the school one of the staff who had observed me through the windows asked me if I knew anything about the little boy in my lap.  I replied that I knew nothing about him.  She said that he was brought to the school after he was found tied up in a black plastic bag and thrown away.  I turned away and looked through tears back out onto the playground. "In our few moments together we touched the emptiness within us.  A pervasive sense of connection assured us that we belong.  In our belonging the fearful nature of the surrounding world was drastically reduced. He is what Eli Weisel has called a "bearer of promise."

        In his memoir of fighting as a soldier in World War II, J. Glenn Gray (1970, p.45) expresses his hope that there are "surely alternative ways more creative and less dreadful" than war to satisfy our genuine longing for community.  In his recent book Chris Hedges (2002, p.141) suggests that we need a new way to speak that lays bare the bankrupt fantasy of war.  John Keegan (1993, p.385) concludes his history of warfare writing that over the past 4000 years war has become a habit adding that "unless we unlearn the habits we have taught ourselves, we shall not survive." This little boy is a messenger embodying a living promise to Gray's, Hedges' and Keegan's hopes.

      What is this promise?  His promise is peace.  How did he come to me so openly?  I felt from him no anger, fear, revenge; instead I felt belonging, love, a yearning for peace. He is a partner in what I call the Godsend Conspiracy.  The Godsend Conspiracy is a compact of peace made between Creation and children.  It is an accord made in light years and felt in seconds.

You would think that humans could protect our children and create the conditions within which they would thrive.  On the contrary, children are being destroyed and childhood is disappearing.  Children are forced to take on the responsibilities of adulthood at earlier and earlier ages. For example, children are often forced to fight in our struggles. We have for much of our history used children in war.  UNICEF, Save the Children, and the US National Commission on Children document that children are not safe in the world. They abandon living in an effort to simply survive in a world created by adults. During the decade 1990-2000, Save the Children estimated that 100 million children died because of adult inflicted living conditions. As much as we extol children as our heirs, the legacy we provide is destruction.  When there is no time to be children the inherent skills of childhood are lost. When childhood's skills are devalued and undeveloped life becomes a movement from the forgotten to the fearful.

 But my purpose is not to re-catalog the misuse of children in war, but rather to suggest that we have neglected them in peace as well. At a time when adults seem unable and unwilling to live in peace, it is imperative that we explore all of the resources we have at our disposal to bring about peace on earth. John Keegan (p. 60) asserts that "a cultural transformation from our warrior past demands a break with the past for which there are no precedents."

 Children are a neglected and undeveloped resource for peace.  I'm not talking about teaching them conflict resolution and new games.  However beneficial such projects are they continue the process of adults teaching children our approach to the world. I'm not talking about teaching children what we know.  I'm suggesting something radically different.  I'm suggesting learning from children.   I'm suggesting that children are a real resource for peace.  That within childhood is a way of being vastly different from the path that adults have taken. This way of peace is inherent in children's original play.  To most adults such an idea is merely an idealized return to some supposed state of innocence.  I am not the first one; however, to suggest that something special exists within children.  Jesus, Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Ramakrishna, Lao-tzu, among others, have admonished us to go to the children. But we've never done it.  As Lyall Watson (1991, p. 29-30) suggests, " . . . perhaps all we need to do is redevelop a kind of organic innocence, recapture the receptiveness of childhood . . ." Children are able to lead us because their play is  beyond the boundaries of worlds.  It is this play on the edge of worlds that offers us an unprecedented and undeciphered way of relating to one another.

After 33 years of doing what these sages suggest I have experienced that indeed children are bearers of a promise, one that we have as yet discovered.  Inherent in this promise of play is a choice utterly outside the dimensions of contest relationships we have known.   That such a possibility exists may seem impossible.  Many have assumed that the fragmentation of conflict will always be with us.   In our survival based scheme of life self- defense is considered to be normal and necessary.  War, however regrettable, is then something we as individuals, groups and countries periodically must wage.

We haven't been able to keep our children safe.  Perhaps they can keep us safe and in so doing short-circuit our savage spiral of violence and revenge.  What do we have to lose?  We adults haven't been able to find peace.  To us peace is merely recess, a time- out to recoup between wars.  We keep passing war down to our children as if it is our most prized legacy.

What are the secret lessons that children like the little boy in South Africa have to offer, the ones that persist despite continual adulteration by their seniors? Children bring with them four basic unadulterated raw materials of life: love, belonging, an urge to thrive, and a trust in the mystery of it all. These lessons have reality for me now as they have been ground into me like dirt into a young child's pants.  I have found them throughout my play with children.

We have lived life as if it is easier and safer not to love. But it is our ability to love that, as the little boy demonstrated, more than anything else heals our hurts and helps us find our way back to peace.  J Glenn Gray (1970, p. 213) realized this at the end of his tour of duty in World War II when he wrote in his diary, "And this morning when I rose, tired and distraught from bed, I knew that in order to survive this time I must love more.  There is no other way . . .."   Chris Hedges (2002, p.184) finishes his examination of war with the same feelings.  He writes that, "To survive as a human being is possible only through love."

This love is an impulse to openness or intent to kindness and compassion.  Contrary to what we might fear we are left not in an identity crisis, but in an identity expansion which makes us, not less human, but more humane. I spent an afternoon playing with fifteen street boys one afternoon in Cape Town, South Africa.   We all left the park touching and hugging each other; one of the older boys asked me through an interpreter if he could learn to play like this with children.   Play's love has everything to do with a willingness to be vulnerable in an unconditional and fierce commitment to another's thriving.  In a very real and practical sense this means that as Urie Bronfenbrenner said, "for a child to develop normally, somebody has to be irrationally crazy about that kid."

It s often felt that conflict provides experiences including excitement or quickening of life's energy and a depth of communal experience or comradeship that peace cannot offer.  Conflict and war are often described as being the ways that especially men find meaning in life.   J. Glenn Gray (1970, p.39) suggests that, "Whether this is true or not deserves to be investigated."   I've discovered that we do not need to be pushed to the abyss of conflict to ignite these enduring qualities of life.  Conflict is an enticing elixir, which hides a lethal addiction.

I've found this quickening and belonging in my play with children. There is no pretense but a concreteness and profound earnestness required in our play that is usually thought to be reserved only for combat.  It is hard to overestimate the importance of this finding.  It reminds us that conflict is not the sole source of such enduring appeals.  Play and combat, however, are not the same.  Play is done by heart and combat is "played for keeps."  In moments of play the boundaries of the self expand outward allowing a kinship in which I feel a "belonging to all life."    In this play the "I" passes insensibly into a "we" and our sense of self disappears.  As a thirteen-year-old girl from a squatter camp in Manila said to her friend who was timid about joining our play, "It's OK he's human too."

Another of the children's lessons is that the purpose of life is to thrive not merely survive.  There is a seemingly strange similarity between this lesson from children's play and what Hannah Arendt (1970, p.xiv) expressed as the "inevitable conclusions of the soldier’s basic credo—that life is not the highest good."   Children have taught me that the survival game adult's play is a dead end. When play becomes contest we are stripped of our natural, life affirming skills that are meant to sustain us in moments of attack.  Contests are relationships between partial beings, far from being stronger; this response is more virulent and violent than a response by a whole person.  When we adulterate our original play we destroy what we cannot make.  The bodies and hearts of our children are tattered in the long nightfall of the human sprit we call survival.

Play teaches that I have a choice beyond survival and contesting with the world.  This choice to thrive is based on a trust in the power to love and to give this love unconditionally at the moment of attack, and after the worst of atrocities. The choice to be neither an aggressor nor a victim increases my opportunities exponentially.  Only when I stop my dependence on self-defense can I begin to thrive. There is no safety in such a fearful, contest world that leaves little or no room for living the miracle of love.  When we thrive we feel loved and are able to give love.  Fear may impel us to survive, but it is love that propels us to feel alive, sustains our vitality, and restores our humanity.  We are seeking the experience of being alive.  The difficulty is that for us to find it, we must not be afraid of life.

These children's lessons are intertwined and are often mysterious and sometimes unbearable in the force of their truth.  Imagine, for example, a world with no sides, no fault, no blame, no revenge, no self-defense, and no enemies.  To adults this would be a fairytale world.  It was to me too until children like the little boy in South Africa introduced me to choices I didn't know I have.  Such a world may be unbelievable to adults, but to the little boy and me it is not unlivable.

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah. Introduction in; Gray, J. Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men In Battle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

Bronfenbrenner, Urie.  Quoted in Beyond Rhetoric: A New Agenda For Children and Families. Final Report of the National Commission on Children. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991

Gray, J. Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men In Battle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

Hedges, Chris. War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.

Keegan, John. A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Watson, Lyall. Gifts of Unknown Things. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1991.