“So, what do you do in the US?” someone asked me a short while ago. She was not American.
“I work for the Zen Peacemakers,” I told her.
Her blue eyes went blank and the edges of her lips twitched. “Huh,” was all she said, nodding vaguely.
From her reaction, I suspect she felt that making peace is almost an affront to reality nowadays, or at best a child’s imaginings. For many years I have seen people raise eyebrows at this or look away, not so much in disapproval, more as if I’m daft and have wasted many years of productivity. After all, I could have started a business. I could have been a therapist or taken my writing to a new level. Instead—Zen Peacemakers?
Of course, members do all those things. But in these critical times, with so much at stake, I hear this question again and again: What are Buddhists doing?
I can’t speak for Buddhists, I can hardly speak for Zen Peacemakers, just describe how I see our work. I’ll start with what we don’t do: We don’t take sides, or, as someone said yesterday in a meeting, we work as one family.
That’s not easy today, when family members won’t speak to each other because of who one voted for (in most of the cases I hear about, it’s the liberal voter who refuses to talk with the other side). In the Zen Peacemaker family, we talk to everyone provided some minimal rules of courtesy are observed. That means that we don’t stay silent.
It doesn’t mean we cave in for the sake of a false harmony, or that we comfort ourselves with spiritual cliches, or that we turn fragile in the face of horror. A long time ago, at a wonderful yoga ashram, I heard a woman say she never reads the newspaper because her personal calm and equanimity are very important for her. She’s probably not a member of Zen Peacemakers. When a family is blind or in denial, dysfunction sets in.
I’ve often wondered, when reading about children taking guns to school and shooting their schoolmates, how their parents feel. If your own child wounded and killed other children, do you stop acknowledging him or her? You can condemn the actions loudly and vociferously, and of course, nowadays prosecutors go after parents as well. You can feel horrible about what they did, make atonement, even reparations. In my mother’s older age, young Germans would come and paint her apartment, their way of making reparations for the Holocaust. But tell me, do you stop acknowledging them as your children?
Or do you say, much as Gandhi pointed out: People are people; it’s their actions that cause harm. Nobody is born evil, except in horror movies. Individual choices and actions can be horrific or great blessings to all of humanity, but there’s a basic equality to all humans, be they a Hitler or a King.
Serving that common humanity, that essence shared by all human and nonhuman beings, is what we mean by serving the whole. The peacemaking we do is serving the whole. I have gotten angry many times and spoke harshly to let off steam. What I’ve learned over the years is to act with immediacy when needed, but always to keep my eyes on the prize. And what is the prize? Bringing our oneness into consciousness, mine and everyone else’s.
That does not mean we do nothing. That does not mean we don’t resist terrible laws and hurtful actions. Instead, we bring medicine for the sick, food for hungry children, we take care of the earth and its species, give respect and dignity to all. By now, what with pandemics, prevalence of nuclear weapons, and the degradation of this earth, we know that we can’t cure these without taking the big picture into account.
“Whoever you exclude from the mandala of your practice will sabotage your work,” Bernie used to warn.
You can have a child who goes one way and another child who goes another, and have very strong opinions about the difference; you’re not neutral. But they’re both your children, and even in the worst of times you don’t forget it. We can work all we want towards wellbeing rather than profits, care rather than extortion, peaceful relations rather than continuing war. Some will join, some won’t. And—it’s all one family.
I recognize that not everyone agrees with this approach, including various religious traditions. But this is what I learned from Bernie Glassman and all the work that he and so many others did over the years. I rarely saw him indignant or upset. Instead, he’d call me: “Eve, let’s go out for dinner.” He would call it a day, get a good night’s sleep, and wake up in the morning refreshed and ready to get back to peacemaking work as he saw it.
Who has the energy for hate and indignation? For rancor or rage? I prefer to keep my decreasing energy towards building and rebuilding a solid foundation for a family with infinitely different members—but a family nevertheless.
I raise money for illegal immigrants. That doesn’t mean that I agree with those who say we should have open borders for all refugees headed to our border. As I wrote before, we should close the border for a while till we figure out new policies and institute new systems. We also have to honestly ask ourselves how open we are to vastly different cultures and sets of values that people bring here. There’s no room here for blindness or even rose-colored glasses.
One last thing. As I was reminded yesterday in a Zoom meeting, each and every one of us participates in some system of oppression. I don’t care if you’re white, black, Latino, Native American, Muslim, or Jewish, I don’t care how marginalized and even persecuted you feel your group has been. We operate inside systems that are often based on scarcity in order to maximize profits, strengthen religious or ethnic identities at a cost to others, empower one gender over another. We may try to act differently as individuals, but we’re all members of clubs, as Bernie often reminded us, consciously or not.
I remember driving across country and admiring the old pioneer families who settled in those vast plains, where women gave birth on their own and where many could not survive the terrible winters. Only later did I realize how much of this was done on the backs of Native Americans, whose land was stolen and their sustenance destroyed.
You may be part of a minority group, you may be a glorious human being, but you’re still part of that system, and if you look well enough, you’ll see and identify those who suffer as part of the system that you participate in. At the very least, it brings humility into the picture.
So, what should we do? There are certain clear-eyed people who see all this and turn their backs on the world. Not the Buddha. He is celebrated for his enlightenment, but I admire him for going back down to be with people and walk the earth. Just one thing interested him, and that was dealing with suffering. The compassion of that approach has always stunned and inspired me.
It doesn’t mean we don’t defend ourselves and others against violence. It doesn’t mean we don’t protect, shelter, and feed our families. We don’t ask whether to do those things, what we ask is: How do we do this? What is appropriate here? What is skillful?
If you have a better way of working in this world, I’m curious to hear it.
Eve Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and head teacher at the Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She received Dharma Transmission and inka from Bernie Glassman. She is also a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction.
Eve has trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has been a Spiritholder at retreats bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Before that, she worked at the Greyston Mandala, which provides housing, child care, jobs, and AIDS-related medical services in Yonkers, New York.
Eve’s articles on social activists have appeared in the magazines Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, and Tikkun. Her collection of Zen koans for modern Zen practitioners in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, came out in February 2020.
Hunt for the Lynx, the first in her fantasy trilogy, The Dogs of the Kiskadee Hills, was published in 2016.
“When I was a young girl my dream was to be a hermit, live alone, and write serious literature. That’s not how things turned out. I got involved with people. I got involved in the world. Two things matter to me right now: the creative spark and the aliveness of personal connection. In some way, they both come down to the same thing.”