Choose non-violence to deal with issues

ARCHBISHOP of Port of Spain Jason Gordon has called on people to consider non-violent means to deal with conflicts in their daily lives.

In a soul-stirring message at the Pro-Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help RC Church, Harris Promenade, San Fernando on Old Year’s night, the Archbishop said the “core” of the problem regarding attainment of peace is the “violence that is in our speech and the violence in our attitudes toward each other.”

“Peace is not the absence of war, it is not the absence of strife and conflict, peace is about right relationship. We first have to make peace with ourselves. You know how many people at war with themselves.

“And what about our negative humour, have you ever listened to the kind of negative humour we have in our households, and in our streets and among our friends.”

That we would choose to emphasis the most negative thing about a person, he continued, as a way of making fun and joke and in that way embarrass people and ridicule people publicly as a way of having banter and fun in our society. That is not the way to build peace.

He said this lack of peace is also manifest in the way persons drive on the nation’s roads, almost as if they are “at war” with the vehicle.

“When you listen to the talk shows on media, sometimes when I hear it I wonder if a war is about to break out because we have become so desensitized to the negativity, by the anger, by the hate speech that we no longer hear ourselves in how we are speaking to each other.

It is betraying an incredibly wounded psyche and an incredibly wounded people and that wound, the psychic wound of our nation will not be healed except we bring that wound honestly and openly to Christ himself so that Christ himself could become our peace.

I am inviting us in this year, as we make this crossing, I am inviting us to consider non-violence as a way for 2019 because that is how we will build a culture of peace and that is how we will become artisans of peace.”

He said peace was a right of every individual including the refugees and those persons who were unable to secure bail because of “injustices in the law”

“In our beloved country we are happy to live by the protection of the law but we are also happy to turn a blind eye to the injustices of the law, we are happy to not see the ways in which justice is broken in our society.”

He said the Holy Father has also commented on the role of politicians as peace builders saying this peace should not be partisan but embrace the entire society.

“They are supposed to be a source of unity for the whole society and the source of unity that seeks after the common good and not just the partisan good. Is it being done for then few or is it being done for the society as a whole.”