From northeast India #2--November 2010

I've been part of a three-day consortium at the Martin Luther Christian University in Shillong. Leban Serto is the coordinator of the Peace Studies Program at MLCU and the one who invited me to be a resource person. In the mornings we had plenary programs. On the last day I was the main speaker, talking on interfaith dimensions of peacemaking. I shared stories from Nigeria and Lebanon as well as from our interfaith work in Detroit. I also sketched the interfaith family tree on nonviolence (which has some arbitrary dimensions to it admittedly): From Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi to Abdul Gaffar Khan to E. Stanley Jones to Martin Luther King Jr to Abraham Joshua Heschel to Aung San Suu Kyi. (That's not always linear, but they are all connected.) Besides Christians at the consortium we had Hindus, Buddhists, practitioners of indigenous religions, a Jew, and some people of no specific faith. I'm not aware of any Muslim participants.

Then each day in the afternoons I led a workshop on conflict transformation with special elements on peace education and interfaith relationships. We explored dynamics, processes and skills of conflict transformation, mainstream/margin, and using a tool for analysis that moves to building comprehensive strategies. The energy levels were very high with a lot of interaction. I was delighted to meet some Baptists who are deeply engaged in peacemaking work in the region, especially some women activists who have had extensive training. We also had a number of students from Burma, both Christian and Buddhist, who participated in the training. Toward the end of one of the sessions we had some wonderfully blunt and exciting discussions about applying these things to the resistance against the Burmese dictatorship as well as to the many armed conflicts in northeast India. It was a great group to work with.

In the evenings on the first and last night of the consortium we had some cultural programs with dance and music. Talk about a cultural feast. There are over 200 different ethnic groups in this region, with their own languages, dances, dress and customs.

Today I worked in a postscript training for Christian students and graduates of the peace studies program. We went back over the material we'd covered in the consortium workshops laying some Biblical studies addressing those same themes. We looked at Acts 6.1-7 through the lenses of first mainstream/margin and then conflict resolution to a win/win solution. Then we plunged into Esther 4, first with mainstream/margin analysis and then using a tool called either "Social Barometer" or "Spectrum of Allies"--a great tool to work on understanding the different types of people related to an issue and developing complex strategies to move people in your direction.

In the afternoon I was taken to a "sacred grove" for the Khasi people--a huge forested area that is kept as a natural preserve. Along the edge there are many ancient stones placed in various configurations kind of like miniature Stonehenges. Nobody knows who the people are that placed these stones or what their purpose was, but they are scattered throughout the Meghalaya region. Most were rather small, some were about 6 or 8 feet high, and then there were two that were about 12 to 15 feet high. My friend tells me that legend has it that these stones were not raised by human hands but by prayer.