Why Peace House Stands
By Busshin Nash, Visiting Novice
What is available here is the opportunity to discover that things can be otherwise. The capacity to be otherwise is freedom. Even though this freedom is available and replete in everybody, because it does not announce itself, people may need a space to come that is intentionally conducive to its discovery—an incubator and a refuge. In that sense, Peace House cannot really give any “thing” to anyone; it simply stands as a witness to the possibility of transformation and freedom for all people.
In my experience, it takes constant, self-conscious effort to maintain a space in such a way that it can reliably hold out the possibility of freedom to the people that enter it. Without that effort, the ways of the world slowly and inevitably creep back in. We are not immune. Those worldly ways are not the enemy of freedom. Rather, the question concerns what is most helpful to the people that come inside. What serves them? As far as I have been able to tell, the process of discovering one’s innate freedom is helped along by things like joyful silence, dignifying beauty, and patient, loving guides.
Therefore, Peace House stands so that anyone looking can have access to these resources, that they might make this discovery of freedom for themselves and learn to share it with others. From the perspective of our work-a-day world, maintaining those resourses can often look like not doing very much at all. But from a different perspective, this “non-doing” is nothing but great trust in the repletion of freedom in all people and things.
