Womb Wisdom: Is There a God?

Elizabeth Esther runs a meme in which on the first Saturday of the month bloggers select their favorite post of the month and share it with other bloggers. The links are posted at Esther's site: here.

It was difficult to select a favorite for November: there were three contenders in my opinion. While The Walnut Tree: An Example of God's Bounty is my personal favorite, Dona Nobis Pacem received the most comments, so I have copied it below. (f you wish to read the 19 comments that were left there, click on the link.)

The blogosphere, as most of you probably know, is celebrating today as a peace movement day. More information can be found at Mimi's site, where you can read the contributions of other bloggers on this theme.

As so often happens in my life, I experienced a moment of synchronicity as I was preparing this blog post. In the afternoon, I was in Arizona to give a graduation speech to a class of Arabic specialists. Without giving any thought to today's peace blog, I nonetheless spoke about peace, beginning my speech in a way not atypical of graduation speeches I give whenever linguists are among the graduating students. The Cold War, I tell them, was not won with weapons. It was won with words -- the words of Americans who understood Russian language and culture and the words of Russians who understood American language and culture. I was thrilled back then to be one grain of sand in the cement of the span that bridged the two superpowers and brought both to a cautious ally status. So, too, today, it will most likely not be weapons but the efforts of the Americans who speak Arabic and understand Arabic cultures and Arabs who speak English and understand American culture who will bring the current hot war to an end. General Abizaid has ascribed the success of the surge in Iraq to the contribution of American linguists.

Years ago, at the approaching end of the Cold War (although no one knew at the time that the Cold War was going to end), I served as interpreter for a remarkable man, Pyotr Volkovich, then vice president of the Belarus Peace Committee. During the Cold War, every major city in the USSR had a peace committee, composed of citizens dedicated to promoting world peace. You see, the Russians were honestly afraid that the USA intended to start a war against them. The members of these committees can today be considered veterans of the Cold War, So, too, I would argue can be that handful of us Americans working and studying in Russia at the time and those Russian scholars living and studying in America. My daughter, Lizzie, cherishes a button that says "Veteran of the Cold War." As the only Westerner in her Soviet 7th grade classroom, coping with distrust and dislike of Americans at the time, she considers rightfully that she has earned the title.

Pyotr I knew from my work in Belarus, one part of which in 1989 was to prepare bilingual documents for the Ministry of Education for an exchange with the USA. Therefore, I was subsequently brought to Portland, Oregon in 1990 to put together the corresponding set of bilingual documents for one of the Portland school districts to establish an exchange with Belarus. Since the Peace Committee provided the financial support for the exchange from the Belarus side, Pyotr had come along with the superintendent of Minsk public schools. The timing had been manipulated to allow Pyotr to be the keynote speaker at the International Rotary Convention that took place in Portland that year. I went to the convention to provide moral support for Pyotr or so I thought. However, Pyotr surprised me by ditching his Soviet interpreter and called out as he approached the podium, "Beth, so mnoi." (Beth, come with me.) And that is how I ended up being the interpreter for his very moving speech which focused on the need for peace. (I have posted details of his speech on Mahlou Musings.)

Perhaps the most potent advocacy for peace I have ever encountered is a poster drawn by a child, who contributed it to a contest for peace advocacy organized by the Moscow Peace Committee. Against a pure blue (sky?) background, the child had drawn a chalky white frame of a house encompassing a globe inside. At the top, the child had scrawled five words: "U nas net drugogo doma." (We have no other home.) No other words were needed, I think. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? So, let's wrap the only home we have in the protection of peace!