Article June 22, 1987 Issue

Second Thought

Looking again at news and commentary

edited by Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D.

Children As Teachers Of Peace

Editors' comment: On a day when the front pages of most newspapers highlighted bleak prospects for the 1986 superpower arms pact, a friend left a book of children's writings and drawings on our desk. Children As Teachers Of Peace has timely messages, like the drawing above by Judith, age 11, and the advice of a ten-year-old named Carrie, who wrote, "When you know you are about to say something bad or when you are holding a grudge against someone, say to yourself, 'I can experience peace instead of this.'"

Looking through the book, we were reminded of that other, much-publicized ten-year-old, Samantha Smith from Maine. She wrote in 1982 to then Soviet leader Andropov: "I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't, please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war."

Adults may have a wide range of political convictions about how best to deal with totalitarianism and to conduct statesmanship. But whatever our particular estimates of the waging of the peace, we do well to emulate the child-heart that will neither be complacent nor surrender to despairing mental forces. The need is for radical prayer—a conviction of the supreme power of good and God's care for all His children. It is actually no more speculative to trust spiritual law, to recognize that God, divine Principle, is supreme, than to trust in sunshine even while there are raindrops. God, Spirit, neither relies on nor is deadlocked by social, historical, or political precedents or manipulations.

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