Introduction by John McDonnell: I want now to introduce Marianne Williamson. People will know Marianne from her writings and they will know of her from her campaigning and also from the grass roots work that she has done around provision of meals on wheels, that sort of thing. Many will also know her from the Global Renaissance Alliance both in terms of the information that is disseminated on the net and elsewhere and now, of course, because of her work with Dennis Kucinich and the campaign for a Department of Peace.

Marianne Williamson - The US Department of Peace initiative

Marianne began by thanking John McDonnell, MP and Diana Basterfield for inviting her to speak at the meeting and then continued:

This past April, Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives that would establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace. Thousands of Americans have lobbied their congress people to support this idea whose time has come.

The goal of the department would be to coordinate conflict-resolution and peace-building efforts both domestically and internationally, providing the president with a much broader array of options for handling violent situations than are normally presented to him. Would we be so quick to apply police and military solutions to our collective problems, if we had peaceful alternatives deemed every bit as effective and sometimes even more so?

"We will not solve the problems of the world," said Albert Einstein, "from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking: We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives. People cause our social problems, and people are more than merely material beings. To address the causal issues regarding these problems, we must deal with more than material factors.

Violence is reflected in physical action, but it emanates from the human heart. Any approach to the cessation of violence must involve emotional, psychological and spiritual factors, if the approach is achieve more than mere eradication of symptoms.

Social and political disease is similar in many ways to biological disease. Decades ago, mainstream medical understanding was radically altered by new realizations regarding health and healing. People began to realize that an allopathic treatment of symptoms, while often the short-term solution to a medical problem, does not necessarily create long-term healing. To be healthy, we must do more than treat sickness; we must pro-actively cultivate our health. Millions of Americans have turned to nutrition, exercise and myriad forms of complementary healing techniques -- from acupuncture to visualization -- to foster and maintain healthier bodies. Surely, the best way to treat disease is to prevent it from occurring.

A holistic approach to healing does not represent an alternative model to Western medicine, but a complementary model. It does not supplant traditional medicine, but augments it. And so it is that we could use a complementary approach to politics as well, one that recognizes not just the symptoms of our problems, but their root causes. A Department of Peace would honour the entirety of a human -- our emotional, psychological and spiritual issues as well as merely our material ones. And in doing so, it would address more deeply the entirety of our problems.

Especially after the tragedy of September 11, people have every right to expect and demand whatever action necessary to create security for our children and ourselves. But conscious Westerners also realize that terrorism is a multidimensional problem requiring a set of multidimensional solutions. It is not like an operable tumor, but more like a cancer that has already metastasized to various parts of the body. We cannot just zap the problem and expect it to disappear forever. We must heal it at the level from which it emerged.

The Department of Peace in the US, and a Ministry for Peace in the UK, would take a more human approach to healing our society, looking not merely for ways we can destroy an enemy, but for more powerful ways to create new friends. The pressing need of this century is that we find a way to harness the power of a nonviolent heart.

Ultimately, the Peace Movement that will transform the world is not indigenous to any particular nation, but to the species itself. There is a conviction emerging from the depth of humanity at this time -- not just from Americans, or the British, or anyone else. It represents a yearning for survival itself, an absolute conviction that we must move beyond the stereotypical, often outmoded thought forms that have defined so much of our governmental functioning of the last few decades. We must evolve into a pro-active embrace of the ways of peace, or we will be doomed to fall back time and time again into the patterns of violence that now permeate world affairs. We must say no to the idea that war is inevitable. And we must say so with conviction.

In the words of philosopher Tiellard de Chardin, "One day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." Just as terrorism is hatred given political expression, peace is love given political expression. We must wage peace with sophistication and commitment, just as we now wage war. For the sake of our children, I pray that we will.