Religion & Peace

Margaret Wheatley asks a question that has stayed with me. 

In a time of uncertainty, fear, division, and institutional breakdown, she says, perhaps the most important question for a leader is not, “What should I do?” 

It is: “Who do I choose to be?” 

For me, leadership is not limited to those who hold formal positions of authority. It is about how we use whatever influence we have, wherever we are, and how we shape the spaces and relationships around us. 

We live in what she calls a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Everywhere we look, there are reasons to be afraid. Social divisions deepen. Trust becomes harder to build. People retreat into their own camps. The problems before us can feel so large that we begin to wonder whether anything we do really matters. And when the world feels too difficult to change, we can easily give up on changing the small world around us. 

Wheatley offers a different way of thinking about leadership. She does not ask us to save the world. She asks us to create “islands of sanity,” a classroom, a community, a family, or simply a space where people still remember how to treat one another as human beings. A place where they can disagree without becoming enemies. A place where trust, dignity, and curiosity are still possible. 

I have been thinking about this idea a lot lately, because it brought back a phrase I heard throughout my years of learning from my teacher, Fethullah Gülen: “islands of peace,” or sulh adaları. The words are different, but the vision is remarkably close. 

He often reminded us that we cannot make everyone peaceful. We cannot persuade everyone to engage in dialogue. We cannot soften every heart or erase every hostility. But perhaps we do not have to. We can begin where we are, building small islands of peace in the middle of a troubled ocean, deciding that hatred will not be given a home in our own relationships, meeting people who are different from us without asking them to become like us. And perhaps these small islands can become places from which a different future begins. 

For Gülen, education was one of the most important places for building such islands. A school could be more than a place where knowledge is transmitted. It could become a place where people who would otherwise never meet sit at the same table, listen to one another, and discover that difference does not have to become division. 

Two Spaces, One Question 

This is exactly what I found myself thinking about during the first week of our new academic year at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. I spent the day at our Fall Faculty Retreat, from morning until late afternoon, thinking with colleagues about what it means 

to become a better university for our students. Then, that evening, I logged into my first class of the semester and found myself returning to many of the same questions from a different angle. 

At the retreat, faculty members from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious and philosophical traditions spent hours thinking together about a simple but important question: How can we become a better university for our students? There was something quietly beautiful about that. People with different beliefs and ways of seeing the world sat together, not trying to erase their differences, but trying to build something together. 

That evening, I carried the same spirit into my first class of the semester, Theology and Scripture in Spiritual Care Practice. Fifteen master’s and doctoral students sat around the table, coming from many different religious, philosophical, and spiritual backgrounds. We began with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s idea of “the danger of a single story.” 

In spiritual care, this question matters more than almost anywhere else. What stories do we carry about suffering, about healing, about faith, and what happens when we let our own beliefs grow so loud that we can no longer hear the complicated story of another person? For a caregiver, this is not simply an intellectual question. It is an ethical one. We have power whenever someone comes to us in a vulnerable moment, power that comes from our role and access, from the authority people project onto us, from the specialized language we carry, and from social privileges we may not even notice we hold. We can use that power to make room for their story, or we can use it to hand them ours instead. So I asked my students to sit with that difference, to think about how we might use our power to make room for someone’s whole story, rather than offering one easy answer. 

Then each student described their own beliefs, religion, and worldview, trying to answer the question, “Who am I when I enter a spiritual care relationship?” Watching students from such different cultures, religions, and worldviews listen to one another, contribute, and show one another respect was something worth witnessing. Everyone was trying to understand one another. No one had to surrender their faith or their identity. No one had to become less of themselves in order to make room for someone else. They were practicing something more difficult than tolerance: they were learning how to give another person a place in their hearts. 

Roots That Reach 

I thought of a saying attributed to Rumi: “One foot is firmly rooted in the center, and the other is with the seventy-two nations.” The image has always spoken to me. We need roots. We need to know who we are. But having roots should not prevent us from reaching toward others. Perhaps this is one of the deepest purposes of education, not simply to teach us what to think, but to teach us how to live with people who think differently. 

During the retreat, we also learned how to make candles. It was my first time making one, and since it happened to be my wife’s birthday, I made my first candle for her. As I worked, another saying attributed to Rumi came to mind: “A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.” 

Perhaps this, too, is a beautiful way to think about education. One light does not become smaller when it gives light to another. The room simply becomes brighter. 

This is what I hope we are building at HIU. Not a place where everyone thinks alike, or where differences quietly disappear, but a place where differences can sit at the same table, where one person’s light can help another see more clearly, where students and faculty can light one another’s candles and become brighter together. An island of sanity. An island of peace. 

One Island, Not the Whole Ocean 

Of course, one island cannot calm the whole ocean. One classroom cannot heal the world. One university cannot end hatred or division. But perhaps that was never the task given to us. Perhaps our task is much closer: to create one place where dignity is protected, where people listen before they judge, where a person can bring their whole story and know that it will be heard. And then, perhaps, another place. And another. 

Maybe peace has always begun this way, not with the whole world suddenly becoming peaceful, but with small islands appearing in the middle of the storm. 

I feel fortunate to be part of such an island. Education is something more than a degree. Sometimes it is simply the experience of sitting beside someone whose faith, culture, or worldview is different from yours, and discovering that you can still listen, learn, and grow together. Your own light does not become smaller when another light begins to shine beside it. 

Perhaps that is what an island of sanity is. 

Perhaps that is what a sulh adası is. 

And perhaps, in a world that seems increasingly divided, building such small islands, one at a time, is one of the most meaningful things we can do.

Tags: community of peace