Why? Because peace is not just the absence of war. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it also as being "in a state of friendliness or quietness". And that is personal - something that, in order to have it, one must cultivate it diligently.
That is not easy. Personal peace - peace of mind and heart - requires first that I be at peace with myself, because only then can I understand that, just as I am fully entitled to be me, I am not the centre of the universe and others have as much right to be what they are, do what they do and say what they say as I have, no matter how different their being and doing and saying might be to mine.
It requires that I learn to practise patience and kindness and generosity and humility and courtesy and unselfishness and good temper and sincerity and that I always believe the best of others.
It demands of me, simply, that I learn to love my neighbour as myself. And if you think that's easy, just try it for a day.
So long as husbands fight with wives, often to the point of divorce and acrimonious battles over children and matrimonial property; so long as sibling fights with sibling, sometimes to the point of lifetime alienation; so long as neighbour fights with neighbour, sometimes to the point of violent confrontation; so long as friends fall out and stop talking to one another, the world will never be at peace.
World peace, you see, begins in your heart and mine.
This week, incidentally, marks 15 years since this column began to appear weekly which means I have finally achieved a target I set myself years ago - to equal the continuity achieved by that venerable wordsmith, Gordon McLauchlan.
His weekly contributions graced these pages for that length of time, the last one on December 18, 2004. The first of my weekly columns was published on August 28, 1996, and since then there have been some 750 of them amounting to some 525,000 words.
When then editor Gavin Ellis asked me to write a weekly column, I asked him "What about?" He said, "Anything you like". "Do you really mean that?" I asked. "Yes," said he - and, for a man with an opinion on everything, it was an offer I couldn't refuse.
I am grateful he and his successors have stuck to that undertaking - and still do - in spite of the criticism, and sometimes abuse, they have sometimes taken from those who would have had this column canned.
My writings have always been markedly politically incorrect and often unashamedly Christian and thus have often made angry some of those who count themselves among the great and the good.
But the editors, bless them, have always had the courage to stick to the fundamental democratic principle of free speech: that while they might disagree - and sometimes quite vehemently - with what I say, they will ever defend my right to say it.
Over the years I have received thousands of emails, hundreds of letters and scores of telephone calls from readers. I thank you all because, since I write on the basis of "love me or hate me, but please don't ignore me" - a tenet handed on to me by the first editor I ever worked for - I thrive on reaction, be it positive or negative.
And I guess it goes with the territory that while many of those who disagree with me write letters to the editor, a much greater number who agree send me nice personal emails - except for the ones whose vicious, obscene and generally misspelled and ungrammatical tirades are invariably anonymous.
My special thanks, however, goes to those Christian brothers and sisters who have prayed for me over the years and still do. For without that, the most effective and powerful of all support, this column would have ceased long ago.
God bless you all.
- garth.george@hotmail.com
