My Personal View of the Peace Testimony

by Chester Freeman
Rochester Meeting

I’ve always been a peaceful person.  Even as a child I never fought back when I was hit or bullied. Having been brought up in a fundamentalistic Black Baptist Church, I was taught to turn the other cheek. As a teenager that peaceful characteristic became a bit more difficult, but I held to it.

So even before accepting the Peace Testimony in the Quaker tradition, I was already practicing it in the Black Baptist Church. There were occasions when thoughts tested my belief system during the Vietnam War. However, during my four years at Hampton University, I took upon myself the responsibility of visiting wounded soldiers in the Veterans Hospital in Hampton, Virginia.

The young men that I visited were the same age as me, and we related to each other in a personal manner. I could see firsthand how difficult it was for them to cope physically, spiritually, and psychologically. Most of the men I saw had lost an arm, a leg or both legs. They were devastated and lonely. They relied on the kindness of strangers. They were dealing with PTSD long before we had a name for it.  I tried to support them by listening to their stories, encouraging them to express their feelings and emotions. This seemed to bring some comfort to them. For those who were religious,  I rolled them in their wheelchairs into the Chapel. I spent time listening to the stories of those who were not religious. Later in life, I would become one of the Protestant hospital chaplains at Hartford Hospital (Hartford, Connecticut).

As a contemporary Quaker, I find it difficult to hold onto the Peace Testimony. With the war in Ukraine, I feel torn. On the one hand, I would like to see mediation and diplomacy be the key, but with the killing of innocent children, elderly, and adults, it seems that fighting back is the only way to keep democracy alive for all of us. So I ask myself, what can I do to uphold the Peace Testimony? For me to keep the Peace Testimony means supporting efforts to assist the government of Ukraine by supporting medical and humanitarian efforts.

Just because we do not support the war, does not mean we can’t support efforts of aid. We may not be on the front line, but we can be in the background lending medical assistance such as supporting “Doctors Without Borders,” sending clothing, food, blankets…whatever we can do as individuals in our own communities.

Practicing the Peace Testimony is not easy today, but it is important and has its place. We need more Quakers in government positions to bring a new way of looking at issues to the Congress. We need the Quaker practice of discernment to be utilized in our policy making decisions. We as a community need to be the example as George Fox talked about in his writings.

We have to follow the example of activist Stacy Abrams who wrote the book Lead from the Outside: how to build your future and make change.  She is an example of the Peace Testimony at work, even though she is not a Quaker. She has demonstrated that one person can make a difference. She has shown that if you let your light shine others will see “that of God in you.”  So I feel hopeful that the Peace Testimony can survive the turmoil in our world.  I feel that the little boy who would not fight others, can now stand in the Light and proclaim his testimony of peace!