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By Root 1563 0

multiplying high-tech weapons across the world. We—meaning children of the Enlightenment—had used “pure reason” to defend the extinction or debasement of native peoples through colonization, to justify the African slave trade, to maintain the subordination of women, to send six million Jews to the ovens, and to create and drop atomic bombs, twice. We—meaning beneficiaries and defenders of capitalism—had created enclaves of unimaginable prosperity while leaving the majority of people behind in ghettos of deprivation and often squalor. We created short-term profit for our generation by plundering the planet that we would bequeath to our children.

And even though we had stopped doing some of these things (at least to a degree, at least temporarily), we were barely beginning to come to terms with how our Western, “civilized,” military-industrial, Enlightened, capitalist system had so disastrously malfunctioned. Much less had we even begun to figure out what to do about it. So we at least wanted to be honest about our failures. Some of us called this quest for honesty deconstruction, some relativism, some pluralism, and some of us called it repentance. “Let’s at least be honest,” we said, “that there are many ways to see things, that our way isn’t the only way, that we who were so confident about being right about everything have been tragically, dangerously, criminally wrong about many things.” Just as kings solved some problems and then created others, our individualism and confidence had begun demonstrating dangerous unintended consequences, leading us into the indigo zone, the quest for honesty—and perhaps even humility.

And now we face the seventh quest, the quest to heal what we have so disastrously broken, the quest to unify and liberate what we’ve tragically divided and conquered, the quest to rediscover a larger and more beautiful whole rather than pit part against part in deadly conflict. I don’t know what to call this quest, but I think it is a quest for what is named and sought in every language and culture:

salaam, pace (Arabic, Italian)

sidi, shanti (Tibetan, Hindi)

mir, tutkium, soksang (Russian, Inuit, Khmer)

rongo, amani (Maori, Swahili)

elohe, he ping (Cherokee, Chinese)

sula, pokoj, shalom (Persian, Polish, Hebrew)

ukuthala, vrede (Zulu, Afrikaans/Dutch)

lumana, irene (Hausa, Greek)

ashtee, amniat (Farsi, Pashto)

wolakota, amahoro (Lakota, Kirundi/kiruanda)

runyara, santiphap (Shona, Lao)

heiwa, paix, qasikay (Japanese, French, Quechua)

We could call it peace, but in light of Western dominance and its discontents, I think it is better to use a non-Western name, perhaps ubuntu from Africa, a rich word meaning one-another-ness, interconnectedness, joined-in-the-common-good-ness, and profound commitment to the well-being of all. We in the twenty-first century have practical reasons for this quest, reasons that interestingly enough bring us back to the red zone, because our survival as a species now depends on the transformation of “the other” into “one another.” We’ll call this the violet zone, the quest for ubuntu.

This isn’t the last stage, no doubt. Beyond our quest for survival (red), security (orange), power (yellow), independence (green), individuality (blue), honesty (indigo), and ubuntu (violet), I imagine there could be an ultraviolet quest for sacredness, a desire to live in a growing conscious awareness of the presence of God and the goodness of God reflected in all things. And beyond that, we can only begin to imagine what our quest might entail.

But here’s the rub: we are all at different places in this quest. Most of us—especially most of us in the Christian faith—are in quests for security (consider the prosperity gospel and certain magical forms of Pentecostalism) and power (consider some forms of strict hyper-Calvinism and other fundamentalisms, with their view of divine sovereignty as deterministic control exercised on behalf of the elect few). Or we’re in quests for independence (consider the many kinds of systematic theologies that pursue mastery of mystery through doctrinal