With wars raging around the globe and a divided nation heading into a pivotal presidential election season, a group of Greenport ministers gathered with town officials on the front lawn of Southold Town Hall on Tuesday to plant a peace pole.
The pole reads ‘May peace prevail on Earth’ in eight languages spoken on the North Fork: English, Hebrew, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Ukranian, Arabic and the New York indigenous language Mohawk.
“A peace pole is an internationally-recognized symbol of the hopes and dreams of the entire human family,” said Dr. Donald Russo, president of Greenport Ecumenical Ministers — an interfaith organization founded more than a half-century ago, which has grown in recent years to include ministers and religious leaders in Southold and Mattituck.
There are an estimated quarter million peace poles planted around the globe, including at the North Pole, the Pentagon, Ground Zero in New York, the Hague in the Netherlands, Pakistan’s Khyber Pass, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and the Egyptian pyramids in Giza.
The Peace Pole Project began in Japan in the 1970s. The first ceremony outside the island nation was in Los Angeles in 1986. Two years later, the World Peace Prayer Society was incorporated as a non-profit with its world headquarters in New York City, according to the project’s website.
Southold Town Hall’s peace pole is the fourth planted on the North Fork. Other poles have taken root in Greenport, at the Orient Congregational Church and at the Cutchogue Elementary School, according to Mr. Russo.
“They remind us to think, speak and act in the spirit of peace and harmony,” he said. “They stand as a silent visual for peace to prevail on Earth.”
Organizers at the event thanked the Southold Town Board for embracing their peace pole proposal with open arms.
“They were amazing,” Rev. Ann Van Cleef said of the board.
Southold Town Board member Dr. Anne Smith also spoke at the ceremony.
“Words have power and images have meaning,” she said. “Southold Town is proud to have this generous and meaningful donation to our community.
“We work to protect our water and our land, and today we work to protect the community,” said Ms. Smith, a former Cutchogue Elementary School principal who helped establish the peace pole there. “We are a community who respects our connections, and we commit to honoring the concepts of ‘May peace prevail on Earth’ — starting with each of us.”
In an interview before the ceremony, Mr. Russo said that he sees Southold’s new peace pole as “a place, first of all, to meditate or pray.
“To say a prayer or meditate on what their understanding of peace is — and hopefully join in a movement where people can come to an agreement on what peace is and work towards it.”
Reverend Dr. Peter Kelley, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Southold, offered up a prayer at the start of the ceremony, for a “world where desperation is not created to the point of needless deaths.
“May it be a world free of those who believe there can be reconciliation without justice, justice without understanding, understanding without standing in the shoes of another, standing without being still.
“May we be prompted in these times to be more expansive and more inclusive, as we accept responsibility to make peace more visible through gracious generosity, empathy, compassion and understanding. May this symbol we dedicate today become a reminder of a new way of being in the world,” the pastor said. “This is our prayer.”