A Mantle of Roses: a Woman's Journey Home to Peace

By Virginia Swain

A Mantle of Roses: A Womans Journey Home to Peace is the memoir of a twenty-year period of an ordinary woman, Virginia Swain, who has had extraordinary experiences. Virginias spiritual journey began in 1979 when she didnt have the resources to deal with a brothers sudden death. Over time, Virginia became aware of a Speaking Presence within her. She learned to access this inner voice to heal her past and claim her vocation for peace. Now she teaches what she has learned through the Institute for Global Leadership and the Center for Global Community and World Law. She mentors leaders committed to a sustainable peace and works to abolish war. Virginia poses questions for the reader at the end of each chapter. Journal pages are at the end of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 5, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462832798

Virginia Swain

Virginia Swain is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Global Leadership, which offers consultation and training for leaders committed to a sustainable peace (www.globalleader.org). She is a peace educator, mediator, mentor, spiritual director and certified professional holistic counselor, with recognition in Who’s Who of American Women, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World. Virginia Swain and Joseph Preston Baratta are the co-founders of the Center for Global Community and World Law™ whose mission is to provide research, publications and education to support the United Nations Charter which calls for the harmonization of nations and abolishing war forever. As President, Virginia offers expertise in global governance, the process and structure by which humanity is evolving to political union and world peace in a global economy. Virginia is married to Dr. Joseph Baratta, Professor of History, Worcester State College and mother of Thomas E. Cone, III, Professor of Economics, State College of New York, Brockport. She is expecting her first grandchild in September 2003.

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Copyright © 2004 by Virginia Swain.

Cover and Chapter Illustrations by Barbara V. Wheeler

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Afterword

Biographical Information About the Author

DEDICATION

JOSEPH PRESTON BARATTA

Husband, Friend, Companion, Dancing Partner

God brought us together to heal the relationship between man and woman, a root cause of war. We co-founded the Center for Global Community and World Law™ joining our expertise in government and governance, reason and feeling, to join with others to abolish war. Now is the time for the feminine in balance with the masculine—both in ourselves and in the world. The best of our humanity is desperately needed now.

It is just beginning, my love … . take hope!

THOMAS TAD CONE

The Son I Chose

You shared your light with me and then your love. I’ve watched you grow in knowledge and experience as an Economist, Professor and compassionate human being. And now you and Karen have a son, Alexander Daniel. This book is for Alexander, my first grandchild. As I share my worldview, I yearn to learn from his.

BARBARA WHEELER

Leader, Artist

With whom I share an eternal bond of friendship and love. Without whom this book would not have been written. From whom I learned a Leadership for a New Time. Thank you for your willingness to co-journey as a grandmother as we know the peace and the love that passes all understanding.

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK BEGAN in November 1987 when Barbara Wheeler first suggested I write down everything I was thinking, feeling and doing as I began my sabbatical on Mount Tamalpais outside San Francisco in Northern California in the west of the United States.

I soon filled eleven notebooks with writing from my rock on Mt. Tam which became the seed of this book. The eleven notebooks were joined by many subsequent journals over fifteen years. It was not until July 1997, ten years later, that I began my first attempt at writing this book, drawing on all my journals.

Jane Strete helped me to begin to pull my thoughts together. Susan LaTour gave me support and encouragement and helped me write the first chapter with her probing, insightful questions and strong editorial skills. Later I worked with Marcia Yudkin for three years.

Elise Boulding, Peter Mullen, Bob Irwin, Linda Foster and Jillian Hensley helped with many wonderful suggestions. Joseph Baratta, David Blodgett, Tad Cone, Joan Swain, Robert Kauffman, Susan Arraje and Ethel Ives all read the book at critical moments for me and their comments were gratefully received. Clearness Committee members Mary Gilbert and Tom Ash provided prayer and critical reflection. Cousin Steve Riege, an English Teacher and writer, gave the last editorial look.

Salem Quarterly Meeting of New England Yearly Meeting contributed to the financial resources necessary for editing this book at a critical stage.

Obadiah Brown Benevolent Fund, Salem Quarterly Meeting. the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of the New England Yearly Meeting and the Lyman Fund all made significant financial contributions to the development of Reconciliation Leadership™ and the Global Mediation and Reconciliation Service™. Additionally, Clearness Committees at Cambridge Friends Meeting and Pleasant Street Meeting, Worcester, offered prayer support and discernment at critical moments. Friends Peace Team Clearness was provided by Elise Boulding and Mary Lee Morrison.

The Rev. John Connolly and The Rev. Patricia Davidson of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Old Lyme, Connecticut offered critical discernment and direction in the early stages of my vocational calling at the United Nations especially related to discerning ministry and going to the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (The Earth Summit) in 1992. Additionally, The Salon Women led by Ramsay Raymond acted as a clearness process for my work in listening to governments (funded by Lyman Fund) at the UN in the five-year review for the United Nations Conference on Economic and Social Development.

In Worcester, Dean Max Hess, College of Continuing Education, Clark University provided conference room space for one of the courses of the Reconciliation Leadership™.

At the United Nations in New York, Ramona Kohrs has graciously supported the programme in countless ways. The Presbyterian United Nations Office, the Quaker United Nations Office, the Samuel T. Rubin Foundation, the World Conference on Religion and Peace and the Church Center Building Staff have all been friends of the programme. Raul Cabral, Eder Garcia and Carol Sakubita of Ambassador Chowdhury’s office have been wonderfully gracious as well.

On a beautiful summer day in 1985, Barbara Wheeler and Michael Collins, Co-Founders of Community Resource and Renewal Center in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and lately, coauthors of Divine Encouragement: Living with the Presence of Hope (Xlibris 2003), came to visit me. They had called the week before to say they received a flyer of a program I had given, Spirituality in the Workplace, one day too late to attend. Our sharing that day was the beginning of friendship and support that has spanned nearly two decades.

Now they are faculty members in the Reconciliation Leadership™ Certificate Program I began in 2003. They teach Work, Purpose, Place and Peace about which I write in Chapter 7, How Can I Bring the Sacred to Work? Leadership as Vocation. They have also been teaching Reconciliation of Polarities as another extraordinary contribution to the program. A third is being added, Spiritual Kinship.

My personal and professional life have blossomed because of their friendship over the twenty-year span about which you, dear reader, will read as you turn the pages to begin this book.

The Patron and Faculty member in the Certificate Program is Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury. Since 2001, I have had the privilege to work with Ambassador Chowdhury, a great visionary leader at the United Nations and Former Ambassador to the United Nations from Bangladesh. Now he is United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States. Ambassador Chowdhury was the Patron and volunteer Co-instructor of our pilot course, Designing and Implementing Interventions for Global Change, which drew 75 participants from 15 countries in five presentations over two years. Now Ambassador Chowdhury is Patron and CoInstructor (pro bono) in the Reconciliation Leadership™ Certificate Programme, which grew out of our pilot course. We have seven courses in the Basic Reconciliation Leadership™ Certificate Programme and eight in the Advanced Programme to begin in Fall 2005.

Ambassador Chowdhury and I dedicated our courses to the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World (2001-2010). As a statesman and skilled negotiator, Ambassador Chowdhury led the negotiations in 1998-99 that resulted in the adoption of the Programme of Action on A Culture of Peace by the United Nations General Assembly in September 1999. He also steered the adoption of the resolution declaring the period 2001-2010 as the United Nations Decade for Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. He continues to lead United Nations and civil society leaders in creative ways to implement the Decade.

The names of all the others who touched my life reside in the spirit of this book. I hesitate to name them in writing for the pages will flow on and on. Your loving presence endures, dearest friends.

And finally, I’d like to acknowledge the men and women in 1945 whose vision formed and developed the United Nations and wrote its Charter after the end of World War II as they envisioned a world without war.

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MY EVOLUTION AS a peacemaker can be explained visually, as in a spiral. The spiral is a metaphor for my spiritual life. In the spiral, I experience a flow, even though my journey has a conscious beginning when I was broken open by the darkness. Every step of my evolution toward peace is part of my spiral process, based on a holistic approach to living. The spiral helped me find my inner Voice and brought me to unity with God, just as I offered its steps to the United Nations community in 1992. The spiral helped me to know who I am so that I could help people be who they are.

—Virginia Swain

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Foreword

VIRGINIA SWAIN BARATTA is my wife, my companion, and my friend. We met ten years ago, long after failed marriages (twenty years for me, fifteen for her). But we chose to try to love again on a more mature basis of friendship. While we were courting, in order to explain to our friends what was happening, I refused to say we were having a «relationship»-that vague and evasive modern expression usually used as a mask for a sexual affair. Marriage was very soon in prospect, so I said we were «beloved of one another.» She instantly took up that word. When we did marry soon after, belovedness was the theme of the preacher’s homily.

This book is about Virginia’s passage to maturity, spiritual wholeness, and a new vocation for peace. It is about an American woman who grew up rather comfortably in Connecticut in the 1950s and then passed through many of the passages of the generation that, within a decade or so, will enter retirement. She tells her story of marriage, Peace Corps