While watching "Lord of the Rings" at the theatre this year, I was struck by the scene in which the machinery of war is set into motion with the destruction of a forest of beautiful trees. They are torn down as fuel for the forges that are manufacturing weapons and armour. The earth is ripped open in great gashes so that its resources can be mined. The sky darkens as fires burn day and night on the ravaged landscape, now the site of feverish intent: war.

The scene dramatizes the fact that environmental destruction is the inevitable companion to the cycle of political violence.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s story is timely for us in this new millennium when the cycles of violence that began before our collective memory can recall are continuing with no abatement. Storytelling is important as a way of talking about things that we have difficulty dealing with directly. Storytellers believe that the act of telling a story can bring changes to the consequences of remote events that continue influencing people in our time.

Tolkien reaches back to an ancient understanding of world events as seen from a spiritual perspective, the "ring of power," also referred to later in his trilogy as the "wheel of fire." The ring or wheel is the cycle of political violence that creates trauma in generation after generation.

Shortly before seeing the film, I came across the following description of this cycle. According to an ancient tradition of Uzbekistan, the trauma caused by war infects entire peoples. The trauma, untreated, becomes a force in itself, a "spirit of trauma" generating periodic acts of violence and counter-violence. Individual leaders, despite their best intentions, succumb to the spirit of trauma. Leaders can come to represent these traumas on behalf of their people so completely that they no longer seem human to us. They actually embody their people’s memory demons. Think of Ghengis Khan or Hitler or today’s terrorists.

Political and spiritual analyses so rarely mesh that when I read this rather mystical description of the cycle of political violence and compared it to Tolkien’s fantasy I was intrigued. In "Lord of the Rings," only an innocent, who sees things from a different perspective, can carry the ring without falling under its influence. While leaders of the world’s nations want a military solution, the innocent one knows that course of action feeds and strengthens the spirit of trauma.

The Uzbekistan tradition says that gaps in the collective memory prevent one side from seeing what they have done to the other to cause trauma in the past. Without this historical awareness, the ring of power, which is the karmic cycle of action and reaction, continues without anyone being aware of why it exists and how it can be stopped.

The method to heal the trauma and stop the ring of power is beautifully simple. However, it involves a form of decision-making that is quite foreign to us in the 21^st century. It is based on the belief that when you free yourself from trauma, you heal your ancestors and protect generations after you. All political decisions must take into account seven generations before us and seven generations after us.

This is a challenging concept. It makes sense from an ecological perspective to make decisions that will not harm the well-being of future generations. If we pollute a river today for an industry’s short-term profit, we obviously create problems for future generations. But the idea that our decisions are connected to the well-being of the previous seven generations requires a very different perspective than that to which we are accustomed. Yet it makes perfect sense. Acknowledging the wrongs of the past does create health, peace, and order in the present and frees future generations from embodying the trauma of untended hurts.

The first step involves filling in gaps in the collective memory. When an act of political violence is perpetrated in the world and everyone seems confused about the causes, it is a sure sign that the spirit of trauma is at work, erasing the memory of previous hurts given or received. Everyone is connected by invisible threads to the memories of many people in the past and the present. The spirit of trauma grows by recreating those hurts.

Healing is initiated when we reach back into the past and listen to the stories of the people. The truth is gradually filled in, somewhat like a three-dimensional sculpture possessing many angles, many points of view. With this 3-D truth before us, we can make wise decisions that address the trauma of past and present betrayals, incursions, land theft, enslavement, pogroms, etc. (Trauma resides in the perpetrators of horror as much as in the victims. The gaps in memory conceal this fact.)

Until people begin to deal with the cycle of political violence in new ways, the ravaging of the environment that always accompanies war will continue, the ring of power will pass from hand to hand, and the spirit of trauma will continue to grow. When we bring our understanding of spiritual healing into the political realm, we will see and respond to political challenges from a different place, a place of wisdom.

Maureen Latta is a freelance writer living in Saskatoon. This article is reprinted courtesy of EarthCare Connections, P. O. Box 2800, Humboldt, SK S0K 2A0. Phone: (306) 682-2407, Fax: (306) 682-5416, Email: earthcare@sasktel.net, Website: www.earthcare.sk.ca.