Peaceable Kingdom: Art, Prayer, and Practice

Peaceable Kingdom

Art, Prayer, and Practice

Acrylic painting by Kat O'Connor Photo courtesy of LEE Studio by Anpis WANG

Lee Mingwei

Our Peaceable Kingdom

An Introduction by Clare Molloy

Prayer

Nita Gilger

Most days I feel like I am living in a Peaceable Kingdom here at our beautiful country home unless I turn on the news or overindulge in political happenings and world strife. When I do that, my heart breaks a little more each day. We each have our own list of worries and fears. Our country seems at a critical juncture and test of whether democracy will remain. Longing for peace is not new in the world. The quest for peace and the disappointing and sometimes deadly failures of humanity have been going on for millennia. There have been troubled times throughout history. We minister types hope to be a part of bringing the Kingdom of God to earth by living it out in love, service, justice and mercy for the here and now. But honestly, it is an uphill battle with humanity. Just think how God must feel. Human strife and hatred must truly break God's heart most of all.

A Quaker minister and artist, Edward Hicks (1780-1849) longed for the same kinds of values and change where all creatures great and small could find ways to live together without harm and conflict. Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom paintings send out that message of promise and hope. There are actually 62 versions of this iconic image which are housed in several notable museums. In those paintings, Hicks illustrated Isaiah's prophecy (Isaiah 11:6-9) of God's kingdom on earth, where all creatures will coexist in peace. We see wolves with sheep; leopards with goats and many other creatures living together alongside humans in peace.

My amazing sister-in-law artist, Kat O’Connor of Worcester, MA, was invited to be a part of a project created by Lee Mingwei of New York. The exhibition will be at the Worcester Art Museum in the fall. It is entitled "Our Peaceable Kingdom." Kat is one of the featured artists who will have a painting in the exhibition. Her interpretation is beautiful and compelling. It is a powerful and unique interpretation of Hick's Peaceable Kingdom.

Kat says of her work:

"Mother Earth is represented by a strong female form made up of land, water, wind and sky. Creatures of the ocean are added as they are crucial to the health of our planet and must be protected if the earth is to remain inhabitable for future generations."

I have to say, I think this painting is beyond fantastic. To my eyes, it is a masterpiece of artistry and meaning. I hope many, many people get to enjoy this painting and others in the exhibit. But beyond that, I hope Kat's dream of the imperative to take care of the earth speaks to people and calls them to action. This wonderful painting inspires me to live with hope and love in word and deed. It fills me with a passion to live more purposefully in caring for the earth and all living creatures--including those humans who upset the balance of nature and love. We are all connected.

Leonard Bernstein once said, "It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams."

Art is a high form of hope for me and can express something more deeply than mere words can offer. For me, art captures beauty and meaning both in outward appearance but also in the deepest places in my soul. Art, in my experience, is truth-telling and inspiration which guides me into my own creative surges. I am so very grateful for artists and art. We need them to jump start our hearts. Maybe it is the artists, the musicians, and the poets who are one of God's best gifts to us as we long for a better world. Yes....as we try to create a peaceable kingdom against all odds. Let it be so. Amen.

Practice

Jay McDaniel

Imagine that you see a rabbit fleeing a fox—and losing the battle. The rabbit leaps into a clearing, its body taut with terror, pursued by the fox whose hunger is as natural as it is lethal. The chase is swift, brutal, and final. And you stand there, stricken—not at the fox, not at the rabbit, but at the ancient tension between them, a tension woven into the fabric of life on Earth.

There is something in me, and perhaps in you, too, that is never quite at home with predator-prey relations. Whitehead notes that life is robbery, because for one thing to live it feeds off (and thus destroys) another. Yes, there is a transfer of energy; but still something is lost. As the fox chases the rabbit, the rabbit is terrified and flees. The question emerges, "Whose side is God on?" I think the answer may be both, in which case there is a bit of tragedy in God as well.

And yet I hope, deep down, for a state of affairs in which there is less robbery and maybe even at some level none at all. On this planet, I do not hope for the elimination of predator-prey relations. But I do hope that we humans can live with much greater harmony with ourselves and with the more-than-human world. And I hope for civilizations to emerge in which we humans learn to live with respect and care for all life—for the Earth community—which includes one another.

What might this mean in practical terms?

It means building communities shaped not by dominance or extraction, but by reverence, reciprocity, and restraint. It means reimagining our food systems, our economies, and our technologies so that they serve life rather than degrade it. It means recognizing that every being—animal, plant, river, soil—has its own dignity and that our flourishing depends on theirs.

In daily life, it might look like:

Eating with compassion, choosing diets that minimize harm when possible, and honoring the lives that make our nourishment possible.
Rewilding our landscapes—giving space for the wild to return, even within cities, even within ourselves.
Practicing deep listening to the voices and cries of other species, as well as the silences that speak of absence, extinction, or neglect.
Rejecting violence in human relationships—in our homes, politics, and systems of justice—in favor of healing, repair, and non-coercive power.
Teaching our children that empathy and cooperation are not sentimental ideals but essential virtues for survival in a shared world.
Creating economies of care, where profit is not the ultimate value, but the well-being of people and planet is the measure of success.

Above all, it means cultivating a vision of the Peaceable Kingdom—not as a naïve utopia, but as a regulative ideal, a horizon toward which we orient our lives. This vision doesn't deny the tragic dimensions of existence, including the robbing that life often entails. But it insists that we are not fated to magnify that tragedy. We can choose to diminish harm, to build systems that nourish rather than devour, to be stewards rather than sovereigns.
Even if predator and prey remain part of the ecological fabric, robbery need not be our dominant cultural ethos. We can become a species that lives with a lighter touch, honoring the sacredness of life in all its forms. The dream of the Peaceable Kingdom, then, is not about abolishing all death or conflict, but about seeking harmony, humility, and love within a world of difference.

And perhaps—just perhaps—God hopes for this, too.

There is one more thing to say. In Whitehead's philosophy, there is a side of God that receives, and is then composed of, all that happens in the world and, indeed, in the universe. He calls it the consequent nature of God. Imagine God as an encircling presence—womb-like—in whose life all things unfold: your life, my life, the fox’s life, the rabbit’s life. And more than that: microscopic life, plant life, stellar life—anything that lives in any way. And imagine that even as these lives interact with one another in countless ways, they also add to the divine life, the divine consciousness, who—like a Mother—receives them into her heart and weaves of them something of a work of art herself, a tapestry amid which they are indeed in harmony. She, then, is the artist. Or, as Whitehead puts it, the poet of the world.

I suspect that when we find ourselves hoping for a deep peace, in which there is no robbery at all, we are sensing a Peace that surpasses understanding. We are sensing this side of God.

The regulative ideal is, in this sense, also an actualized ideal. Perhaps it cannot be fully realized on Earth, but it may nevertheless be realized in heaven—understood not as a distant place, but as the living whole of the universe itself, a Life in whose heart all lives unfold. This, too, may be part of what we glimpse in Kat O’Connor’s painting: a peace not untouched by sorrow, but one that has gathered sorrow into beauty.

Kat O'Connor writes: "Mother Earth is represented by a strong female form made up of land, water, wind and sky. Creatures of the ocean are added as they are crucial to the health of our planet and must be protected if the earth is to remain inhabitable for future generations." I am suggesting that Mother Earth is more than our earth. She is the living whole of the universe, and its poet, too.

Kat O'Connor

Kat O’Connor is a full-time artist and art instructor living outside of Boston, Massachusetts. O’Connor’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States. She is a Copley Master with the Copley Society of Artists, and was honored with a Co/So Fellowship and Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Massachusetts in 2023 and 2025, and was a 2021 Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Resident. She was awarded a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship for her drawings and two ArtsWorcester Material Needs Grants. She has led painting classes in Texas, New Mexico, Italy, Greece, and throughout New England. O’Connor works in watercolor, acrylic, and oil, and her paintings explore water in many of its various forms- frequently with the figure included. Click here to see more of her work. She will be teaching in the Pyrenees Mountains in Southern France in the summer of 2025.