Ask Rev. Deborah Moldow whether she has been working for peace her whole life, and she laughs at the idea. “No, absolutely not in my childhood. I was a child actress.”
It was, she says, “a very me, me, me profession to be in.” An only child as well, Deborah remembers having the sense that the world revolved around her. “It took a lot of lessons to realize that that wasn’t the case,” she says.
One of those lessons arrived in her 30s. Deborah had continued in theater, particularly musical theater, moving toward better roles and leading parts. But her singing voice was not as reliable as the trajectory she imagined required. It was, she says, “an unpleasant reality” to face.
“But it opened my world.”
She began exploring other paths, including experiences with Tibetan culture that deepened her understanding of compassion and brought her into contact with the Dalai Lama. Then, in 1993, she was ordained as an interfaith minister—a turning point she describes as announcing that she was “here to serve others.”
Within a year, she began working with what was then called the World Peace Prayer Society, now May Peace Prevail on Earth International. Eventually, that work took her to the United Nations.
When Peace Becomes a Culture
Until then, Deborah had understood peace much as many people do: as an end to war, hostility, and violence. At the UN, while co-chairing a Values Caucus, Deborah helped organize informal morning gatherings with ambassadors. One morning, Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh began talking about something broader: a culture of peace.
“It was a big awakening for many of us,” Deborah remembers. Peace was not only about ending war. It included “how we treat one another, how we educate our children, and how we live our daily lives.”
“It’s the consciousness of peace that creates a culture of peace,” she says. Inner change shapes behavior. Behavior shapes relationships. Relationships become culture.
Deborah sees people increasingly asking themselves, “What’s mine to do here? How can I be a force for healing and peace?” Maybe the answer is found in a community or workplace. Maybe it involves a school, an organization, or public service. Maybe, she says, your role is simply to help a father and his brother begin speaking to one another again. “What can I do to be a peacemaker?” she asks. “That question is a beautiful start for anyone.”
The Difficult Work of Peace
“The key is forgiveness,” Deborah says. She is not talking only about the everyday hurts between people. Deborah considers what forgiveness could mean in the aftermath of genocide, racism, oppression, and harms carried across generations. What does it ask in the aftermath of atrocities committed against a people, a family, or an entire culture?
“It’s a big question,” she says. “This is not a small thing.”
Forgiveness has become part of Deborah’s understanding of what it means to free the human heart from remaining permanently organized around injury. It is a spiritual practice she believes can change what people carry forward—not a denial of what happened or the suffering it caused.
Years ago, Deborah founded an online spiritual community called the Garden of Light. A friend looked at what she was creating and asked, “Where is the darkness?” Deborah says, “I really took that in, and I made space for darkness. We cannot sweep the darkness under the rug.”
Peace does not require pretending everything is peaceful. Healing does not mean our wounds simply disappear. Deborah describes both as ongoing work—something we return to again and again as life asks new things of us.
What We Bring Into the Next Moment
On September 11, 2001, Deborah was riding a train toward New York City as news of the attacks on the World Trade Center began spreading through the car. This was before smartphones. Information traveled person to person as the train continued toward Grand Central Station. “We didn’t know what to expect,” she remembers.
She tried to breathe. Silently, over and over, she repeated the prayer that had accompanied her peace work for years: “May peace prevail on earth. May peace prevail on earth. May peace prevail on earth.”
The prayer could not change what was happening outside the train. But Deborah says it changed something inside her first. “Your biology responds to that calming influence,” she says. “In every moment we have a choice. So we can choose to be peacemakers, however that is for us.”
Deborah grew up in a society that celebrated individual achievement—the stars, the standouts, the people who “made it.” “I think we lost the honoring of service,” she says. Teachers. Caregivers. Nurses. Public servants. People entering business or politics asking not only what they can achieve, but what they can contribute.
“This is a collective endeavor,” Deborah says. “We can’t do it alone.” Borrowing a phrase from Rick Ulfik, founder of We, The World, Deborah describes the movement as one from me to we.
Holding Hope Without Certainty
Deborah still hopes humanity can evolve toward a culture in which “the beautiful qualities that are in every human heart can come forward.” But hope is not certainty. “There is not some highway to the sky that’s going to make that happen.”
“When you are in despair, you cannot act,” Deborah says. “And we want everybody to be able to act from what is most beautiful inside them.” For Deborah, hope is not assurance of an outcome. It is part of what keeps participation possible.
More than 30 years after putting Reverend before her name and declaring herself in service to others, Deborah is still returning to the prayer she once asked each morning: How can I be an instrument of peace?
The answer has never been fixed. As her life has changed, so has what service has asked of her—from theater to ministry, from the United Nations to decades of peacebuilding, from tending her own inner life to helping cultivate a wider culture of peace.
Perhaps that is why the question Deborah asks now is not so different from the one she has been living into all these years.
“What’s mine to do here? How can I be a force for healing and peace?”
Rev. Deborah Moldow continues her work as a peacebuilder, minister, author, and co-director of Evolutionary Leaders. Learn more about her work and explore additional resources at https://www.revdeborah.com.
It’s the consciousness of peace that creates a culture of peace.
