This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Ryan McKinny, a world-renowned opera singer named “one of the finest singers of his generation” by Opera News. Ryan also serves on Search’s President’s Leadership Council, an experienced group of global business executives, philanthropists, and thought leaders who advise Search’s Board of Directors and Executive Leadership Team.
Prefer to listen? Click to hear Ryan read his message.
As a young, aspiring opera singer, I used to think of peace more as a lack of something than the presence of something. I often would avoid conflict, both in my personal life and with my colleagues, in the name of “keeping the peace.” My sense of global peace followed similar thinking: peace is the absence of war. Even my relationship with myself worked this way. If I just ignored the difficult parts of myself and didn’t let them act out, I was practicing peace.
But nothing will disturb one’s peace like becoming a parent. My daughter, Emma, was born just as I was beginning my professional career as an opera singer, and my wife, Tonya, and I decided we would all travel the world together for my career. As a young child, Emma was, and still is, a firecracker of a human. The world told us that good parents had obedient kids, and by that metric we were failing pretty miserably—not to mention publicly in airports all over the world.
The anger that I aimed mostly at myself for not being good at my new, most important job in life led me to my first peacebuilding project: my relationship with my daughter. I read a book called Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute. It had a profound effect not only on how I thought about my relationship with Emma, but also how I thought of myself, opera, and the world. What stuck in my heart and mind was a principle that I am still learning the lessons of today: to resolve conflict in a way that results in true peace, I must see the people involved as full human beings—with needs that I likely don’t yet understand—and the only way to bridge that gap is through letting go of my assumptions and listening deeply.
As a singer, I am known for my interpretations of “bad guys”—the most famous of which is the rapist and murderer Joseph de Rocher in the opera Dead Man Walking, based on the book written by Sister Helen Prejean. Being involved with that piece led me to becoming friends with Terrence Andrus, an incarcerated man on death row who took his own life two years ago at the Palunsky Unit in Texas. He was an artist and a poet, and we had a lot in common. Our daughters are similar ages. Letting go of my previously held judgments and listening to him as a human being opened my eyes so much to what else I might be missing in the world.
As an artist, my goal is to connect with people. Through my voice and my embodiment of a character, I want to show the audience a whole human being, whether that human being is perceived as “good” or “bad.” In this world where people are reduced to short clips on tiny screens, it can be an overwhelmingly moving experience to connect with an actual human in real space and time, with all their beauty and all of their flaws.
Just as my views on peace in my life and in my art changed, my worldview changed when I first encountered Search for Common Ground. I never imagined an organization existed that was trying to put into practice what I had come to know in my own life, only now applied to the most difficult violent conflicts in the world. The lessons were nearly identical: connection and understanding is what real peace is built from. It is not comfortable, nor is it quick, but it is possible and it is worth every bit of effort.
Now Emma is twenty years old and her brother, Louis, is sixteen. Of all the things I have accomplished in my life, on stage or off, I take no greater pride than in my relationship with both of them. They are peacebuilders in their own ways and I have grown to love the process of learning them at every new stage. Peace feels tangible to me these days—not just a lack of violence or a lack of conflict, but a presence of connection and understanding between human beings.
