What does freedom mean to you?
At an interfaith prayer breakfast at Belvedere Family Church in New York, participants were invited to answer that question with a single word. Written on pieces of colored paper, their responses would eventually become part of a mosaic—one small expression of what the gathering itself hoped to accomplish by bringing different perspectives together around a shared desire for peace.
Held December 6, 2025, “Honoring the Light of Faith as the Source of Hope, Unity and Peace” marked the Belvedere community’s first Peace Starts With Me Alliance program. Approximately 60 people gathered for the morning, including 27 guests, as participating organizations within the community worked together to create a space for interfaith reflection, fellowship, and conversation.
Five faith traditions were represented, giving participants an opportunity to hear several perspectives on the values they shared. Following a brief ceremony, faith leaders were each invited to offer reflections from their respective traditions. Among them were Imam Mussa, a Hindu guru, Bishop Roger McKenzie, Peter Parker of the Church of Scientology, and a Jewish rabbi from the Bronx.
Their individual reflections opened naturally into the morning’s broader consideration of religion’s relationship with peace. In his keynote address, “Religion and Peace: Challenges and Opportunities,” Dr. Thomas Walsh used the history of religion around the world to explore both the difficulties faith communities have encountered and the possibilities they hold for contributing to peace. Organizers said the educational presentation was warmly received by those in attendance.
But the morning also asked participants to consider those larger ideas on a personal level.
Women’s Federation for World Peace (WFWP) representative Mika Rothstein led a meditation before returning participants to the question of freedom. Each person chose a word expressing what freedom meant to them and wrote it on colored paper. Rothstein then collected the responses, bringing the separate contributions together in a single mosaic.
Around the breakfast tables, those conversations continued more informally. Ministers and Ambassadors for Peace shared the morning with community members and guests, including a group of nine Filipino attendees from a local social club, most of whom were Catholic. Music and a shared breakfast added to the atmosphere of fellowship.
For Belvedere’s first Peace Starts With Me Alliance program, that combination of individual reflection and shared experience offered a natural expression of the movement’s message. Peace may begin with what one person believes, values, or chooses to contribute, but it can grow through relationships with people whose traditions and experiences are different from one’s own.
The gathering concluded with participants singing several verses of “America the Beautiful.” By then, the individual words they had chosen to express freedom had also become part of something larger. Separate pieces of colored paper had been arranged into a single mosaic, just as five faith traditions had shared the morning without surrendering the distinct voices each brought with them.
In that collection of colors, words, prayers, and perspectives, the gathering offered a simple image of unity—not sameness, but different people finding room beside one another in a shared hope for freedom and peace.
