Deep Peace to You

Sunday, June 5, 2005

Rev. Gretchen Woods

Opening Words: from Paul Robeson

I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear the melody of freedom or the words that might inspire hope and courage in the face of despair and fear. My weapons are peaceful, for it is only by peace that peace can be attained. The song of freedom must prevail.

Reading: “A Network of Mutuality” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that. We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely the distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. We shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

Sermon: “Deep Peace to You”

Take a moment, release any breath that you have been holding tightly. Let your body relax for a moment, soften and expand to fill the space you need. Let some memory of peace come to you, gently, and embrace you in its arms. Peace is possible. Let it be.

We come together now for the closing of our regular academic year. We worked hard together this year to co-create a spiritual community in which we explore the meaning of our lives, comfort each other in sorrow and celebrate with one another in success. We gathered regularly to hold up what is of value to us, to remind one another of those things that deserve our attention and active care, and to organize our efforts for the greater good of the larger community. Our Social Concerns Committee raised funds for many groups, both local and far-flung, so that goodness will increase in our world. Our Social Justice Action Group provided incredibly educational and challenging programs on the problem of Global Warming. The congregation as a whole endorsed the Earth Charter. The Program Council assured the day-to-day activities of the congregation continue to run smoothly and that we have additional social events to celebrate our enjoyment of one another. We have earned a few weeks of less active summer rest and peace.

Yet we also know that we live in a world where war is being waged in many places. Some we know well: Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan come to mind. Others we ignore, like Somalia and Rwanda. The former are more important to our national interests, the latter less so. But all involve innocent human beings losing life and/or limb in acts far from the peace we seek, far from the land they love. I am reminded of a poem by Archibald MacLeish:

The young dead soldiers do no speak.

Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:

Who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them at night

and when the clock counts.

They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us.

They say: We have done what we could

but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: We have given our lives

but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: Our deaths are not our; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

Will remembering be enough? Will it give us peace. I propose that peace calls us to a good deal more than remembering, though that is truly a meaningful start. Yes, first, we must not forget. We need to remember how being who we are is hurtful and hurts. But we must also pay attention to the realities of our own lives and possibilities in unseen connections within our selves, within our communities, within our world.

First, we must remember: we must remember what we feel like when we are overpowered and made invisible and unworthy. I suspect not a one of us escaped that experience. Maybe our parents put us down or abused us physically or sexually. Maybe our teachers said things that left us feeling despair about our potential as intelligent human beings. Maybe our school mates cruelly mocked our shortcomings. We know that pain. Imagine it happening to a whole group of people all the time. Some of you come from underrepresented minorities who have experienced this sort of psychological war. Pain, rage, and powerlessness can make us mean and hardened to love around us. This is not peace, but it is all too often the experience of human beings whatever their culture or heritage.

In Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America, Thandeka points out that prejudice is often the reaction of a child to the recognition that some part of her self or his self is unacceptable to the powers that be, that feelings are to be kept hidden if they include appreciation for those who are different. Our whole society thus enforces lack of peace with one’s own feelings and disconnect from one’s wholeness to be acceptable in the society. So to retrieve one’s sense of wholeness and inner peace, one Must remember: remember the depth and strength of one’s own attraction to the beauty in variety that is naturally seen all around us before one learns the prejudices of one’s society.

Jay Rothman employs this sort of remembering to help people deeply enmeshed in identity-based conflict find some common ground. He invites people to air the deep sense of difference they have learned from their cultural conflicts, venting the anger and hurt that comes from deep within the experiences of being deemed less worthy and valuable. Then he invites them to examine what goals they might actually have in common. If people are willing to do this honestly, they find their goals and needs are very much alike. With good faith efforts, vastly conflicted people can learn to share at least some common goals and work toward them, rather than focusing upon the pain of their shamed differences. This is not unlike Marshall Rosenberg’s “Non-Violent Communication” program.

Beyond remembering, though, we also need to reclaim our power- from-within. We need to reconnect with our own sense of value and worth. This can be done many ways: through physical activity, explorations of nature, through meditation, through conversations like our conversation groups provide. We need to know that each of us has within us a spark of life that shines and offers light and warmth to others. We need to know that we can love and be loved in return.

Paradoxically, this remembering and knowing must include acceptance of our human limitations, resigning as gods and goddesses. M. Scott Peck asserts that evil is the inability to accept one’s human limitations, setting them outside our consciousness and projecting them upon others (Peck. People of the Lie.). It seems to me that the obverse is necessary for peace, especially inner peace. If we can accept our own foibles and quirks, if we can remember our own value without expecting an impossible perfection, both as individuals and as nations, we can appreciate the value of others more readily.

All too often we confuse love and power with control, and thereby assure our loss of peace. There is no way we shall be able entirely to control our world and the outcomes of our lives. Life is co-creation with others having power to co-create as well. And the random strikes without pity. We may lose a loved one to a totally unpredictable auto accident or to war or to illness. This is not fore-ordained by a vengeful god. It is simply part of the true randomness and chance of life process. So how do we find faith that our power has any value?

Just as we do not have full control, neither are we totally at the whim of the universe. Making plans; preparing our selves through training, education, etc., all offer opportunities to claim our power from within and bring it to bear on the life process. We can’t control, but we can surely engage life’s process more effectively by engaging and training. Think about it: what is a great batting average in baseball? 300? That’s hitting less than a third of the time one is at bat. The same applies to playing the French horn. Believe me, I know from experience. Yet, the joy of playing well, even if imperfectly, either in sports or music, is, as the ad says, “priceless.”

We don’t do this in a vacuum. To play well, we need others, both playing along with us and in the audience cheering us along. We need our awareness of connections to go beyond our own narrow band of life. This call of community engages us in the life process toward peace. We can spew catcalls and sabotage, but that won’t lead us to peace. We need to endorse one another’s strengths and support one another’s weaknesses. There are things I can do that others can’t. Conversely, there are things that others can do that I can’t. And no one of us can do it all. Besides, doing it all leads to resentment and a sense of disconnection, rather than of success.

Doing it all alone limits severely how much can be done. When many engage, far more can be accomplished. This was my experience with the largest UU congregation in Michigan. While my purview was newsletter, choir, and the Art Forum, social action and many other good works also were done within the context of that church, and not dependent on my energies, limited as they were by being the young mother of two lively sons.

For some of us, our experiences of growing awareness of connections, though beginning from within and moving out into our communities, also includes a sense of a greater consciousness in the whole world that nourishes our spirits and keeps us going through the war and pain in our lives. In our hymnbook, Singing the Living Tradition, there is a sequence of prayers for peace that come from the world’s religious traditions:

From Judaism:

Grant us the ability to find joy and strength not in the strident call to arms, but in stretching out our arms to grasp our fellow creatures in the striving for justice and truth.

From Christianity:

Save us from weak resignation to violence, teach us that restraint is the highest expression of power, that thoughtfulness and tenderness are the mark of the strong; Help us to love our enemies, not by countenancing their sins, but remembering our own.

From Islam:

Save us, our compassionate Lord,

from our folly, by your wisdom,

from our arrogance, by your forgiving love,

from our greed by your infinite bounty,

and from our insecurity by your healing power.

From the Atharva Veda of India:

Let there be peace in the sky and in the atmosphere, peace in the plant world and in the forests; Let the cosmic powers be peaceful; let Brahman be peaceful; let there be undiluted and fulfilling peace everywhere.

Each of these prayers suggests that there is a source of life beyond our own limited means to which we may become aware and from which we may draw deeper peace. Some of us have never found this, not through the arts or nature or human contact. This is truly a shame for all of us. But it is never too late to bring awareness of this source into our lives. We may find it through our covenant/conversation groups and insights that come from true creative interchange amongst us. We may find it in the beauty of the earth in all its majesty, or the incredible explosion of creativity in music or art, or in the simple joy of a child or kitten purring on our chests. This is not a traditional god, but a source of energy and hope for our lives: a source of peace, even with our human limitations.

Ultimately, peace Is every step, if we take our simple every day steps with awareness and humility, without expectations, and with preparation. Thich Nhat Hanh captures this process:

Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.

Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living things.

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice that establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth. Amen.

Deep Peace to you! So Be it! Blessed be!