To Create the Peace
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Unversalist Church
May 27, 2018
I was quickly scanning the headlines in my email Inbox the other day, and I could tell that there was a holiday approaching because everyone wanted to sell me something. “Deals, deals, Memorial Day deals!” promised one retailer. “Save big in honor of Memorial Day!” “Everything you want is now 50% off!” (Wow – everything?)
Deep down we know that retail deals are not what Memorial Day is all about. And yet, we are likely to treat it as a celebration – the unofficial beginning of summer. The cottages get opened up. Boats go in the water. There may be the first cookout.
And those are all good things, especially in this part of the world where we endure long, bleak winters and truly deserve to get outdoors and enjoy ourselves.
But deep down we know that partying is not what Memorial Day is all about.
Tomorrow we are asked to remember all those in the armed forces who gave their lives in military service to our country. However we feel about war, however we feel about our country’s policies and decisions, there is that fact of the sacrifice of young lives in our wars. We honor, not the ‘big savings’, but the commitment and the willingness of young people to go into harm’s way.
Here, on Memorial Day in 2018, we must confront a difficult truth: that we have been at war consistently for almost 17 years. We are almost one-fifth of the way through the new century, the 21st century, and we have been at war for almost the entire time. Let that sink in for just a moment.
We are not a nation at peace. We have not been a peaceful nation in a very long time. War has become a way of life, the default condition in which we exist.
Of course, the war rarely comes home to us in traditional ways. There are no battles on our soil. We civilians do not suffer the destruction and death that have become so commonplace in the Middle East. And because we don’t see it unless we turn on the television, it is possible that we might not think that we are affected by war.
As we have learned more about psychology and about neuroscience, about human emotional needs and responses and the brain, we have learned about the hidden damage, the post-traumatic stress, that violence and combat can cause to military personnel. This is widely accepted. But here, in 2018, I find myself wondering about the damage being done to a society that has accepted war as a way of life. What effect is war having on us all?
Psychotherapist Edward Tick wrote this: “Plato taught in The Republic that the qualities in each of us will be evident in our state and that what is harmonious and healthy in any nation will be true of its citizenry. Conversely, what is destructive in a nation will be similarly expressed by its people. War in this way affects everyone and everything. It not only disorders our individual psyches, it also rearranges our collective guidepost and cracks our social containers.” (Edward Tick, War and the Soul, Illinois: Quest Books, p. 151.)
“War…cracks our social containers.” Let’s think about our society for a moment: this container in which we live. I find myself wondering more and more often, “what is wrong with us?” Truly the United States of America is an angry, violent place these days. Lethal weapons are available to just about anyone who wants one, and there are many who do want, not just one, but a collection. Overt racism is becoming more visible, more acceptable. White supremacist groups are feeling empowered to demonstrate publicly.
We are violent, and we are fearful. What presents as hate is founded in fear. People of color are accosted in public, and ordered to ‘go back where they came from.’ Our news is full of stories of people calling the police for the most trivial of actions on the part of fellow citizens. Recently there was a story in which a white woman called the police because some people of color were having a barbeque in a public park. It would seem that the Homeland Security campaign to make people more aware of terrorist threats and to report things that they observe – think of all those signs reading “If you see something – say something” – are encouraging people to tattle on each other for simply going about their everyday lives. I found this on the Department of Homeland Security website: “But your every day is different than your neighbor’s—filled with the moments that make it uniquely yours. So if you see something you know shouldn’t be there—or someone’s behavior that doesn’t seem quite right—say something. Because only you know what’s supposed to be in your everyday.” And we are urged to call the police and report.
We live in fear. And so people call the police, and the police, because of these years of war, are becoming increasingly militarized, heavily weaponized. Surplus military equipment is made available to police departments. Many police departments, not all, seem to have a policy of ‘shoot first, ask questions later.’ The reports of people of color being beaten or shot during routine traffic violations are too numerous to count. We are afraid, suspicious, on edge, looking for threats and enemies everywhere. The state of perpetual war and the heightened vigilance and fear are eroding our society and our national character.
“…What is destructive in a nation will be similarly expressed by its people. War…affects everyone and everything.”
This isn’t a difficult concept for Unitarian Universalists to grasp. We believe in the wholeness of existence, the oneness of humanity, that we are all connected in what we call the ‘interdependent web of all existence’, and that we share a common destiny. And yet, increasingly in the United States we focus so much more on what divides us: skin color, ethnic origin, religion. We think in terms of duality, of a series of binaries: winners and losers, us versus them, black and white, red states and blue states.
A nation so preoccupied, so divided, so at war with itself, cannot be at peace.
In 1964 the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Why would he have been awarded this? After all, he was not a diplomat, not a head of state, not involved in fostering peace between countries. But in fact, Dr. King was very much creating peace through his philosophy and work in non-violent resistance. He called people neither to violent resistance, nor to passive acceptance, but to a third way: the way of non-violent resistance, that calls for resisting oppression without oppressing others. As he put it in his Nobel speech:
“…in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
What do I mean by ‘violence?’
Violence is not merely physical. We worry about guns, we worry about terrorism – bombs going off in public spaces. We worry about all the ways in which our physical safety could be destroyed. But not all violence is physical. We are a violent society, not just in our actions, but in our speech and in our policies. We demean people: we insult, we use words to bully one another, we can be scornful and contemptuous. We deny the humanity of others in many ways – denying others the right to speak, or refusing to listen. We deny people adequate health care, or food, or in some cities in the U.S., even clean water. The other day the President of the United States referred to a group of criminals as ‘animals’. He dehumanized them. We have allowed fear and hatred to dominate instead of love. This is all violence.
The author Parker Palmer defines violence in this way: he says violence is “any way we have of violating the identity and integrity of another person.” (Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 169.)
It is this definition that begins to give us a glimpse into how we can work for peace, how we can actively help create peace. If we think of peacemaking as something that happens only between nations, it’s easy to think we have no role to play. We can’t help influence what is playing out between the United States and North Korea. It is easy to feel helpless and to just turn away. But if we understand that working for peace is part of our daily lives, part of all our interactions, then we can choose to walk out of this sanctuary this morning and dedicate ourselves to lives of peacemaking.
We have the ability to choose our response to what we see happening around us. We can choose to create peace. Let’s return to our responsive reading, an excerpt from the Dao De Zhing. What happens if we read it beginning with the last line?
“There must be peace in the heart
If there is to be peace in the home.
There must be peace in the home
If there is to be peace between neighbors.
There must be peace between neighbors
If there is to be peace in the cities.
There must be peace in the cities
If there is to be peace in the nations.
There must be peace in the nations,
If there is to be peace in the world.”
It begins with peace in the heart. And peace in the heart results from our choices. If we choose to love, to be kind, choose to make a conscious effort to practice compassion, to react to others with empathy and not with fear or contempt, then we will help to create the peace.
If we choose to be curious about others, and not dismissive, if we choose to be welcoming, instead of ordering people to go back to where they came from, if we choose to build bridges, not walls, we will help to create the peace.
If we choose to embrace principles of non-violence, resisting in ways that do not add to the destructive spiral into more hate, more fear, more aggression, we will help to create peace. We can protest, we can vote, we can rise up and use our voices and find like-minded people – often right here – to join hands and hearts and say, “No more, never again…”
It’s amazing what happens when we choose to help to create peace. A lot of it looks like simply showing up. In the wake of the Parkland shootings last February, being able to join big groups of people making noise at Grant Circle lightened my heart. What did it accomplish? Well, of course we can’t measure actions such as this. But carloads of high school kids saw that we care about them. Truckloads of angry white guys saw that we weren’t backing down, even when they offered us their rudest hand gestures. And holding a sign and yelling “have a nice day!” to the people making rude hand gestures bolstered the courage, and created relationships among all those gathered together. A lot of you joined in with this effort. We knew that it mattered that we were there, and we knew that we felt more at peace.
There is so much that we have no control of, and so much that feels wrong these days. It is easy to turn away, to believe that there is nothing we can do. And it’s true that we cannot influence many of the problems we are confronting as a country right now. But if we choose the third way of being, the path between violence and passiveness, the path of non-violence, we can help to create wholeness, help reach across all that divides us, and help to create the peace.
My dear ones, this Memorial Day Weekend, and every day, may this be your choice:
“To take each moment
and live each moment
in peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me.”
May it be so,
Amen.
