Address: “Songs of Peace”©

The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR, March 25, 2007

Last Sunday afternoon, about 35 people gathered at the United Methodist Church on Dayton Street behind Van Neste Square in Ridgewood for an interfaith service marking the 4^th anniversary of the War in Iraq. At least 7 were from our congregation. In the large, bright, nearly empty sanctuary, we shared prayers of peace from the major world religions, sang together, and shared moments of silent reflection, ending with a brief vigil on the steps of the church, symbolizing the need to take our commitment out into the world.

Remembering the packed, standing-room-only church where we held our first Interfaith Service for Peace in Ridgewood just as the war was breaking out in March of 2003, I couldn’t help but wonder why this service was so sparsely attended. I knew that some of my colleagues had been concerned that our first service had been too political, and so we had carefully agreed to focus on peace rather than statements against the war. Still, some of those colleagues were absent, and their parishioners even more so. “We’re competing against March Madness” explained my Baptist colleague, shrugging her shoulders. “I think the snow did us in” said another, although it hadn’t snowed since Friday.

Although there were scattered demonstrations against the War this week, along with a flurry of articles updating us not only on the War itself, but on the fate of the veterans who have served in this conflict, it seems to me that already the war is fading into the background of our collective minds again.

Are we waiting for the nice round number of the 5^th anniversary of Iraq to become determined as a nation to put an end to this large scale madness? Surely the fact that we are spending $259 million a day in Iraq – enough to provide over 22,000 college students with a full year’s tuition -- is bigger news than the basketball court moves of the Buckeyes, or who will fill the remaining slots in the final four? Or how about the fact that every day a young college-aged person serving in our military dies in combat, along with untold numbers of Iraqi citizens?

Certainly, we are going to be paying the bills – financial, psychological, and political – for this war for generations to come. Last Sunday, the NYT Magazine ran an in-depth article on the impact of this war on the 160,000 women who have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The aftermath of the sexual harassment and war trauma they have experienced, combined with lack of support upon their return, is proving to be a pretty toxic cocktail. In story after story, these women – many of whom had to leave children behind while their served overseas – are having a very difficult time readjusting to their lives back at home. They suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, have difficulty sustaining employment, and often can’t find their way back to being the mothers and wives they once were, in a life they can no longer seem to engage with. The photographs of these women show attractive, women in everyday surroundings but with vacant eyes; as if a part of them were now absent.

For every one of these women, there are nine more men who have served in this War, equally traumatized, and equally at a loss to regain a sense of safety, security and normalcy in their post-combat lives.

I remember as a seventh grader in school in 1977, having to go on a sort of wilderness survival camp adventure. A part of the experience was having to use a compass and a map to blaze our own trail through the woods to three designated points. My little group got turned around before the third checkpoint -- our pick-up location -- and so we found ourselves lost in the woods.

It wasn’t a large woods, and we knew there was a road nearby somewhere, but we just weren’t sure which way it could be. So, you can imagine our relief when we were found within an hour or two by the school custodian, who had accompanied our group as a volunteer staff advisor. He knew something about wilderness survival, having been a Vietnam Combat Veteran, and as we were waiting for our van to arrive he told us stories about the jungle there, pulling out a large knife that he had sheathed in a leg brace, and studying its surface as he spoke. Truth be told, even though he had been my rescuer he scared me a little as I saw him around the campus after that ~ always dressed in combat fatigues, and I assumed always carrying that knife around. He just seemed like he was all coiled up inside, ready to spring – combat ready.

Many years later, when I was completing my Clinical Pastoral internship at a VA Hospital in California, I was assigned to the psychiatric unit. There I heard the stories of many Vietnam Veterans, most of whom had that same wound up affect, like they were always on alert for the enemy. In fact, they told me that they could never let their guard down, making sure to sit in seats in restaurants where they could view the entire room, for instance, and keeping a variety of firearms in their homes.

One day, I was walking through the long hallway outside the unit, when a commotion broke out. One of our patients, experiencing a flashback, had turned up a long folding table and was bunkered down behind it, screaming and holding his head in his hands. His outburst had a ripple effect, and it was a busy day on the psychiatric ward that day. This was now 1991, more than 18 years after the Vietnam War had ended.

Unfortunately, though, it never ends. In 1991 we were just beginning to receive some of the first of the Gulf War veterans who had suffered from psychological problems and were just beginning to enter the Veteran’s Hospital system. Now, we have a whole new generation of combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. And these war veterans represent only the tip of the iceberg – I can’t even imagine the devastation experienced in the actual war zones themselves. The wounds of war run swift and deep.

At our General Assembly last summer, delegates selected “Peacemaking” to be the 2006-1010 Congregational Study Action Issue of the UUA. We are asked to spend these four years in study, and reflection, community organizing, advocacy and public witness for Peace. The question we are to ask ourselves, and then vote on at our General Assembly in 2010 is this:

Should the Unitarian Universalist Association reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes between peoples and nations and adopt a principle of seeking just peace through nonviolent means?

A bit of historical context might be appropriate here. Unlike the so-called “Peace Churches” (the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren, and others), Unitarian Universalists have in general been proponents of the “Just War Theory” -- the idea that force is sometimes justified for self-defense or to preserve the life of another. Yet we have also supported numerous resolutions on peace, disarmament, and the right to conscientious objector status. As a religious denomination, what we have never done is undertaken a systematic study in order to clarify our position, thus providing guidance to our members on what it means to apply our sixth principle: “the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.”

Looking at the current situation in Darfur, I am hard-pressed to embrace the path of pure pacifism. I believe that there are times and situations – in particular those that qualify as genocide – in which the international community ought to work together to protect the lives of the innocent from the tyranny of despots, using force if necessary. And yet I’m grateful that this study issue is forcing me to once again consider the cost of attempting to use violence to conquer violence. The words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are compelling on this issue:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but your do not murder hate. Violence merely increases hate… Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive our darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Did any of you hear the story on NPR yesterday about the bill before Congress that would establish a US Department of Peace? Apparently, ever since the time of Benjamin Rush, a Unitarian signer of the Declaration of Independence, there has been a movement to create such an office, as a counterbalance to what was originally called the Department of War, and is now called the Department of Defense. A group of women in Fairmont, Minnesota who are a part of a “Peace Club” but who are hardly the stuff of radical politics – they look more like your Aunt Ethel at her recipe club than Abby Hoffman trying to levitate the Pentagon -- proposed that their town council support the bill, and it was approved unanimously.

The backlash in this conservative small town was surprisingly strong. One local man, interestingly a Vietnam Veteran, said: “I just couldn’t believe it. These communists are trying to do it again.” Apparently, the consensus among many men in town was that establishing a Peace Department would somehow give control of our government to the United Nations, although that is not a part of this bill. Instead, it merely proposes to do things like spend 2% of our Department of Defense resources on training people in conflict resolution, and celebrating a Peace Day much like the current Earth Day or Arbor Day. The Vietnam Veteran was blunt. If Congress were to pass this resolution, Americans would become a “bunch of wusses.” Two weeks after they passed the resolution supporting the Peace Department, the town council of Fairmont, Minn. overturned their own resolution in a 3-2 vote.

Interestingly, the issue of pacifism has been a controversial one right here at the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood. The Rev. Milton Muder, who served here from 1931-1939 garnered a lot of opposition from members over his radical political views, which included a commitment to Pacifism – not a popular stance in the early years of the Second World War. His controversial selection of speakers at his Sunday evening Fireside Forum led to the resignation of some members, and efforts by others to vote him out of his office.

After years of friction, Muder finally resigned under pressure, stating privately that he wished he had never left the Methodist ministry. With the help of some sympathetic members, he was able to purchase a farm in Vermont where he unsuccessful sought to support his family with subsistence farming. Muder would spend his later years serving brief pastorates in small Unitarian and Methodist congregations in rural New England and North Carolina.

Muder wasn’t the only Unitarian minister to suffer the loss of his pulpit over the issue of Pacifism during the difficult economic years of the 1930’s and the growing concern over Hitler’s march through Europe. Many of the same ministers who espoused Pacifist views also embraced socialism, believing that economic injustice was itself a form of violence that interfered with the possibility of a peaceful, just society. The Rev. John Haynes Holmes, celebrated minister of this period of the Community Church of New York (who was actually able to retain his pulpit despite his pacifism), spoke in an essay in 1936 of the abandonment of the cause of pacifism as world war seemed inevitable, and the atrocities of the Nazi’s became known.[1]

After the Great War of 1914, he explained, there were about a dozen years in which the “day of pacifism seemed to be dawning upon the world.” Many seemed to agree that the sheer brutality of the First World War, with its waste of human life and destruction of society, far outweighed any good it might have achieved. War was defined as the “sum of all villainies;” an act of mass suicide. Along came Mahatma Gandhi, the saint of pacifism, echoed by a growing emphasis on the gospel of love and peace in the West. And yet, just as quickly as it appeared, pacifism seemed to collapse before the thunder of the Nazi scourge.

Today, it seems that as Unitarian Universalists we have become somewhat directionless when it comes to the peace movement. Even though we have a very active Peace and Justice Committee here, with many of you going to Washington or New York, or up to Van Neste Square, to protest the War in Iraq – this is actually a very tiny minority of our congregation, and within Unitarian Universalism as a whole. I would guess that most of us are very concerned indeed about the unrest in the Middle East, and the threat of further conflict in places like North Korea and in Iran.

Personally, and I speak from this free pulpit for myself and not for our congregation as a whole, I am tired to death of being lied to, standing helplessly by as the War in Iraq continues to spiral out of control, and having my children’s future wasted for the protection of the wealthiest minority on our planet. We are overdue in our nation for some serious self assessment on our approach to world leadership. We say we want freedom, liberty and justice to reign supreme in the world, but we are increasingly playing the role of international despot; defender of an unsustainable and out-of-control materialism that is devoid of integrity, spiritual wholeness, or intellectual honesty.

The future of life on this planet is simply not sustainable under the weight of our American lifestyles, and our violent approach to world domination. I think we can all see that change is needed, but how? Maybe Benjamin Rush was right, and we need a Peace Department to help guide us towards a more balanced approach to international relations. Personally, I’m going to write my congressmen and support it, although I’m not sure it stands a chance in our current political environment.

That said, I want to turn to the personal side of this issue. It may sound trite, but it is true that peace begins within each one of us. If we fail to strive for peace within ourselves, within our families, within our neighborhoods, within our towns, within our counties, within our states; then peace will surely fail within our nations, and within our larger world. It is no wonder that we cannot build bridges of understanding between Muslims, Christians and Jews, between people of differing economic and racial status, or between people of differing ideological and political loyalties, when we ourselves are increasingly unsettled, first within ourselves, and then within our larger circles of belonging.

I think it behooves us to ask ourselves some simple questions. What am I doing to nurture peacefulness within my own life? Am I a human doing, or a human being? Am I at peace with my own failings, as well as my yearnings? And in terms of our engagement with others, how open-hearted am I to the opposing viewpoints of others? Who is my neighbor, and who is unwelcome in my neighborhood? Do I rely on violent or overly forceful means of co-existing with others? How might I live more peacefully with those around me? Could I forgive those I call my enemies?

On a societal level, what role does economic disparity and lack of equal opportunity play in keeping the forces of violence alive? How am I either supporting systems of oppression or countering them? What are my views on gun control, and how might that reduce violence? Have I turned a blind eye to violence in the form of electronic media? What am I teaching or not teaching my children about living non-violently? Have I participated in the social justice ministry of my congregation, and could I find a way to be more powerful in my stance for peace?

Peace, peace among the beasts, and peace among humankind! Let us be gentle with ourselves just now, and gentle with one another, that we might do better tomorrow, rising to meet the world’s deep hunger with our own deep gifts. May we sow the seeds of peace, and reap the same. And from my childhood religion, a favorite blessing: May the peace which passes all understanding be with you, now and forever more.

Amen.

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[1] Holmes, John Haynes, “Has Pacifism Become Impossible?” in Peace is the Way edited by Walter Wink, Orbis Books, NY, 2000.