This past Friday, September 21 marked the observance of the international day of peace. Throughout the world, including here, community groups, religious bodies, and individuals with hearts yearning for something they would name as peace, gathered for various forms of observance. Some of our dear youth and adults created this giant peace dove, marched, sang, carried the flags of the world, and danced, loving the beautiful Earth, remembering in peace its myriad plants and rocks, water, and air, and creatures. Others on the international day of peace wrote letters, protested, and prayed. Some people did what they have to do every other day—they went to school, tried to find work, cleaned up after the storms, rejoiced at good news, wondered about the next step, the diagnosis, where their children or their parents were, ran for the border, ran for office or from the police, some helped, some waited, some feared for their lives. Some people were judged, ignored, profiled, and targeted. Some people were hurt, even on the International Day of Peace. In the mix of life, it is important to pause, to call for the peace that day, every day, to stop and breathe, to meditate upon nature’s saints all around us outside, to renew ourselves for the resistance, to pray for the broken world, and to invest our energies anew in healing it. It is big, the longing for peace, our conviction not to stop in our work to change things for good. It is essential to our own integrity, essential to the life of the world, especially now. I am so proud that Talia involved our youth in our local observance with the likes of the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding and Madres sin Fronteras, Moms Demand Action, and so many other courageous peace builders. One of our own youth group members, Holden Martin, created and edited this beautiful video of the international interns who work at River Phoenix Center as they offer greetings for the Day of Peace. Big thanks to Holden for creating it. It is being featured on the Center for Peacebuilding’s website.
These young people and so many, many more, offer the courage of resistance—the reminder that peace is active. Peace greets and gardens, interviews and intervenes and interferes. Peace restores the vote, makes reparation, stands in solidarity, celebrates diversity, subverts violence and educates, heals, feeds, opens closed doors, flings off locked chains, refuses to keep silence in the face of wrong. Peace resists hatred with love, overcomes lies with the strength of truth. And all around this world, individuals, small groups, masses of people, too, all colors, all ethnicities, all gender identities and sexual orientations, from all nations, are cultivating in courage what makes for peace. It is a hopeful truth to recall that in our own microcosm here, we can help offer a peace-filled, responsibly resistant path forward—we are in the process of learning and of teaching others that living at peace with Earth, with ourselves, and with one another is both an intentional choice of personal integrity and also, a skill which can be taught and learned. Living in equity and peace is born in our spirits and nourished and fed with education. We can learn and relearn peace-speak, peace-life—for as Talia said last Sunday, in the words of one of her mentors, “Practice makes permanent.” And I think “Spiritual practice makes peace.”
One way of nurturing and sharing a spirit of peace is when we gather together in spiritual practice. Most world religions have their seminal peaceful prayers: primary speech to or for the earth or the Deity or the prophets or the enlightened ones or the ancestors. For some Christians it may be the The Lord’s Prayer. For the Jews there is the Shema, a prayer that begins with active listening, “Hear, O Israel…” For the Muslims, the Fathia, begins with blessing Allah the Compassionate One, and the Buddhist Metta prayer that longs for the realities of connection for all:
“May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature. May all beings be free.”
Peace begins with humility, listening, connection to Spirit, and talk– But peace is not just talk—as you well know, it leads, sometimes drags us into action. It requires the hard decisions of us–our personal investment.
In one Peanuts cartoon Lucy says to Charlie Brown, “I’m tired of everything. I don’t like anybody. I’m mad at the whole wide world!”
Charlie says, “But I thought you had inner peace.”
Lucy replies, “I do have inner peace. But I still have outer obnoxiousness.” And we do, all around may be outer obnoxiousness, but if we mouth the words: “Let peace begin with me”, then we are called first to monitor our own thoughts and our daily treatment of others–non-human and human alike—a fearless inventory that asks—am I speaking and acting from the strength of true and insistent compassion for all? Peace means that living with our own loved ones, with our co-workers, with those whose opinions clash with ours, and in these hallowed walls of UCG, we will dare to listen to hear and to learn from one another. It means that in our community, and born out of our peaceful spiritual practice, however known, we will resist violence and fear and out of a peace-filled heart, speak and intervene for those changes that make for peace—food security, safety for immigrants, racial equity, equal access to education, healthcare, employment, and affordable housing. I believe that as peace practitioners, we are called to join with other community partners in teaching and learning healthy boundaries, respect, nonviolent communication, and conflict resolution so that violence no longer is anyone’s daily bread. Let the Spirit of Peace grow in us, rooted and grounded in love and in a spaciousness of mind and heart and conviction.
Making peace a reality all around us and within is a large part of our jobs as humans, I think. It’s part of a relationship with God, with Mother Earth, with other creatures and humans—the gift we offer in response to the grace-filled opportunity we were given to have lived on this planet as consumers of her resources… We can use the resources to harm or we can use them to make peace.
Jesus said once, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks…” It is experiential spirituality. If peace begins with a grace-filled, grateful heart and we invest our resources in learning all that makes for peace, then from that flows actions that are nonviolent, that are just, that are equitable, that are spacious in their welcome. And so it becomes flow— in our hearts—love, centeredness is practiced that leads to more and more conversation and learning in one another’s company that leads to just actions that make more and more peace. That is a fine and effective way to nurture the soul, care for Earth, educate one another in ways of peace and good, and to resist the hate, every day. It must begin with the open and compassionate heart.
I close with the legend of the titmouse and the dove, that may be just a story or may be an invitation to us.
Once a titmouse said to a dove, “Tell me the weight of a snowflake,”
“Nothing more than nothing,” was the dove’s answer.
“In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story,” the titmouse said.
“In winter I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow-not heavily, not in a raging blizzard-no, just like a dream, without a sound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say-the branch broke off.”
Having said that, the titmouse shook her head and flew away into the forest.
The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself, “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come to this world.
May our voices be raised and our resolve for peace be strengthened today. Amen.
Benediction:
As we celebrate peace, we also celebrate the turning of the season to autumn and so receive this beautiful benediction by Burton D. Carley:
I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and nights by which we count time remember their own passing.
I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.
I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.
Perhaps that is the reason for our births — to be the memory for creation.
Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected. Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer: “What can you tell me about September?”