Sermons
Praying for Peace
A Worship Service of Music and Meditation
Rev. Kathleen McTigue
Unitarian Society of New Haven, CT
Sunday, March 23, 2003
Reading
from James Gilligan, Preventing Violence
For the past four millennia, since the time of the first law-givers…humanity has been engaged in a great social experiment, testing the hypothesis that we could prevent violence, or at least diminish its scale and intensity, by labeling it 'evil' and 'criminal'; ordering people not to engage in it; and then, when they commit acts of violence anyway, retaliating with more violence of our own, which we call 'punishment' and 'justice'.
Now, four thousand years is long enough to test any hypothesis, and the results of this experiment have been in for a long time: this means of attempting to prevent violence, far from solving the problem of violence, or even diminishing the threat it poses to our continued survival, has in fact been followed by a continued escalation of the frequency and intensity of violence, to the point that the century we have just survived has been the bloodiest in all human history, with more humans killing other humans than in all previous centuries combined. Worse yet, we have now achieved, through a deliberate effort, the technological ability to kill everyone on earth, thus becoming the first species in evolutionary history to be in danger of bringing about its own extinction -- unless we can increase our ability to prevent violence far more effectively than we have for the past four thousand years.
Given that the approach used for the past four millennia has been such a total failure -- indeed, has been so counter-productive, resulting in more rather than less violence -- the beginning of a new millennium would seem to be an auspicious moment to consider replacing that ancient strategy with a radically new and different one….
Many national governments and international bodies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague are trying to discover, or invent, new bases for negotiating an end to collective violence in all its forms -- genocide, war crimes, totalitarianism, racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing and so on; [and] for repairing the physical and psychological trauma those forms of violence leave in their wake… They are engaging in these social and legal experiments in the only way that we have ever been able to develop successful new strategies for living together -- namely, slowly, painfully, controversially, by trial and error, and in an atmosphere of humility and open debate rather than of vengeance and self-righteousness.
[This work is slow and uncertain. But we must not forget] that when we talk about preventing violence, we are not talking about something that can be solved with gimmicks; we are not talking about 'techniques'. We are talking about whether, and how, we and other human beings can learn to live with each other, and even to want to live with each other -- and I mean live as opposed to die, for that is the only other choice where violence is concerned.
Part One: Meditation for Peace
We light the first candle to name our deep yearning for peace
and to honor all those who now stand in harm's way.
We hold in heart and mind the soldiers of our country
who are engaged in battle in our name.
Some of them are so young we cannot think of them
except as our sons, our daughters.
Some of them are very frightened.
They are afraid of being killed. Some of them have already died.
They are afraid of having to kill. Some of them have already killed.
They are afraid of failure, and afraid of what they might have to do
if they are to succeed.
We hold them in our hearts tenderly, and we pray for their speedy return.
We pray not only for the safety of their bodies
but for the wholeness of their spirits,
knowing as we do that they will see fearful things,
that they may do fearful things
and that the human spirit can be wounded just as grievously as the human body.
We remember that these soldiers have mothers and fathers,
wives and husbands and children who love them deeply and fear for them
in every hour of this war.
May these families be comforted by the swift return of our soldiers.
We hold in heart and mind the soldiers of Iraq.
We know that many of them are men without a choice.
They too are very frightened;
they too have families who grieve for them.
To us, they are men without faces: we do not know their names,
we do not know the course of their lives or what lies within their hearts.
We do know they are our brothers:
they suffer when they are wounded or when they lose one they love;
they yearn for long and gentle days when they might wake to the morning in peace
and know themselves to be safe.
May we not allow ourselves to forget that these soldiers
are people of this same small earth,
kin to us, across all our differences.
We hold in heart and mind the ordinary people of Iraq,
these unknown multitudes who are now in harm's way.
We remember the young women, pregnant and days away from childbirth
who will not be granted the simple grace of giving birth to their babies in safety.
We remember the old men and women who cannot run,
who sit still and wonder, without hope,
what they will do as the bombs fall around their homes.
We remember the mothers who have already seen their children die of illness,
and who have no way to keep their living children safe from harm.
And we remember the children, the beautiful children of Iraq,
dark eyes and stunning smiles: babies, toddlers, children, adolescents.
They are very frightened.
They have nowhere to go.
We pray for their safety of mind and spirit,
their chance to live, to celebrate and build, to love and grow old.
May we not turn away from the faces of the children.
May we carry them with us in our work for peace.
Part Two: Meditation for Wholeness
We light the second candle to name our yearning for wholeness.
Central to that wholeness is the willingness to know and to speak the truth,
the willingness to name and unveil a lie.
We must remember the power of language to reveal or to obscure.
When we are told, 'collateral damage', we will remember: human being.
When we are told, 'enemy combatant', we will remember: human being.
When we are told that war will lead to peace, we will remember to doubt.
We will remember that our strong and beloved nation can bear the weight of our dissent.
We will resist the voices that claim it is not so.
Citizens of a free nation, it is not our calling to make ourselves quiescent and meek,
or to lift our flags in mute surrender of all doubts.
The calling of a citizen is to learn: to see where we are ignorant,
to see where we are flawed, to name it when a lie is spoken,
to raise our voices with the best power of our knowledge and our passion.
It is to hold our nation to the deep power of its foundations,
the ringing language of equality, of kinship, of freedom
that calls to us as urgently today as in the hours the words were first spoken.
The language of war is a language of harsh divisions:
evil on that side and goodness on our own.
We know in our hearts that the truth is much more difficult and painful than this.
We know there is only one human tribe, across all the earth.
We know that within each confused and yearning one of us
is the seed of great goodness, and the ability to visit unspeakable cruelty on each other.
Our world is one world, and our lives inseparably linked to one another
across all the divisions of language and faith, culture and circumstance,
across all the walls built from rage and error, from fear and revenge.
Where does our safety lie?
Not in isolation, not in the twisting cycles of violence and revenge,
not in striking first, not in hitting hardest,
not in any of the strange pathways toward the perfect, catastrophic bomb.
Not in being the biggest, not in being the richest.
Where does our safety lie?
In the deep and abiding bonds that tie us to one another and bind us to the earth.
We cannot rest in peace until all can rest in peace.
Meditation for Hope
It is a difficult thing to hold hope in heart and mind at a time of war.
We are fearful as we wonder how the intricate paths of action and reaction might unwind.
The world is changing beneath our feet, moved by forces complex and powerful,
shaken into new patterns we cannot yet fathom or predict.
We must hold our vision of the world as it could be, as it might yet be,
hold it like a seed we guard against the winter
for the time of planting.
We are not alone: we are legion.
We speak every language on the planet,
our hands are of every age and shade of human flesh,
cradling the seeds of our vision and our hope.
The seeds hold the promise of a time when war will be unthinkable,
when divisive walls will crumble,
when the wealth of our people will be poured into the farms, the schools, the hospitals,
when our lovely and supple hands are taught the complex secrets
of fiddle and harp, compass and microscope,
and never learn the smooth and cruel movements
of trigger and pin and launch button.
Hope is the children you love,
the ones you are teaching how to touch with gentleness,
how to see themselves citizens of a whole planet,
how to say, 'I was mistaken, I'm sorry' and 'tell me the way you see it'.
Hope is the bread you bake,
kitchen perfumed with the ancient smell of yeast, promise of calm hearth, promise of full belly.
Hope is your kind word to an adversary, your gentleness in the face of rebuke.
Hope is our community of faith, all of our communities of faith,
where we are taught reverence for the earth, for the human family,
for the vast mysteries beyond our ken.
We will hold to our hope in the difficult days we traverse together.
We will care for the seeds of our vision
we will sow them well and faithfully,
and nurture them by the way we live each of our days,
by the way we live each of our nights,
by the will and labor we bring to hard and unending work of peace.
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