PEACE LIKE A RIVER Reflections on Peacemaking as a Spiritual Discipline
18 March 2007
James Ishmael Ford

Text
For thus says the Lord: Behold, I extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you will be nursed, you will be carried on the hip and fondled on the knees.
Isaiah 66:12

Perhaps you’re not familiar with our denominational study/action program? We have an annual convention of Unitarian Universalist congregations called the General Assembly. It serves a variety of functions, but one is to put some issue of concern on the front burner, to invite our various congregations to reflect and perhaps take a course of action. Sometimes this takes the form of a statement of conscience. And sometimes it takes the form of a study/action plan, where the issue is given support through reports, study guides, and such like. The results are published and often sent to relevant parties outside our denomination including governments and governmental leaders. John Buehrens, former president of our denomination speaks of the public witness part of this as proof we UUs haven’t completely given up on petitionary prayer.

While a fiercely noncreedal community resistant to any firm self-definition, by looking at what it is we pay attention to, I believe one can see something of who and what we are and who and what we hope to be. For instance our first public statement calling for an end to persecution of homosexual persons dates to 1970. Among religious communities we were anticipated in this social justice concern only by the Quakers. Over the years we’ve addressed women’s issues, religious freedom, the rights of youth, criminal justice, ecology, and over and over again questions of international conflict and war.

Now the issue that has been put before us is gathered together under the general rubric “peacemaking.” The study action asks us to reflect on how we choose to engage the questions of war and peace, to consider what our theologies (that’s a plural term, of course) might be, and to consider if there should be some communal statement regarding war and peace. We’re invited to consider a number of things including whether there should or could be a UU Just War theory or whether we should make a communal declaration against violence in any form, becoming effectively a peace church, joining the Friends, the Mennonites and others like them.

We here at FUSN haven’t involved ourselves much in this denominational process over the years; to our loss, I think. Doing so joins us with those many others who share so much with us, and who in our joining together, find greater clarity, a greater voice and a greater possibility of effecting change. So, I’m enthusiastic about the possibilities. That said I consider this one of the hardest subjects I’ve addressed from this pulpit. When considering the questions of war and peace and peacemaking, I discover I have more hands than Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.” On another hand, perhaps that’s exactly the perspective needed to kick off a reflection of this sort. It’s too late this church year to do much more than hold the issue up, but I hope over the next couple of years we’ll find a variety of venues to explore the constellation of issues around that compelling, hopeful and troubling word peacemaking.

I suggest we’re often driven by urges we barely discern within ourselves, appetites, fears, desires. We’re caught up in our grasping after this and that, and become a fish hooked by our own clinging to some idea or other. Like the prince Arjuna, hero of the Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita, following his divine destiny, following his duty down to the plain and a devastating, fratricidal war. It’s a story I’ve thought about for much of my life. The Gita is about many things, some quite important to me, but one is a story of inevitable violence. It carries within it an assumption violence is a core part of our human condition.

When thinking of violence and how to address it I recall in particular two incidents in my life. The first when I’m perhaps eleven or twelve. A bully has beaten my brother to the ground and is pounding on his head. I run up, grab the boy, pull him back and hit him as hard as I can in the face. His nose bursts with blood and crying and bleeding he runs off. I exult. I feel I’ve done my duty by my brother; and a sense of power runs through my veins, the rush of a drug following the push of the needle’s plunger.

Second, years later, I’m in my early twenties and staying with my brother at my mother’s home. I’d only just left the monastery and my hair was still a monk’s stubble. Late in the afternoon my mother comes to the door from work, herself bloody. She’s just been mugged and violently beaten when she tried to resist losing her purse, which as is often true with poorer people contained all the money she had. My brother was fascinated with guns. So we took a pistol and a rifle from his collection and walked down the darkening late evening Oakland street. We really wanted to find that guy.

Fortunately, we didn’t find anyone that looked like he might be the one who hurt our mother. We very well might have killed him. Could have killed him, certainly would have hurt him terribly. Weeks outside the monastery walls all I could feel was blood red rage narrowing my focus in a blinding desire for vengeance. There I was, hooked, a fish who had swallowed the bait.

A flood of thoughts and feelings follow as I consider these things. Let me address three. First, we human beings are violent and are always capable of terrible things. At least I am. Our forward looking eyes and the incisors in our mouths speak of predators. To some degree biology is destiny. Second, as dangerous as it is, I believe we have a right, at least a deep need, to self-defense. I would kill to protect my mother or Jan or my auntie. But, also, and my third take away: violence is a monster that will devour its children. To shift the metaphor, it’s a sword that is, if at all possible, best left sheathed.

I find in that knowing of myself one more thing. For humans, biology isn’t completely destiny. I don’t have to act one way or another. It isn’t easy, just trying to eat less and lose some weight, I know how hard it is to change a lifetime of habit; but I can. I don’t have to follow with Arjuna down to the plain and that terrible war. My biology, our human biology, gives us some freedom, at the very least an ability if we’re paying attention to say yes or no, to act and to refrain from acting. We are the animal that gets to choose.

That said things happen and we must respond. Was there another way to deal with the bully beating my brother? Certainly, but right then, with fists flailing, my brother’s head bouncing on the sidewalk, and no adults around to intervene? That later event should never have involved my brother and me walking down an Oakland street with guns. That was insane. And it opens real questions about communal responsibilities. This was a poor neighborhood sinking into despair. My mother wasn’t the only one who’d suffered a mugging or worse. But there were no official witness, to that or to my brother and me walking the streets with guns.

While speaking from my personal life, I think everything I’ve said so far can also be extended to our communal lives, to how we interact with each other here, to how we live as citizens of this nation, of how we are part of the human family, indeed, the family of life itself. Right now I’m thinking mostly about us as a nation. As a people we are not irreversibly destined to act one way or another. We have strong inclinations, sometimes it can feel like hard wiring, but just as we can choose our actions as individuals, in the case of nations history need not be destiny. By consciously engaging, by choosing one thing or another, some doors close, other doors open, lives change.

The catch is there is no simple cure for the hurt we face in this world. Our problems have ten thousand causes, and therefore we must seek many cures. Still, there is a method of honest looking within our own hearts that is a necessary start. Let there be peace and let it begin with me is not an empty slogan. Still, the world is dynamic and specific situations call for unique responses. So, regarding the question of war and peace, I suggest, there may be a place for a Just War perspective.

Our Catholic sisters and brothers have given this a great deal of thought and have come up with some rules of thumb that make sense to me. War must only be a last resort, it must be to a specific and just purpose and can only be undertaken with a reasonable chance of success, it must be seen as likely to lead to something better than if there had not been a war, the violence needs to be proportional, and every effort must be made to avoid killing noncombatants.

This doesn’t open the door to war very often; the sword should rarely be drawn out of its sheath. The greatest danger here seems to me to be the amazing ability we humans have to justify doing what we want to do. I think of myself and my brother walking down that street brandishing a rifle and a pistol. Our capacity for self deception is incredible. High rhetoric has justified many evil acts over the years. And of course, there is that pesky principle of unintended consequences. You let the sword out, and you don’t know, can’t know, who it will cut. Still, and with these serious caveats I’m impressed with Catholic Just War thought, and I believe if we’re honestly looking at who we are and what we want to be, we need to seriously, rationally consider that proportional violence in service of justice is defensible.

I am also profoundly impressed by Mohandas Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence. As Ralph Waldo Emerson sagely observed, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” I am concerned with how we become our best possible. And if biology isn’t necessarily destiny, then what are the better hopes of our lives? To what may we actually aspire? Pace e Bene, an interfaith peace group summarizes Gandhi’s principals neatly in eight ways that are very resonant, I feel, with only the slightest tweaking, our Unitarian Universalist sensibilities.

It is an alternative that doesn’t mean there isn’t violence, that doesn’t say there might be occasions where violence might be the only response. Rather it is a call to a spiritual discipline that can alter our own hearts, yours and mine, should we undertake it as our life’s vow. It is an invitation and a witness to the world. It is the path of healing, the way of the peacemaker. Here they are; eight guidelines for transformation.

The first is acknowledging all life is one. The beginning of wisdom is the terrible realization we are all connected, not as some vague ideal, but as our most intimate truth. Second, is seeing how we all have some access to truth, and we are also all, to some degree or other, deluded. Third, we are more than what we do. Fourth, what we do, our means, must be consistent with our goals. Fifth, we need to celebrate our differences as well as our similarities. Sixth, we are wisest when we avoid thinking oppositionally, as “us” verses “them.” Seventh, out of our investigation of what our unity means, we discover that desire for the well-being of all. And eighth, remembering always, the nonviolent journey, the peacemaker path, is a process, a way of transformation, a move from fear to love.

Now, today’s reflection only holds these possibilities up. We don’t have time to unpack, to take apart, and to put back together in better ways. Not today. But, my intention here, really, is only to hold up the problem, to suggest there may be healthy ways to engage, and to invite us into a process, an exploration, of what might be.

And isn’t that an implicit part of our covenant to be with one another, to allow each other to change us, even as our presence can change others?

Isn’t that wonderful, if a little daunting?

Amen.