Keeping The Peace

This sermon was given Sunday, Dec. 10 at First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont.

We all began a pilgrimage. We are all on a journey that began a couple of weeks ago and will culminate at the end of December. The pilgrimage from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s a pilgrimage that everyone takes whether or not they believe in Jesus, whether or not they want to engage in the holiday spirit. It’s here, it has descended upon us. The stores and advertisements will not let us forget. But it is also the time of Advent – a time of waiting and preparation. And the concept of Advent can be expanded beyond the preparation for the birth of Jesus and its Christian frame. It is a time that can be used for looking back and reflecting on the year and looking inside. Catherine Doherty writes that “Advent is a time of standing still, and yet making a pilgrimage. It is an inner pilgrimage, a pilgrimage in which we don't use our feet. We stand still; yet, in a manner of speaking, we walk a thousand miles across the world - just because we chose to stand still.”
This time is often referred to as a time of “peace.” If you pick up a variety of holiday cards, the words inside often wish the receiver a peaceful season or year. May the peace of the holidays come to you and yours or something to that affect. And because it is a time of various religious traditions coming together, peace is often the common ground. If Merry Christmas or Happy Hannukah isn’t broad enough, wishing blessings for a year or time of peace is a safe bet. And a wonderful message! But what about peace and how do we actually get to having some moments or times of peace during this incredibly busy time of year? This is a time of year when we are bombarded by holiday music, decorations, advertisements, pressures. It is a shock to our systems that is introduced sometimes as early as Halloween! And amid all of the lights and music, it can sometimes be a hard and lonely time. Hard because we can be reminded of who in our family or community is not here this year. Hard because we can feel like we must participate in some way – buying or making gifts, giving more than we do normally, even feeling holiday cheeriness can be a pressure. It is a balancing act during these weeks. One aspect that I do appreciate is that religious and cultural traditions seem to come together more than other times of the year – Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice. The common threads between the faith traditions are there. And these weeks are a strong and powerful time for reflection, community and gratitude. And there is common ground - the coming of light, the coming together of communities, birthing of new life, new ideas. And the wish, the prayer for peace. Peace can be this common ground.

The peace poles are white with black lettering. They stand about eight feet high and usually have six sides. There is a peace pole in front of a UU church in Salt Lake City, Utah. There is a pole in front of a Buddhist temple in California. There is a peace pole on top of a hill at a retreat center in Vermont. The words on each of the sides says “May Peace Prevail On Earth” in Chinese, Russian, Korean, English. From the Peace Pole Project web site it reads “When you plant a Peace Pole in your community, you are linking with people all over the world who have planted their Poles in the same spirit of peace. Every Peace Pole proclaims the prayer May Peace Prevail on Earth in the language of the country and often four to six other languages as well. The more than 200,000 Peace Poles around the world are on all continents, in every country you can think of. They are in simple places, such as churches and gardens, and extraordinary ones, such as at the Pyramids of El Giza, Egypt or the Magnetic North Pole in Canada. They are promoting healing of conflict in places like Sarajevo and the Allenby Bridge between Israel and Jordan.” Bethlehem and Bagdad. Salt Lake City and Vermont. They serve as constant reminders for us to visualize and pray for world peace.

During a storm the only place of peace is the eye in the middle. A space in the middle that is calm when everything else is wild. The eye of the storm. In the middle of the storm where it is quiet is the eye. I just finished reading a book called The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It is a wild and fantastical tale about a 16 year old boy from India who ends up in a 24 foot life boat with a 450-pound Bengal tiger for about 7 months! The author makes no claims that this is a true story or that it is plausible. But what the boy and tiger must end up doing is inhabiting the same small space together in order for both to survive. A life boat in the middle of the ocean. And they have to come to a sense of peace about their predicament. It is essential that they keep the peace with each other in that 24 foot space! Neither is able to be and act in the ways they would normally act but must adapt and adapt to this wild situation. It is worth reading and a grand escape! And before the ocean adventure, the boy explores and adopts three faith traditions – Hinduism, Islam and Christianity and calls on God and gods of many names during his time at sea. He is a spiritual seeker at a very young age, exploring these three traditions and not wanting to settle on one, he embraces all of them. He prays on Friday at the mosque, he is there Sunday morning at the Catholic Church and he visits the Hindu temple. He finds common ground and decides he doesn’t have to choose – why can’t I be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim? His faith is what saves him when he is lost at sea. He is on this long and fantastical pilgrimage. He finds a kind of peace as he prays whenever and however he can. And it was hard. Sometimes Pi doesn’t think he can go on. He is hungry and lonely and fearing for his life. “At such moments I tried to elevate myself. I would touch the turban I had made with the remnants of my shirt and I would say aloud, “This is God’s hat!...I would pat my pants and say aloud, “this is God’s attire.” I would point at the sky and say aloud, this is God’s ear.” And in this way I would remind myself of creation and my place in it. But God’s hat was always unraveling. God’s pants were falling apart. God’s cat was a constant danger…God’s ear didn’t seem to be listening.” He said that the darkness did always end up passing. Fish came along to be caught, the wind would shift and the sun would come up. And there was a point of light in his heart where God was, where his faith was that kept him going, that gave him strength through this pilgrimage of physical and spiritual survival.

Louise Diamond lives in Bristol, Vermont and she is the author of the Peace Book. She writes that there are basic assumptions underlying our society that go against peace and that by changing or challenging these assumptions, we can transform our society and ultimately the world. She writes that “a true culture of peace is based on four basic principles that promote trust, harmony, and healthy human relationships.” She offers four principles of Peace. (and you’ll be able to hear our UU principles within these!) The first, Community. “We come-in-unity first with ourselves, then with others, acknowledging we are all in this together, interconnected and interdependent. Therefore, what hurts one, hurts all. To honor the equal dignity and worth of all…and a commitment to social and economic justice.” Sound familiar? The interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. What happens in one corner of the world, of the web, impacts all of us.

Her second principle is Cooperation. Finding common ground. Knowing we will all win if we work together. Again, that web of interdependence. The third principle is Nonviolence. She writes “with dialogue and creative problem solving – and with a moral conviction to avoid the suffering caused by violence – we can address the toughest issues of our individual and collective lives.” And the fourth principle is Witness. With Life as our witness, families all are we. “Peace is a living presence within all of us,” she writes. “It is encoded in us as natural wisdom, our spiritual birthright.” There is a seed of peace in everyone and it is relating to that place. It takes work, I’m not suggesting it is easy. I was recently driving and late to a meeting so I was following a car quite closely. I kept having to put on my brakes but for some reason, it didn’t dawn on me that it was because I was following the car ahead of me too closely. Well, we get into the town and suddenly the driver stops suddenly in the middle of the road. I look behind me and several trucks had to stop. She gets out of her car and yells loudly at me to get off her blank tail and stop following her. I have kids in the car, she yells. She got back in her car and started driving again. I waited and followed at a safe distance, feeling really silly for having been yelled at in the middle of town by an irate mother. She was right. I had been following too closely. I wasn’t driving safely. It wasn’t safe for her to get out in the middle of the road either but if I’d kept my distance that might not have happened. So I would be a few minutes late to the meeting. It is better and more important to keep the peace.
UU Minister Rev. Rob Manning reflected in a sermon he wrote four years ago that “This is one of the great times of the Christian calendar, a month of contemplation and spiritual preparation. If the birth of Christ is the coming into the world of light, hope, and peace, what are these things in our world today? How do we make room for them within ourselves, among us as people, and among the nations of the world? This is the time, the opportunity, for all of Christendom to contemplate and spiritually prepare for the coming of light, and hope, and peace. It happens every year, you know. Advent is on the calendar every year. But advent as a season tends to be something like the Chicago Cubs World Series: it’s always scheduled but it never really comes. Christmas always comes. The entire economy would be ruined if some grinch somehow managed to make Christmas not come. Christmas always comes, but Advent never comes.”

It’s true. Christmas does come and it goes. It comes early! It sweeps into the stores and the neighborhoods in a flood and sparkle of lights and colors – signs that proclaim and do not allow anyone to forget that it is Christmas. But I think Rob is right. Advent doesn’t actually come. This time of waiting and preparation, this time of quiet preparation and reflection is not rewarded usually with a flash of insight and a magnificent change. The light doesn’t actually flood the world in sudden brilliance that we are all witness to. At least not literally. But we can welcome in the quiet peace of advent. What a welcome opportunity to reflect, to bring in a bit of peace amid the flash and overly bright decorations and too loud music. By the time the 25th comes, we will have been bombarded by sight and sound. We have seen so many lights…advent may be a waiting for light to come in the darkness but it’s pretty bright already! That is why the candlelight services that are held take on a new meaning. We have to turn out our lights. We have to rest for a few minutes together. We have to be in the darkness. We have to feel the peace that already exists. Peace is here now, every breath is a prayer. I used to say that statement a lot during a time when I did not feel peaceful and needed those words to calm me.

But when I open the paper, it seems that the opposite of peace is what I see and read about in the larger world. Peace does not seem to be beginning, it seems to be hiding. Rob says Advent never comes. Peace doesn’t seem to come either. At least not everywhere, not all the time. But I think it’s like love. A small bit of peace goes a long way. A peaceful gesture towards someone. Not responding in anger to the woman who got out of her car. It took will on my part. I don’t like getting yelled at. No one does. But peace at the beginning of the day…peace in the middle…peace around the edges. Like a giant weaving we are all and each helping to make. We are all helping to weave it. John Lennon’s words are in there: “Imagine all the people, living life in peace....” It can’t hurt to keep that thought as the eye of the storm, as the spark of light, as that prayer.

Peace Pilgrim began walking in 1953. Yes, she did have an epiphany, a revelation, a grand insight on a mountain top. It doesn’t always happen so dramatically but her life took a drastic turn so I think it needed to come as a dramatic. She knew she had to dedicate her life to peace. That was all there was to it. She heeded the light that came flooding in – the message was. You need to start walking for peace. And you don’t need to take anything with you. You will need to have faith that people will offer you food, that you will find places to rest, that you will be taken care of. So she embarked wearing only a blue tunic that said “peace pilgrim” on the front and 25,000 miles for peace on the back. She actually added that after she had walked that many miles. She was a remarkable woman. Walking for peace…yes, she did begin during the Korean War and wanted the war to end. But it was more about peace between individual people, between each other that she wanted to promote. She said that “Peace is a state of mind and a path of action. It is a concept, a goal, an experience, a path. Peace is an ideal. It is both intangible and concrete, complex and simple, exciting and calming. Peace is personal and political; it is spiritual and practical, local and global. It is a process and an outcome, an above all a way of being.” Peace begins with me. Peace begins with us. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There are some great stories about her travels, her walk, her pilgrimage over many years and thousands of miles.

“Advent is a short season, yet it covers a long distance,” Catherine de Hueck Doherty writes. “It is the road of a soul from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It seems such a short distance as we are accustomed to thinking of distances. Yet it is a road into infinity, into eternity. It has a beginning, but no end. In truth, Advent is the road of the spiritual life which all of us must start if we do not want to miss the way. So, then. Let us enter, you and I, into the pilgrimage that doesn't take us from home. For ours is a journey of the spirit, which is a thousand times harder than a journey of the feet. Let us 'arise and go'.”

And we won’t know. We have no idea where our pilgrimage this year will take us. Most likely not a lifeboat in the ocean with a tiger…we probably won’t don a blue tunic and start walking for peace, at least not all the way across the country. But something unexpected might happen. A point of light might cross our path and it is so bright we have to notice it. A pilgrimage that doesn’t take us from our houses but leads us down new and unexpected paths. I’ll meet you there.

Blessed Be and Amen.

Sources drawn from for this sermon:
The Peace Book by Louise Diamond
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Sermon written in 2002 by UU Minister Rev. Rob Manning
reflection on Advent by Catherine de Hueck Doherty
Peace Pole Project - http://www.worldpeace.org/peacepoles.html