Rev. Linda Simmons
Reflections on War and Peace
May 25, 2014
We are meaning making creatures. Everything we do is an act of meaning making.
William Dilthey, a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlinwrote: “Meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.”
Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience. When we cannot make meaning out of experience, even a meaning that tells us that there must be a higher meaning we cannot grasp, we fall into crisis, we get sick, we feel lost, disoriented, disconnected from ourselves and others.
Professor Crystal Park from the Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut wrote an article in 2011 called, Implicit Religion and the Meaning Making Model. She writes,
“Global meaning consists of the structures through which people perceive and understand themselves and their environment and direct their behavior. Global meaning systems encompass beliefs, goals, and subjective feelings of purpose or meaning in life.
Global beliefs are the core schémas through which people interpret their experiences, including beliefs regarding fairness, justice, luck, control, coherence, benevolence, and identity.
People describe meaningfulness as feeling that one has purpose or direction, as having plans and intentions. This sense of meaningfulness comes, in part, from seeing one's life as containing those meaning-making goals that one values.
Global goals provide the motivation and direction to pursue those goals through daily strivings and the daily decisions we all make about how to spend our time, energy, and other resources. The extent to which people feel their daily lives are consistent with their global meanings provides sources of satisfaction and well-being.”
Memorial Day brings words, which of course contain and make meaning, like hero, manhood, adulthood, service, patriotism, honor. How we define these words as a culture, as a world, as a system of global meaning makers matters, indeed directs us to actions.
Having lives filled with meanings that we value is something we are all willing to make sacrifices for and do every day.
What meanings did you wake today to fulfill? Was it to be good, strong, right, kind, beautiful, courageous, thoughtful, capable? Some of these meanings bring us to ourselves each other, and some separate us.
One of the surest ways to embody the meanings of hero and patriot is to join the military and go to war. One of the surest ways for so many to leave a life of meanings that do not satisfy or bring respect is to join the military and go to war.
Does it work? Do those who return from our recent wars experience themselves through us as heroes, patriots, adults, and people of honor worthy of respect? The way we ignore those returning from war and the medical benefits we offer and withhold from those returning from war would suggest this is not the case.
The outcomes of suicide, homicide, domestic violence, depression, homelessness, and mental illness suggest that what happens in many cases when one returns from war does not leave one feeling honored, respected, held apart as a hero.
My father entered the Navy as a young man. He was trying to escape the brutality of his father, the entrapment that was his family and socio-economic conditions that limited his options. His world was one of violence. From the time he was a young boy he was asked by his mother to go to bars at the age of 10, 11, 12 and get his father before he spent all his money on booze. My dad would go to collect his dad and somehow convince him to come home, and then become a victim of his violence or watch his mother become a victim to it. The Navy was an escape, a chance to become other. He fought in the Korean War.
He came back and became, perhaps not a carbon copy of his father but surely a version of him. Becoming a hero, a man of honor, a patriot, one who served his country did not offer him a life of dignity and self-respect. War affirmed for him that violence was necessary to survive.
What does it mean to live in a world that offers so many desirable meaning categories through service in war? What does it mean to live in a world that does not offer other, accessible, viable ways to fulfill these meanings for so many?
These meaning-making systems are failing our young people, are failing us all.
How do we honor our war dead, leave flowers on their graves without honoring war itself or while honoring the need for peace? We leave our flowers for the young people and all people who gave their lives to embody a meaning that could offer them more than they had. They gave their lives to embody meanings that we have all participated in upholding, all participated in circulating, all participated in not replacing with other meanings. They gave their lives believing it mattered. Bring your flowers to these graves. Their lives mattered, lives they gave up living into meanings that offered hope, life, honor and possibility.
Leave your flowers and then work for peace.
Systems of meanings change when we start living in relationship to old meanings in new ways. The meaning of the words: minority, woman, sick, healthy, rich, poor…all of these meanings have changed over time because we have changed and reconstructed truth to match our lives, to contain our lives and make sense of them.
Erik Lindberg in his article, Resilience, writes about responses to end or change the course of global warming from various communities of meaning. He critiques them all saying they are too confined to past meanings that no longer have the capacity to sustain change. They can only reproduce the paradigms of scarcity, consumption, and a logic that encourages argument and lack of personal responsibility.
He writes,
“Ever since embarking on graduate studies in English and Comparative Literature, I have, with tongue in cheek, referred to myself as an Evangelical Atheist, one of the most modern designations one might choose, including the aspect of self-parody it includes.
I bring this up because the self-reflection and reversal of course that saying the following involves is significant for someone who has reveled in the profane: a successful Transition may need to start acting more like a religion. The most plausible approach, in this late hour, may be to consider things like the soil and the earth as sacred.
Creating a sacred realm of the untouchable, after all, has been one of the very few successful ways in which humans have placed limits on themselves.
We must start the difficult project of revaluation, according to which we parse through our entire repertoire of values and hierarchies and embark on one of the most profound revolutions in expectations in human history.”
A revolution of expectations. This reminds me of the words of Jim Antal, who serves the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ as the Conference Minister and President. that we need spiritual practices of changed behavior that will change the meaning of the words progress, success and I would add heroism, patriotism and honor.
We are a community of religious seekers who are placed in this nexus of time and space to create difference, hope, compassion, reason, love as responses to the climate, shrinking resources, the everyday bickering that happens between us and so many others and steels away self-worth on the micro level, steals away life as it becomes gangs, violence on the streets and war on the macro level.
How should we define honor, manhood, heroism, patriotism? What if to be patriotic meant to be vulnerable, to work for peace, to negotiate truth, to end war as a response to lack and difference? What if to be a hero meant to be a teacher, a mother, a father, an environmentalist, a religious seeker in a time when to be religious and to seek no longer holds value?
This is uniquely our work as Unitarian Universalists because we made promises to each other and the world in joining this tradition that we would take care of each other, honor the inherent worth and dignity of all people, the first principle of our faith to which we are all covenanted, to uphold justice, equity and compassion in human relations, our second principle. We made a promise when we joined this faith to do more than feel comfortable and good about ourselves. We promised to show up for each other, for the world.
This is uniquely our time as Unitarian Universalists. Our voices are well poised to counter dogmatism, absolute truth, violence as life saving, patriotism as blind obedience to ideals that do not breed compassion or life.
And the only way I know how to do this is to change our lives and commit to contributing to the lives of others in new ways.
Today, I ask you to make a commitment to helping someone define the word hero as honoring the sacred, contributing to peace, serving others to help them live lives of dignity, answering the call of justice through compassion. To help another see themselves as worthy of respect because we are all children of this wide, mysterious, heartbreaking, joyful and profound experience of life.
I have here two pots of soil and some seeds.
Like all seeds, they will take time to grow and only committed attention combined with the grace of the earth will nurture a seed into blossom.
I invite you this memorial day, which is also a time of planting when the frost has promised to pass, to come up and plant this seed of your commitment, plant this seed to create meanings that can save us, plant a seed to offer new meaning to life. Plant this seed to mark the growing of your own heroism on this earth. Plant this seed for peace.
Brian Andreas,American writer, painter, sculptor, technologist and publisher writes, “Anyone can slay a dragon ...but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That's what takes a real hero.”
Amen.
1