Blessed are the Peacemakers
Service offered by Pam Rumancik
Sunday, August 3, 2008
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
Rocky River, Ohio
Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Part 1 – The Story of Us
Many thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were just beginning to figure out what it meant to be human, people mostly lived alone. The world was a scary place. Animals threatened, the weather could be harsh, it was hard to find food. If you were alone when you ran into a tiger – you were pretty much dinner. If you were alone when you started having your baby, there was a good chance neither you nor your child would survive.
Our forefathers & mothers realized that they had more control over these situations when they banded together. Family groups grew to clans. Clans grew to tribes. Together they could catch bigger prey and feed more people. Together they could build sturdy shelter against the elements. Together they could plant and harvest, heal one another, pass on gathered wisdom.
Even then, all humans shared the same longings; the longing for safety in an uncertain world; the longing to know and be known, to love and be loved, to feel a part of something larger than themselves; Being part of a group, a family, a community helped fill that longing.
Because this worked communities grew. Nomadic populations settled and became towns and cities, eventually states and countries. You couldn’t know everyone anymore; it became hard to tell the us from the them, so rules were developed to identify one another. Your people dressed like you, ate the same kinds of food as you, worshiped the same gods, performed the same rituals.
Despite clashes between peoples, for the most part this worked. It created space to breathe, to laugh, to love. People felt some level of security, some knowledge of how the world worked and what was going to happen next. It’s worked for thousands of years.
An unfortunate side effect of this gathering together was that it was easier to be an “us” if there was a “them”. Easier to feel good about your situation – flaws and all – if you could point to somebody else who was worse off than you. We still carry that in us today.
The world has gotten smaller. Tribes of us and them no longer make us safe. The residual suspicion of the unfamiliar – the not like us – creates needless fear and division. Creates anxiety, creates the kind of places where people are rejected and made unwelcome for no real reason – for speaking with an accent, for having darker skin, for loving the wrong person.
It’s time to retell the story of us. It’s time for a new way of being in the world. Teresa of Avila said: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
We must create a story where gods do not divide us – but peek out at us from the faces of our neighbors. Where we recognize divinity in its most basic form, in the eyes of the people around us. It’s what mystics have been telling us for centuries. There is no them. We are all one unity of being – one us - one interconnected web of being on this small planet.
Instead of looking for God to gift us a new world – we must be the hands and feet creating that world, the imagineers describing it, the voices calling for it. We are the breath of our ancestors, telling a new story, we are the spirit of life – building a new reality.
Part 2 - Blessed are the Peacemakers
We are one. Sometimes it’s easy to feel it, to feel safe, to feel our interconnected web of being. Like today - It is so good to be back here. Back in my home church, the community where I feel safe and familiar. It’s good to see all the faces I know & love - and the new faces that mean my church is thriving and growing. It’s good to be in a place where I feel comfortable and I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next.
As human beings we long for connectedness, security, a sense of belonging. It’s the empty that love fills –and love is the only thing that can fill it – that can make the longing go away.
We are one. Love lives here. As a community we stand on the side of love – and even wear t-shirts to show it. As a member of the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender community, I especially understand the comfort that comes from being part of a larger us. When there are so many people in the world who make me ‘them.’ Having a home in Unitarian Universalist churches where I am welcomed into the us of community is a precious and wonderful thing. If there is any place that we like to believe we are safe it is in our church community.
Which is why the shooting last Sunday in Knoxville hit so hard. It felt like us. They look like us, they sound like us. Although we may not know them, we know them. They are part of our ‘us.’
We are saddened by the deaths and the horrific details on a Sunday morning. We have compassion for their pain and we want to reach out and help – reach out to heal. We recognize that because of interconnectedness, their pain is our pain. But there is another element in the swirl of emotion if we are honest. In our deepest truth, one part of our reaction is fear because they do look like us. Because their tragedy reminds us of our vulnerability – of the fragility and unpredictability of our own lives.
Forgive me for this. When I first heard about the Knoxville shooting I was sad. I was horrified at the senselessness of violence in a church. Of a person so disturbed that he had to vent his pain on strangers in order to find relief from the demons in his soul. I felt compassion and love for all the sufferers – all the people whose peaceful day at church had turned to tragedy.
But my next reaction was less – um compassionate. I thought ‘oh no – here we go again.’ The pattern that we’ve seen played out over and over will start up again – this time with Unitarian Universalists at the center. You know the one. The one we’ve witnessed too many times –Oklahoma City, Columbine, Sept 11th in New York (although that is a entity all its own) – and more recently Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University – the one where our society works itself into a low level of hysteria about an event that’s happened to ‘us’.
Thankfully, I have not witnessed this in our community. We have reacted with love and compassion, and very little of that excess of sensibility which seems to surface when these events unfold. But it made me stop and wonder about why our society does react that way. A heightened level of anxiety is revealed by the horrified fascination – the hint of voyeurism disguised as compassion that comes out when tragedies strike.
Why do the media make such a big deal out of isolated random events, when people are dying every day? I attend seminary in Chicago and this year nearly 300 people have already been murdered in that city – way too many of them school children the victims of senseless gang violence. Just a few days ago a man was burned to death in a store front church in an inner city neighborhood. I know Cleveland isn’t as bad as Chicago but I’m sure there has been more than enough tragedy to go around here as well. I can’t help but wonder – why does middle America only get agitated when it happens to people who look like us?
One answer is that it is out of the ordinary. The school children – and there have been 29 Chicago public school students killed since last fall - live in bad neighborhoods. Their families are poor and can’t move them to safer places. It’s part and parcel of life. “Those people” live with the threat of violence every day. We put up a screen to make them separate from us – make their homes a place where violence is acceptable because it’s a way of life in the inner city. We make these people ‘other’ in order to protect our hearts, to protect our illusions of safety and security.
Big events – the Columbines and the Virginia Techs- happen to people going about their lives in “safe’ places. In colleges (where our children might be) in office buildings, and now, in a church. As middle class, mostly white people we have created powerful illusions of control, of safety, of the ability to keep such violence and suffering out of our lives. These random events – as rare as they are – remind us of how little control we really have. We have to admit, at some level, that when we react with horror and feel we must do something, it is as much to address our own suffering as that of the people who have been wounded.
In my chaplaincy training this past spring we did a unit on suffering and what I learned surprised me. Suffering is more complex than I’d realized. Human beings can bear a lot of pain. We can endure much more than you’d imagine without describing it as suffering. The elements which combine to turn pain into suffering are lack of control and lack of predictability. When these are added, even a small amount of pain, whether physical or emotional, can be debilitating. It is the loss of self-determination, the inability to predict what comes next which takes an illness from merely painful to unbearable.
In the same way, these tragic events remind us that we don’t really know what is around the next bend in our lives and that we don’t have control over much of it; no matter where we live or how much money we make. They remind us of a fragility of life that is hard sit with.
In the Summer Day, Mary Oliver writes;
I don’t know exactly what prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down in the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed. How to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
We often use this beautiful poem as a benediction. It contains both recognition and challenge. Everything does die – at last and too soon. What is it we are called to do while we’re here – while we are in the midst of this beautiful and precious gift of life?
I think it is too pay attention.
To look around. To embrace the beauty and the iniquity. To not hide ourselves behind illusions of safety. Not circle the wagons and build higher walls – metaphorically or emotionally- between us and them. No man is an island; it is often isolation that drives desperate souls to acts of violence.
Unitarian Universalists are deeply committed to inclusivity. Our seventh principle upholds and honors the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part. We are working to expand the borders of us, to make welcome all peoples and beings. This is why we were attacked in Tennessee. Why people who are uncertain of their own worth sometimes feel compelled to commit hate crimes, to diminish and denigrate an “other” to make themselves feel better, to strengthen their own weak sense of ‘us.” We cannot respond with fear. We must remain committed to love.
We are challenged to keep telling a new story of us and not just us as Unitarian Universalists, but us as people of the earth. It gives me hope that we have learned from the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that hurting those we would name our enemies hurts us all. At some level we are beginning to understand that having an identified ‘them’ is not the answer; that it is in expanding our definition of ‘us’ that we will create peace for everyone.
We can do that in many different ways. Every act for social justice, every voice raised for the oppressed, every point of witness against discrimination is a step in building a safer planet. Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, speaking about the number of children killed in Chicago, said "Twenty-eight of those kids are African-American and Latino. Hard to imagine that that would be acceptable if that were, in fact, the case in other parts of the city or in a middle-class suburb somewhere," he said. "Something is wrong, and this violence has to stop." I say it will only stop when those children become our children; when the violence done to them is the violence done to us.
In Mt 5:9 Jesus tell us “Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called the children of God.” We must be peacemakers, children of a god whose face is reflected in each being on the planet – whose hands are our hands, whose eyes are our eyes and whose compassion is our compassion. It is in claiming the relationship of family worldwide, of acknowledging our unity of being that we are inspired to work for justice for all beings.