"Keeping the Peace...Site"

Veteran war correspondent and New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has done it all:ambushed "on desolate stretches of Central American roads, locked in unnerving firefights in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by the Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guards, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in central Bosnia, shot at by Serb snipers and shelled with deafening rounds of artillery in Sarajevo that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." He is sick of violent death and fear, sorry for the memories he must carry with him forever.

And yet, he admits that "war is an enticing elixir."

In an essay he wrote recently for the quarterly journal of Amnesty International, Chris Hedges admits that war may be hell, but it fills a spiritual void. "[War] gives us resolve, a cause," he writes."It allows us to be noble." And war is seductive. "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug. It is peddled by mythmakers ­ historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state ­ all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty."

"And so it takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers," Chris Hedges concludes. "Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy, and all feel the peer pressure. Few, once in battle, can find the strength to resist."

"War makes the world understandable," Hedges writes. That is why it is such a powerful force. When differences can be reduced to the struggle between good and evil, the ambiguities of the world are clarified. A terrorized public wants to wrest meaning out of the darkness and confusion.War offers, in Hedges' words, "a black-and-white tableau of them and us."It gives us solidarity. It consoles us that human suffering can serve a higher good.

Considering the irresistible attraction and strange thrill that war provides, peace is a pale and unappealing alternative. Peace asks us to grow comfortable with ambiguity, to look beyond the mythic struggle of good and evil, to accept complexity and difference. We conclude that it takes tremendous effort ­ like kicking the war habit and looking for some other kind of higher power ­ to achieve it.

Still, despite its allure and mythical power, war eventually reveals its emptiness, its damage, its toll on the human spirit. It leaves its survivors yearning to understand what it takes ­ in the world and in ourselves ­ to create a world at peace. A Los Angeles Times poll published yesterday showed that older people, especially the World War II generation, are opposing the war on Iraq in higher numbers than younger people. Quite possibly those who fought one war are the least willing to ask others to fight another. They know the damage and the toll it will take.

There is little about war that can teach us how to make peace, however deeply we may long for it. Peace requires education. And it needs people in community developing the skills of peace making.

In 1986, our congregation voted to designate our church a "peace site." This would be a place where people could come to learn about peace. Inspired by the "Beyond War" and sanctuary movements, we made good use of the peace site back then. In addition to educational programs, our congregation offered refuge to a Guatemalan family facing life-threatening deportation, and gave hope to many others fleeing terror in Central America.

This year, with the vigor of our "faith in action" initiative and our congregational vote against a war on Iraq, we are poised to revitalize our role as a peace site. This weekend, thousands of people gathered at demonstrations all over the world to witness for peace. Today is the birthday observance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., advocate of nonviolence, freedom, equality, and peace. It¹s a good time to think together again about what it means for peace to become our spiritual quest.

Peace work is personal growth and self-discipline, Diane Fletcher-Hoppe suggested while lighting the chalice. It challenges us to reject our impulses for retaliation and punishment. We learned from the children¹s story that "enemy pie" is not to punish our enemies, but to make them our friends. That is a good image to keep in mind. Peace is transformational work: in ourselves and in relation to others.

Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophy of nonviolence provided the foundation of Martin Luther King¹s
approach to the civil rights struggle, was candid about the personal effort involved in making peace. "I have learned through bitter experience," he said, "the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world." The power of nonviolence is transformed anger: anger at injustice and oppression, expressed not with hostility, but with compassion and dignity.

Dr. King explained the difference this way. "The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community." If we want peace, both Gandhi and King would insist, we must learn to practice nonviolence.

A good activity for our peace site would be to explore the philosophy of nonviolence. Not everyone who wants peace believes that nonviolence is the only way to achieve it. That is a difference among us we could explore together as well. We do not have to agree about everything to keep peace among ourselves. Actually ­ it¹s the other way around. To live in peace is to respect our differences. We could also study the philosophy of "just war." What defines an adequate cause for going to war? Our peace site could offer a place for a moral debate about war, when and if it is ever "just."

Most Unitarian Universalists are not pacifists, opposed to war of any kind. Rather we are people who want to be fully informed and conscious about the stand we take. Our peace site could help us make up our minds, by offering us opportunities to seek the truth together.

Our peace site could be a community of people, just as we are, who agree that studying peace and practicing what we learn together is part of our spiritual life. The understanding and practice of peace begin within ourselves and in our relationships with others. We move outward from there into the community and the larger world.

Dr. King said that "the only way to ultimately change humanity and make for the society that we all long for is to keep love at the center of our lives." He wasn¹t talking about romantic love. He was talking about
"understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all [humanity]," to use his words. To use our Unitarian Universalist words, he affirmed the "inherent worth and dignity of all persons." All are equally deserving of our respect and understanding.

To come together in a peace site is to put these attitudes into practice. It is to challenge us to counter the power and the attraction of war with the hope and dream of peace. It is to keep our faith in the future, when, as Dr. King said, "we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of Š[our] inhumanity, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice."

Looking back on his years as a war correspondent, Chris Hedges realized the most important distinction anyone can make between war and peace. "We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause," he says about war. "And this is a quality war shares with love," he continues, "for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security. But unlike love, war gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction."

Let us agree that the meaning and purpose of our gathering is love. May this love guide us in the work of our peace site. And may our work be the creation of new ways of being in the world ­ and the creation of new worlds, "bright and glittering," that we have helped to make.

References used to prepare this sermon include "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," by Chris Hedges, in Amnesty Now, Winter, 2002; "The Power of Nonviolence," by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered in 1957 and published in A Testament of Hope, edited by James M. Washington (HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), and "WWII Generation Is Questioning What This War Would Be Good For," in the Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2003.