"A Religion of Peace"

Our Unitarian Universalist movement has cultivated a global identity ever since the nineteenth century, when Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau first explored eastern religions in search of a new spirituality. By 1893, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a Chicago Unitarian minister, helped convene the historic World Parliament of Religions, which drew religious leaders of all the world’s faiths into public dialogue. Unitarians from Boston sponsored Paramahansa Yogananda , founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, for his first appearance in the United States in 1920. And Swami Vivekenanda established the Vedanta Society with help from Unitarian Universalists in California a few years later.

Through these contacts with the larger world, our traditional affirmations of the goodness of human nature and the limitless love of God evolved into a vision of world community inspired by a universal religion that was boundless and open. The vision was hopeful, inclusive, and humanistic. It emphasized dialogue and education, and faith in a universal truth underlying all surface differences.

We haven’t swerved much from these core values, although world events challenge them more with each passing day. Now our vision sometimes looks naïve and misguided. When all we see is the chasm, not the common ground, between the people of the world, it’s hard to keep the faith.

But our hope prevails despite our disappointments. "Let us celebrate the unity of the world," wrote Clifford Reed, a contemporary British Unitarian. "Let us celebrate the reality beneath our divisive illusions, the vision that lifts our eyes to the future that could be."

We are not feeling much like celebrating these days. Terrorism and war are all around us. It’s a time when we have every reason to ask what comfort and what guidance our faith has to offer. The vision of a world community at peace has never seemed so urgently needed, so hard to achieve, or so easy to abandon. But this is no time to let go. Preparing for today’s service, I thought about how I don’t expect to see anything close to world peace in my lifetime anymore. I thought about all the people in the world whose vision is very different from our own and just as undesirable to us as ours is to them. I thought about the chasms of ideology, trust, religion, and culture that drive us farther apart every day. And I asked myself whether our vision ­ this "one-world vision"­ can really show us what to do.

It helps to begin with our history. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century, when Unitarians and Universalists encountered non-western religion, that our movement developed a concept of "one world." Our forebears were people, after all, who were said to believe in "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man, and the neighborhood of Boston." They were provincial in more ways than one, however radical their theology may have been.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to a friend in 1840 that he had been reading Hindu scripture, the Vedas. Emerson felt a real ambivalence about this strange foreign religion. "It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble and poetic mind," he wrote approvingly. At the same time, he dismissed what he called "the endless ceremonial nonsense which caricatures and contradicts it through every chapter."

Yet this exploration led Emerson ultimately to a new understanding of spirituality. He came to believe that what all people have in common is an intuitive capacity ­ a sense of ultimate reality ­ that dwells in our souls and connects us to all humanity. He trusted that this ultimate reality resides underneath our human differences, timeless and universal. "Within us is the soul of the whole," he wrote, "the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One."

Out of this "soul of the whole" arose the vision of world unity. It was grounded in our spirituality and reinforced by our interfaith encounters. When Swami Yogananda arrived in Boston for the International Congress of Religious Liberals in 1920, he was greeted at the dock by the leaders of the American Unitarian Association. One of them gave the following report of Yogananda’s message: "Religion, he maintained, is universal and it is one. We cannot possibly universalize particular customs and conventions; but the common element in religion can be universalized, and we may ask all alike to follow and obey it."

American Unitarians and Universalists agreed enthusiastically with Yogananda. They believed there was a universal element to religion just as Emerson believed there was a universal quality to the human soul. If all alike were "to follow and obey," the world would live in harmony and peace.

These are the religious roots of our vision of one world. In the contemporary language of our Purposes and Principles, we affirm and promote "the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all." We are all a part of the "interdependent web of all existence," the affirmation continues, offering a visual image of what holds us all together.

It is our vision of world community that has inspired many of us to work for peace. Yet ours is not a pacifist faith, like the historic peace churches. Many Unitarian Universalists are pacifists, however, inspired by the teachings of Gandhi and the examples of nonviolent resistance we have experienced in our own country. And many of us would say that our liberal religious principles lead inevitably to that position.

But the value we hold in common is the goal of world community. It is a world community that upholds peace, liberty and justice for all, although it does not prescribe what route we must follow to get there. That is why once again ­ as we have too many other times ­ our religious community must debate whether war can be a pathway to peace.

Can war ever be a pathway to peace? Yes, say those for whom World War II was a moral imperative that called for sacrifice and unity. By 1945, however, fresh from the horrors of the battleground and awash with grief, the international community gathered to create a new vision of the world, and it gave us the United Nations. It was a vision that offered hope of an alternative to war, as the UN Charter makes clear. "We, the peoples of the United Nations," it begins, "determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small, To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, And for these ends to practice tolerance and to live together in peace as good neighbors," it continues, we resolve "to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims."

Unitarian Universalists quickly realized that the vision and values of the United Nations were compatible with our own. We established our own office at the United Nations; our church is a supporting member. We also belong, along with groups as varied as the Girl Scouts, the Anti Defamation League, and the NAACP, to the United Nations Association. For many of us, it is simply unthinkable for our country to proceed with any military action that the United Nations has not approved. The reason is not simply because we respect the United Nations. It is because the vision and the values the United Nations represents are deeply rooted in our faith tradition. The United Nations is the closest we have ever come to a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. Without it, we can only move further away from our great hope and dream.

These days we are more aware than ever that not everyone sees our "one world" the way we do. And these are not harmless differences. We may never fully understand why others believe or act as they do. But we can look at our actions and ask ourselves if they are consistent with what we believe. For there is where we find the comfort and guidance our tradition has to offer.

I still believe in world community. However fragmented, hateful and frightened our world has become, I still believe that beneath those differences there is one soul and one earth. I still believe that peace is possible if we work together for understanding, justice, and freedom. I understand that some will think this position is naïve. I acknowledge that someone who hates this idea may want to drop a bomb on my head. But I will not hate in return because I do not want to become someone who does. And I do not want to go to war with those who do.

My faith has taught me that people are capable of far better things than we realize because we are part of one beautiful world, that has given each of us life. Perhaps war is a failure of the imagination to find another way to make the world safe. I hope that some day we will find that way. Until that time, I hold on to the vision of one world, gently leading us closer to peace, by showing us our souls are one after all.

References used to prepare this sermon include The Unitarians and the Universalists, by David Robinson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda (Los Angeles, California: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1993); Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edited by Stephen E. Whicher (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1957).

Copyright 2002, Rev. Judith E. Meyer

This text is for personal use only, and may not be copied

or distributed without the permission of the author.