THE GOAL OF WORLD COMMUNITY: ENVISIONING OUR SIXTH PRINCIPLE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

March 25, 2007

READINGS

Micah 4:3
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more;
But they shall all sit under their own vines and fig trees;
And no one shall make them afraid.

From The Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell
In our age of sustained democratic revolution, the power that governments inspire through fear remains under constant challenge by the power that flows from people’s freedom to act in behalf of their interests and beliefs. Whether one calls this power cooperative power or something else, it has, with the steady widening and deepening of the democratic spirit, over and over bent great power to its will. Its point of origin is the heart and mind of each ordinary person. . . .

It is not an all-purpose “means” with which any “end” can be pursued. It cannot be “projected,” for its strength declines in proportion to its distance from its source; it is a local plant, rooted in home soil. It is therefore mighty on the defensive, feeble on the offensive, and toxic to territorial empires, all of which, in our time, have died. It stands in the way of any future imperial scheme, American or other. . . . Its watchwords are love and freedom, yet it is not just an ideal, but a real force in the world.

SERMON

The writer Anne Lamott in her latest book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, tells that one day shortly after the war in Iraq had started when she was feeling gloomy and desperate she decided to distract herself by cleaning the drawers of a bureau. In the back of one she happened on a tangled gold chain.

“I took it outside,” she writes, “and sat down on the front step in the cool morning and tugged on it. Tugging is what you always try first with a tangled chain of slinky filament. It makes things worse, but it’s what you do.”

Lamott says that when she was a child her mother used to give her gold chains to untangle. “I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up,” she says. The chains “would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia and India, to the great weight of the world; yet they were light as a feather.”

Sometimes, she says, “I would put the chain on a table and work it gently, letting the slink slip itself out of the knot, but other times I had to use a needle to loosen the worst of it, poking lightly so I wouldn’t break any of the links.”

This time, though, she says, after a few minutes she gave up, put the chain away and picked up the morning paper: big mistake, for as soon as she started reading she found her rage returning. “I’ve known for years that resentments don’t hurt the people we resent, but that they do hurt and even sometimes kill us,” she says. So, she had begun thinking about how she might get beyond them. “I’d been asking myself,” she writes, “Am I willing to try to give up a bit of this hatred? Yeah; finally; theoretically. And that was a start.”

Annie Lamott’s story of that tangled gold chain comes to mind when I think that image at the center of our sixth Unitarian Universalist principle: We covenant to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. World community: such a compelling idea, people of all races and cultures living together on this Earth in some arrangement of mutual acceptance, accountability and respect. And yet, in the world of today that idea seems much like that chain in Anne’s bureau drawer: lovely, inviting, but so tightly tangled it seems nearly hopeless to try to unravel it.

When I reflect on our seven Unitarian Universalist principles, most of them seem direct enough that usually I can get a pretty good idea of how to abide by them. Am I treating this person as someone with inherent worth and dignity? Am I showing compassion, acceptance? Are my words and actions promoting a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the right of conscience and the democratic process? But it’s when we get to our sixth principle that we start to get a little spacey.

It sounds great – the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all – resonant as it is with that ending phrase echoing the Pledge of Allegiance. But what, exactly, does that mean? How do I do that?

The vision of all humankind living at peace is nothing new. Those words from the prophet Micah that we heard earlier are among the oldest in the Hebrew Scriptures – written perhaps 10,000 years ago – and they likely derive from oral traditions that are even older, given that the language appears in nearly identical forms in two prophetic books – Micah and Isaiah.

Part of what makes those words so powerful is that they give us a concrete image for our work, an image that is embodied in a sculpture at United Nations Park in New York depicting a warrior with hammer raised, pounding his sword into the curved blade of a plow. Sad to say, though, history has shown that this conversion can always be reversed, as the Hebrew Bible itself attests. In a very different context the prophet Joel says, “Proclaim this among the nations. Prepare war, stir up the warrior. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior.’”

So, while we have an image of what peace might look like, we are left with the question of how we achieve it and maintain it, how we steer clear of those prophets, in the words of Micah, “who cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing in their mouths,” how we assure that swords beaten into plowshares stay that way.

We get a hint, I think, if we stick with that word “community,” the goal of world community for peace, liberty and justice for all. In his book, The Unconquerable World, which you heard from earlier, Jonathan Schell proceeds from the conviction that the 20th century demonstrated the bankruptcy of violence as means of achieving political ends and, more hopefully, the promise of non-violent cooperation.

Theory holds, after all, that war is something that one pursues not for its own sake, but for another end, to accomplish something. A state attacks another to gain some advantage. Success in this interchange, though, depends on a clearly defined goal and end point. If you and I play a game of chess, the game is over when one of us checkmates the other’s king. The conclusion in the case of war is not always so clear, and the consequences are never so neat.

The 20th century demonstrated that whatever intentions leaders may have for war as a tool to accomplish their ends, war has a logic of its own that ultimately will skew and pervert those ends. The world-wide conflagrations that dominated the century accomplished destruction and loss of life on an epic, hither-to unimaginable scale. They also introduced genocide as a tool of war and through technological innovation perfected the grisly art of human slaughter to the point where today with stockpiles of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons we live with the realistic possibility of our own annihilation.

In response to the armed might and imperial ambitions of the major powers, Jonathan Schell observed, two movements arose in the 20th century, each of them centered in popular will instead of state power. One of them continued the logic of war, but the other took a radically new direction.

One group, faced with a foe with superior military might, chose war of a different kind, a people’s campaign in which combatants fought guerilla style and were able to melt into a sympathetic populace. China perfected this campaign in the early 20th century, but it was also adopted by Vietnam against both France and the U.S., and with varying success by other groups. Success of a people’s war depends on broad popular support and widespread willingness to endure the deprivations of war.

The problem is that once one commits to war as a strategy, one also is caught in the logic of war. As Schell puts it, “People’s war immerses the people in the violence from which it seeks to deliver them.” And that violence often includes oppression on the part of once-popular leaders against the very people who raised them to power. War observes no boundaries, and the sacrifice, discipline and deprivations demanded of the leaders are soon demanded of all.

The other movement is that of non-violent change. The waging of war and all the devastation it brought about so traumatized the 20th century that it is easy to loose sight of what a profound effect nonviolent action has had. Yet, from India to Poland to Denmark to Argentina and Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to our own American South nonviolent action has transformed diverse nations of diverse peoples. Nonviolent action has succeeded against brutal military powers as well as enlightened democracies and has been used on behalf of diverse citizenries as well as downtrodden minorities.

The power of nonviolent action is that it arises not from allegiance to some cause, leader, or ideology, but out of the interests, the values, the integrity of every individual engaged in it. The Hindus who joined Gandhi’s Salt March, the Danes who resisted Nazi occupation, the African-Americans who marched across Selma’s Pettus Bridge were acting on behalf of their own perceived right of identity, of self-determination.

But even more, they were joined in a deep sense of solidarity with each other. It was not a sense of self-importance from which they acted but a sense of their own worth as human beings, the worth of all those who joined them, and the worth of all those who, by their actions, they hoped to set free. Their success did not come overnight. They endured hardship, setbacks and losses. Yet they stuck with it, responded creatively and worked to widen their movements. They didn’t need to coerce anybody to join them. The brave examples of their lives were clear and their goals encompassed the good of many people.

Just as there is a logic of war, you might say there is also a logic of peace. Unlike with the logic of war, where each stage in the cycle of violence grows more and more destructive, with the logic of peace each accomplishment in peace-making and the raising up of the oppressed increases confidence in the next. The process builds trust and with it faith that peace-making is a viable venture. We’re more inclined to turn to it, and as we use it we get better at it.

Schell calls this achieving power through cooperation rather than conflict. But it’s more than pragmatic success that drives the decision to engage in cooperation instead of conflict, because sometimes cooperation isn’t so successful. It may take some time for the process to bear fruit. At an even deeper level, the satisfaction behind choosing cooperative, non-violent methods is a sense that, whatever the outcome, I am living out of my truth. Gandhi called the principle behind non-violent action “satyagraha,” which is variously translated as holding fast to one’s truth, or “truth force.” Using this principle, I refuse to be drawn into violence and refuse to cooperate in violence against others. Instead of living divided, acting against our true selves, Gandhi insisted, we must act out of who we truly are and what we love.

This is brave work, and, in truth, a hard way to live. Gandhi’s life is testimony to the perils of such a path. And so this is where we come back to the crucial role of community. Community is a crucible for learning to live the undivided life, the life of our own truths. We need a place to be held in mutual respect and care, to be our authentic selves, to learn and accomplish the work we are called to do, to serve and support each other, and to learn and gain the courage to be a force for change in the larger world.

At our best, this church and our association of congregations are two such communities where we can do this: where we learn practices to find peace within ourselves, where we learn to work through conflict in safe and productive ways, where we can raise our children supportively, where we can celebrate diversity and learn to accept and even embrace the other, where we can heal from the hurts that life inflicts, from which we can reach out to change society, to change the world.

The goal of world community, then, is not some utopian moment when the visions of Micah and Isaiah come true. It is embodied in the smallest actions we take in our daily lives to realize peace and reconciliation in our lives and the world. For as spacey as that sixth principle may sound at times, it is in many ways the end goal toward which the other principles point. The disciplines that each of the other principles teach – compassion, acceptance, justice, freedom, respect – are all needed to attain the kind of world community that must be our goal if we as a species are to survive.

The 20th century has proven the futility of war, of violence, of hegemony, even if to date the present administration in Washington does not appear to have learned that. What is left now is for people of good will to show that there is another way, a way toward cooperation, reconciliation and peace.

It is good to see our church already deeply engaged in that work. As the children and parents who met here Saturday and then joined a peace rally, as a study group now gathering to assess ways to promote peace, as the flags on our lawn honoring the dead in the Iraq War, civilian and military, all attest this is a community that takes seriously its responsibility as a voice for a different future.

Like children teasing with a tangled gold chain we are working for an opening, a way that might open a kink or two. And so that brings us back to Anne LaMott:

“I got the chain out of the drawer and gave it another try,” she writes, “but I didn’t have any patience. It crossed my mind to take a hammer to the miserable thing and bust it into pieces. Trying to unravel it was a waste of time. I didn’t need it. But something inside me got back to work. Maybe I would find the perfect person to give it to – someone who was down in the dumps, who’d lost all hope of change, whose spirits would be lifted by a little present. So, tug, tug, poke, poke: I have to believe that if I do this, it will cause change – there will be more give, and give means there is more light between the links. You know never exactly where the knot is going to release, but usually, if you keep working it, it will.”

Tug, tug, poke, poke. May it be so it for us as well.

So Be It.