Languages of War and Peace

Languages of War and Peace August 3, 2014 Linda Simmons

I study with the Lama Yeshe Palmo, a Buddhist Lama in the Tibetan tradition who lives here on the island. She is instructing me on the Buddhist path, teaching me how to meditate and to still my mind. Not an easy feat I assure you!

We meet twice a month and at one of our meetings I confessed to her that sometimes when I am overwhelmed I watch TV series like Gray’s Anatomy or Orange is the New Black. She told me that we all watch TV in order to experience emotions we can find no other outlet to experience.

I think the emotion I experience in Orange is the New Black, a show about women’s prison in which each person has to find a way to survive, to cope with brutalizing, inhuman conditions, is one of the relief of a single focus, the focus of being drawn into a life so impossible that there is nothing else that matters but this one life.

This comforts me because the outside world is so big right now and so overwhelming. There is so much suffering: Israel, Gaza, the Ukraine, Syria, poverty, climate change, masses of children at the border, an execution that lasted for 2 hours in Arizona. Even just saying these words, opening my mind to the images these words leave seared on our hearts, leaves me far from what my Lama, I do call her my Lama, teaches me everyday. Know peace and be peace.

Focusing down to a single story, the story of surviving in prison, brings me a sense of peace I struggle to find when I turn away from that TV screen.

Orange is the New Black also reminds me that we cannot survive alone, that we cannot survive without seeing each other’s humanity. I made a ton of judgments about each character, deciding within myself if each deserved mercy, compassion, fair treatment, kindness. And then in Season 2, the show brings you into the personal lives of each woman, before prison, into the neighborhoods and desires and influences that each of us is confronted with as we mature but in these cases, the confrontations were extreme, the ability to be influenced by love, compassion, health, peace were very, very few.

And now when I watch the show, I feel empathy for the female prisoners as they act out. Now I understand how that could have been me too if I had grown up they way some of these folk grew up in poverty and violence, had been categorized as less than by my skin color, my education, ability.

Now I see human beings who were broken and are now incarcerated and I watch them break further in conditions that only affirm that violence is the only way of life that makes sense.

1 Watching this, I wonder who I would become if I ended up there. Let’s say I absconded with the Portuguese bell in our tower as a gift for my Portuguese mother and ended up in one of these institutions.

Who would I be, who would I become? Would I be generous, kind, compassionate or angry, self-centered, victimized, violent or some of all of this?

Someone once asked me what is the antithesis to compassion and I said hatred. She then went on to describe an incident in which a very young child was hit by a car on a busy road. My heart reached out in compassion immediately. And then she said it was 1:00am when this child was hit and my mind kicked in with rage, Where was his mother at that hour? Why wasn’t she watching?

Judgment is the antithesis to compassion. Judgment is the antithesis to compassion.

Even if we don't read the NY times, even if we don’t listen to NPR, even if we don’t open those facebook links that blast the condition of the world into our senses, we all know we are in trouble.

I was listening to Gary’s improvisational drum group the other day. I watched as the flute and the Congo drums sounded out, as the djembe drums and the symbols were struck.

Improvisation requires that each person listen to the other while holding their own center, that each person offer their own gifts, that each person play their authenticity in harmony with the authenticity of the other, even when the authenticity of the other sounds too loud, too off key, too difficult to integrate.

There are awkward moments in a drumming group, moments when people realize they could listen better and have to adjust, in between moments, moments of hesitancy when judgments keep one or another from giving, from finding a way forward with the group and moments when one person gets too self involved and the others have to bring him back into the fold.

I have been reading a lot about the Israeli and Gaza situation. I make a lot of judgments reading and watching the statistics of death in Palestine and the number of children included in those statistics. And then I remember what I know. I remember that I cannot know what it is to be Israeli or Palestinian.

I remember that I have not asked an Israeli or Palestinian for their understanding of what is going on. I remember that I need to open myself to learning more than I need to make judgments.

I know there are times when one-sided judgments need to be made and action must be taken. History is full of these examples as are our own lives.

2 Are we there now in Israel and Palestine, to the place where we know on which side to stand and need not ask any more questions? Are we? We surely know that the killing of civilians has to end, on both sides. We know this much is non-negotiable.

But what is the way to peace? What are the questions that the way to peace has to ask? What is the listening that the way to peace has to do? How can we engage this from here in Nantucket?

I have a new fascination of late, the study of fractals. Fractals are never-ending patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc.

A tree offers us a simple example of fractals. If you look at a tree from a distance, you see the trunk and many branches. If you then come closer and look at just a branch, you still see the pattern of a tree trunk with many branches. If you then look at a branch of the branch, you still see the pattern of a tree trunk with many branches, all the way down to a leaf which still reflects the pattern of a tree and many branches with its veins.

Fractals highlight the possibility that we as human beings are built in patterns that repeat and repeat throughout each other’s very cellular make up, and that when we change, when we alter the way we think or talk or behave, we alter the patterns of our lives and this ripples out into and changes other lives. History suggests this is so. Whenever people have risen up and changed their behavior significantly, we have had massive social change and the patterns of those changes lives with us all still, are still imprinted on our minds and bodies.

What would change in us, in the patterns of our lives, if the next time we were in Boston we went to the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury to learn more about Palestine?

I have been there several times when I lived in Medford and went to divinity school in Cambridge. I chose Islam as my second religion and wanted to learn more about it from Muslims. It is a good place to go and ask questions.

What would happen if we went there and asked, What do you know about the Muslims in Palestine? What do they feel is the way to peace?

And if while we were in Boston we went to Reform Jewish Outreach Boston and asked, What do you know about the people of Israel? What do they feel is the way to peace? Or we could ask are brothers and sisters here from Shirat Ha Yam.

3 I do not know what would happen. But I do know that we would be able to name the rag doll (reference to the Children’s Story read from the book The Scrap Doll by Liz Rosenberg), that represents so many people we do not understand and so leave in boxes of judgment, without humanity and therefore without our compassion.

The sound of improv is the sound of beginning where you are, with what you have, offering the gifts you bring and offering them out loud, offering them big, while knowing that the offering is only a piece of what is needed, only a fragment of the whole, only one gift, one sound, one possibility in a myriad of possibilities. Improv is moving toward what we know, what we love, and also learning how to hear newly so that all sounds are part of what we respond to, even those we do not understand, even those we do not know how to appreciate.

And the children pouring across our borders? What of them? The name illegal leaves them in the box, ripped of their humanity but ripped of ours too. We are only fully human as we practice our full humanity.

As Howard Thurman, an influential African American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader wrote,

"Every living thing, including [humanity], belongs to every other living thing. And I can never be what I ought to be until the last living manifestation of life is what it ought to be. For better or for worse, I am tied into the idiom of everything that lives. And if I forget this, I profane creation. If I remember it, I come to myself in you…and you come to yourself in me. "

What do we need to change, what pattern of belief and action do we need to shift to see all people as human beings? Are we not complicit as Americans in the struggle in South and Central America? Have not our trade policies and political strategies kept these lands serving us before themselves?

Because the answers to the question of immigration and of peace are complicated does not mean we should not be asking the questions. Questions can lead to other questions that can lead to compassion rising up in us until we are capable of naming people, seeing people, hearing their stories. This changes us, the pattern of our lives. This changes the patterns we leave for others to follow. This changes the world.

Questioning is not all there is to do but it is a good place to begin, and for this we need not leave our beautiful island. Right here in this meeting house Shirat Ha Yam meets for worship as does Faro de Luz, a Spanish speaking Christian congregation of people mostly from El Salvador.

What would we have to change to allow us to ask someone from Faro de Luz, What do you worry about? How do you find your life here? Do you know anyone who has experienced hardship, loss or death crossing or trying to cross the border? What do you think immigration policies should focus on?

4 Just this much, just this much could shift a pattern, could rewrite a fractal, could change our lives and so change the way life repeats.

Koko the guerilla, the guerilla who speaks sign language, wanted to meet Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, a program she watched every day. When she did, she picked him up in her arms and rocked him like a baby, signing, I love you. Koko gets so much of it right. It is utterly important to love what is worthy of our love, to reach toward this, to rock it in our arms. And is it just as important to move toward what we do not love, what we cannot name as worthy of love, to seek out what causes us discordance because the beliefs we carry are asked to shift. This is ultimately what it means to embrace our full humanity: love what we can love with ease and then fight to love what we see as unlovable.

There is so much to do this very day. Have we reached out to someone we judged into a place we cannot see them anymore? Have we taken out a belief that keeps us walled off from others, whomever and wherever those others are, and turned it over in our hands and considered it as unworthy of us?

Have we risked seeing our very humanity in all others even when we cannot understand them, even when they frighten us or tire us or bringing up our need to protect what we feel is rightfully ours?

Some say that as Unitarian Universalists we can believe whatever we want. I do not think this is true. We can believe whatever is supported by our 7 principles but it is more than that too. We can believe whatever is supported by our 7 principles and then is brought into this our covenanted community and discussed, poured over, heard and still, and still feels worthy of us all.

That is not anything my dear friends.

Our first principle: the inherent worth and dignity of all people does not mean only our inherent worth and dignity. Our second principle: justice, equity and compassion in human relations does not only mean in relation to what we care about or in relation to what makes our lives easier, it means in all relations.

We are people of faith who have no music pre-arranged. We are people who meet and listen to each other and through listening, through aching and seeking and talking and disagreeing and learning each other’s languages, sounds, needs, hopes… create our own musical voice.

The time for improvisation is upon us. Pick up the instrument of your life and offer what your gifts are in relation to the gifts of all of those around you. Listen. Shift. Let us name the world until we have to experience it, all of it. Let us experience the world until we have to love it, all of it.

5 And when we grow weary, when it is too much to hear the rhythm of the world and ask the questions and attempt the answers, when loving breaks our hearts, we can come back here and rest in the this place that promises to hear, that promises to love us into our wholeness, that promises to see our beauty in all our imperfections. Amen.