From Jackhammers to Meditation: Spiritual Practices for Peace Sermon May 28, 2017 Emrys Staton Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix

Transcription

1 From Jackhammers to Meditation: Spiritual Practices for Peace Sermon May 28, 2017 Emrys Staton Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix Reading from Dan Berrigan: Today s reading is by Father Daniel Berrigan - an American Jesuit priest whose life was devoted to anti-war activism. Starting during the Vietnam war, his name became famous after using homemade napalm to publicly burn some 378 draft documents. He often criticized the Catholic church, and religion in general, as being complicit in supporting wars, upholding racism, and ignoring the causes of poverty. He died just over a year ago, at the age of 94. He was, in strict theological terms, one badass priest. From a piece written in his prison diary in 1971, he writes: Certainly the trouble is not that we do not want peace. We have seen enough war, we are sick of it, unto death. The war has come home like a stalking corpse, tailing its blood, its tears, its losses, its despairs seeking like an American ghost the soul of America. We want the peace; but most of us do not want to pay the price of peace. We still dream of a peace that has no cost attached. We want peace, but we live content with poverty and injustice and racism, with the murder of prisoners and students, the despair of the poor to whom justice is endlessly denied. We long for peace, but we wish also to keep undisturbed a social fabric of privilege and power that controls the economic misery of two thirds of the world's people.

2 Sermon: Father Berrigan rarely minced words in his condemnation of war, and as a provocative and outspoken critic of US militarism, he was just as inclined to admonish the activists of the anti-war movement as he was to chastise the government and corporations that pushed for war. And so he asks, to his fellow activists, are you willing to pay the same, or higher, cost for peace, as society has been willing to pay for war? I never got to meet Berrigan, who died just over a year ago, but I did get to meet one of his friends and co-conspirators, Father Carl Kabat. I met Carl Kabat in Kansas City about a decade ago, at a midwest gathering of Catholic Workers. I was hoping to take short nap during our gathering in the designated "quiet room" at the old schoolhouse where we were meeting. In the room, an older gentleman was already lying on the floor. I offerd some polite niceity like "I hope I'm not bothering you, just going to lay down, too." And in a raspy voice, He replied with something like oh, yeah, don t worry about it, I m used to resting in noisy, uncomfortable places. I ve been in prison for the past several years. If you ve heard of the Catholic Worker movement, you may know that this is a group of people who act out of deep personal values pushing against the forces of war and poverty. Many cities have Catholic Worker homes where they provide comfort and hospitality for homeless folks and those experiencing poverty. And they have a history of organizing creative demonstrations and protests - arrests and prison time are not uncommon among the movement. So I asked him what he'd been in prison for, and the idea of taking a nap quickly faded as he started sharing his story. He talked about how he and a couple friends went to an equipment rental yard in their volkswagen van, got an air compressor and a pneumatic jackhammer, and headed out into the fields of Missouri to the location of an underground Minuteman II nuclear missile silo. They parked the VW bus, cut a hole in the fence, set up their equipment, and started jackhammering away at the massive concrete lid covering the silo. For that, he eventually served ten years in federal prison.

3 That was in Four years before, in 1980, Carl and several friends, including Daniel Berrigan and his brother Phillip, all broke into a General Electric weapons plant with hammers and started banging on the nose cones of the Mark 12A nuclear warheads, hoping to damage and disable several of them. Over the years, in between prison sentences, Carl continued to participate in similar actions, sometimes dressed in a clown suit complete with a red nose. As recently as last fourth of july, at 83, Carl was arrested for defacing a Honeywell nuclear research building with red paint, symbolizing blood. After I learned about Carl s story, I looked into the history of what is known as the Ploughshares Movement. The name comes from the famous biblical phrase from the book of Isaiah, And God shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: that 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. This idea of re-purposing weapons into useful farm tools is a potent visual - as well as a divine command taken seriously by the ploughshares activists. Carl Kabat explained it in a newspaper interview by saying: To beat the sword into a plowshare, you need a hammer. Well, jackhammer is just a little bigger hammer. He has a great sense of humor, too, because and a nuclear missile is a much, much bigger and far more volatile sword. I find Kabat and others like him inspiring and daring, boldly attacking our most lethal weapons and the facilities that make them, and willing to pay a significant price for peace - giving up years of their own freedom in an attempt to free the world from the possibility of nuclear annihilation. How many of us would be willing to do the same? For another point of view, I turn to Thich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has spent a lifetime teaching and writing about peace, after watching the devastation of the war America waged on Vietnam. From his perspective, war is an individual, internal issue. He says, We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if the powerful countries would reduce their weapons arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds our prejudices, fears, and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of the bombs are still here, in our hearts and

4 minds, and sooner or later, we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. For Thich Nhat Hahn, the weapons are not the problem, they are a symptom of the problem. It s the overall mindset stemming from fear, ignorance and prejudice, that will lead a society build and re-build those weapons. So he challenges us to find ways to uproot war from our hearts and in Buddhism, they focus on the practice of meditation. In my own limited training in meditation, my teacher helped me understand that I should not have a goal of acquiring inner peace, that I shouldn t really even have goals at all. But through the consistent practice of meditation or other forms of concentration and awareness one often finds that inner peace, contentment, and compassion will have the space to naturally arise on their own. When I started a consistent practice of meditation, I really wanted to get a calm mind. When my mind wasn t calming down, thoughts kept coming and taking over, I felt frustrated and assumed I was doing it wrong. (right?) It was this battle taking place in my head - and I even used that military term, battle, to describe what I was experiencing. I have an ideal of what I want my state of mind to be to be, and I m going to fight against myself for it. And in a way, I armed myself with mindfulness weaponry - I ll try breathing with counting, or breathing with a mantra, or breathing and labeling my breath, or breathing in for four seconds and breathing out for eight seconds. And when that failed, I ll escalate the tactics a five day silent retreat, complete with bells and incense, prostrations at 5:00 am, yoga, and slow, mindful chewing at each vegetarian meal. Then I realize, that after all this strife and struggle, and my mind still isn t calm and settled I ve been engaged in a war. Silently, sitting on a cushion on the floor - I m both the soldier and the collateral damage. I m the jackhammer and the missile silo. As Thich Nhat Hahn says, If we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds. So I m holding in my mind these two challenges - one, am I willing to pay the cost for peace? And two, how can I uproot war from my own heart and mind?

5 I often go out for walks at night, and since I live near the capitol, one of my favorite places to go is the park there, Wesley Bolin plaza, which contains some 20 different war and military memorials. The most impressive to me are two huge artillery guns from two different Navy battle ships - the 14 from the USS Arizona and the 16 off the USS Missouri - both mounted and aimed eastward, right at the downtown skyline. At Wesley Bowlin plaza, there are no memorials on the topic of peace. Even in Washington DC, you re hard pressed to find a substantial installation dedicated to peace or peacemakers. I spent some time on the old google search page to see if there are any public statues or memorials of Dan Berrigan or Carl Kabat or the Ploughshares movement. There aren t. Louisville, Kentucky had a petition to replace a confederate monument with a statue of Muhammad Ali, who was eloquently outspoken against the vietnam war. I couldn t find anything that suggested they actually followed through with that plan. When searching for peace memorials in general, there are many that show up, but they are mostly monuments commemorating the ending of a war, not explicitly to anti-war efforts or activists. And yes, there are some public statues and monuments for a few famous peace and social justice leaders, like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. - but that s really all I could find. I am encouraged, in fact, excited, to hear that more and more monuments, statues, and namesakes to the confederate leaders of the US civil war are coming down. I definitely see it as a way of uprooting racism, prejudice, and war from our collective heart as a society. Over the last two weeks, the city of New Orleans took down four statues. If you haven t read or heard it, I recommend looking up Mayor Mitch Landreaus speech. In part, he said: The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. For years, I ve really wondered what it would be like to see different figures revered on public pedestals. In my home town, they hang these little banners on the light poles with photos of the young folks who ve joined the military and gone to war. What if, I mean I can hardly imagine it, but what if they put up banners with photos of local activists and peacemakers and justice folks? And it said Prescott honors our home grown heroes underneath them? Or when you go to a professional sporting event, and out to throw the first pitch

6 or on the big screen at halftime, they highlighted community organizers, and thanked them for their sacrifice and service? I want to see a 70 foot pedestal with a statue of Bree Newsome, the woman who was arrested for removing the confederate flag from the south carolina state capitol two years ago, or a memorial to all the mothers who organized with Cindy Sheehan against the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. I d love to see a giant modern art interactive sculpture of a catholic priest and a jackhammer rising from the plains of Missouri. So I went back to Google, and I searched for Thich Nhat Hahn statue. Please, give me something, anything. And, you know what? May the universe rain multitudes of blessings upon the great city of Oakland, California. They recently installed an incredible public bronze sculpture called Remembering Them. Its the largest bronze monument on the west coast and features 25 great humanitarian leaders from around the world. Maya Angelou, Susan B Anthony, Ruby Bridges, Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, the unknown person in Tiananmen Square, Harvey Milk, and Thich Nhat Hahn - and sixteen others. As I reflect on the cost of peace, I think of both dollars and personal sacrifice. We know the cost of war can be measured in both - our military budget numbers, and the numbers of lives lost and broken. The cost of peace feels more elusive, harder to quantify or measure or describe. Father Kabat and his comrades could maybe measure it by the years spent in prison for their activism. For Thich Nhat Hanh, it could be the 30 years he was exiled from his home. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his titles and barred from fighting for four years. The cost of removing the four confederate and white supremacy monuments in New Orleans was $600,000. The bronze humanitarian memorial in Oakland ran $9 million. As Unitarian Universalists, we can be a religion for our time by embracing the question of what the cost of peace means for us. We can choose our tools and tactics from the public protest of jackhammers to the internal insights of meditation. We can support or catalyze the efforts in our own communities to shift who and what is memorialized, adding in the peacemakers who are so often dismissed and forgotten.

7 Whatever paths we choose, I challenge us to heed Father Berrigan s appeal that we push to be willing to pay a higher cost for peace than we are for war. May it be so.