"Humanizing Peace"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

September 21, 2008 at Northern Hills Fellowship

Reading: The Path of Return Continues the Journey by Thich Nhat Hahn

During the Vietnam War, Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, founded the School of Youth for Social Service in Saigon where students were imbued with the spirit of nonviolent service.  Upon leaving the school, they went in groups to help resettle refugees and to assist peasants build homes, and sow or harvest their crops.  They sought only to heal the wounds of war and reconstruct the villages, but the school was perceived as a threat by some.  One night a horrific crime, and act of terrorism, took place when five of the students were seized from their dormitories, led to the riverbank and shot.  Our reading this morning is an excerpt from a play written by Thich Nhat Hahn a few months later, in which those who died talk to each other trying to find meaning from this act of violence.  The speakers are Tuan, Lanh, Tho, Hy, and Mai.

TUAN: When I was alive, not a day passed when I did not recite the Heart Sutra. I thought I understood it.  But it was only when the man with the poncho pointed a gun at my head that I really saw what the Heart Sutra was all about.
LANH: Tell us, Brother Tuan, what did you see?
TUAN: It's hard to say, Lanh. It's not something to be un­derstood but to be seen.  We can easily explain what we un­derstand, but not what we see or perceive.  It came all of a sudden, like lightning.
LANH (begging): But try, Brother Tuan, what did you see?
TUAN: Well, when that man with the poncho brought his gun up to my head, I realized immediately, without being aware of it consciously, that he was not going to shoot me.  He was going to shoot something else, but not me.  How could he shoot me without knowing who I was?  Since then, I have been wondering how someone can blow the brains out of another without knowing him.
THO: You are funny, Brother Tuan!  He asked us over and over again to make sure that we really were the Youth for Social Service, before he killed us.  He shot you because he knew who you were.  You were a member of the Youth for Social Service.  They wanted to kill the Youth for Social Service.  Therefore they shot you.
LANH: Why are you smiling, Sister Mai?
MAI: Tho is speaking in terms of logic, and the Heart Sutra is exactly the tool we need to shatter that kind of reason­ing.
TUAN: I agree with you, Sister Mai. "Youth for Social Ser­vice" is just a label that they pasted on the objects of their hatred or fear, an object that exists only in their perception. It has nothing to do with us as persons.  They shot only at the object of their fear and hatred, but because they had pasted the label of this object on us, they ended up shoot­ing us, and we died by mistake. They killed us because they truly did not know who we were.
HY: Brother Tuan, are you speaking about wrong percep­tions? Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other.  We see only the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.
MAI: The war that is raging in our homeland is caused by exactly this blindness. Those who are shooting at this very moment do not know who they are fighting.  All are vic­tims.  And some are ready to profit from the mutual de­struction.
LANH: That is certainly true of those who killed us.  In a fleeting moment, I think they saw that we were just human beings, not monsters.  But, when the moment arrived, they had to shoot, to obey orders.  It must be the cruel, irrevo­cable order imposed on man's destiny.
THO: Oh, Lanh, you talk as if there were such a thing as an abstract order.  That order came from their superiors, who else?
MAI: You do not understand, Tho. The ones who killed you were only obeying the orders of their superiors. And those superiors were also victims.  Yet, those who shot you did show their human qualities. They hesitated, not want­ing to kill you, fighting against themselves. They had to carry out their orders because they were crushed between the hammer and the anvil, the orders and their families, their jobs, even their lives. Their consciences and percep­tions had been greatly obscured.
HY: One man even exclaimed, "God, you are all so young!"  It was not just an expression of pity for us, but also a pro­test against his own fate.
MAI: Men kill because, on the one hand, they do not know their real enemy, and on the other hand, they are pushed into a position

Sermon: Humanizing Peace by Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

What are these students saying to us forty years after their deaths?  What is this man of peace, this Vietnamese Buddhist monk trying to tell us?  He insists that his tale is a true one, that he has actually lived the life of his play.  He was part of the students’ life, and after they were shot, he participated in the conversations they just now spoke to us.  In his way of thinking, there is no separation between the realities of the world and the realities of the mind.  In his religion there is no separation between people; deep down we are all the same.   When he wrote this play, he was speaking through and for the students and for all of humanity.  Are these students ghosts come back to haunt us to take vengeance on those who murdered them?  I think not.  They come as blessed presences, spirits of hopefulness that we can build a new culture of peace.

They had begun to see why some people use guns and other forms of violence to attack the objects of their fear and hatred.  It began to sink in to their minds that their murderers did not know them as people, but rather imagined them to be villains, representatives of forces who were out to destroy their side.  This is what I call “Dehumanization,” when we imagine another person to be less than fully human. The students began to understand that turning people into objects allows us to make them into monsters who we can then destroy if we have a gun in our hands.  Not appreciating a people as fully human allows us to remain aloof from their plight when there is a hurricane or a genocide.  Because there is so much suffering in the world, it is probably inevitable that we try to desensitize ourselves to some of it.  There is only so much we can feel, and then the stress gets to be too much, and we must escape.  But I must warn that dehumanizing others is not an ethical way to reduce our stress.

The students began to see what the Heart Sutra means when it implies that all the afflictive emotions come from ignorance that every human being has the potential to be a Buddha.  Another way to say that is…everyone shares the same human nature and has the potential to contribute to the betterment of the world.  They saw that all people caught up in the neuroses of war are victims of these troubling emotions.  By the way, the Heart Sutra is the shortest of Buddhist scriptures, less than one page.  I recommend it to you to along with commentaries on it by the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hahn.

Finally, the students concluded that their murderers had actually displayed at least some humanity before they shot them.  They saw their killers as caught up in a mindset that forced them to kill.  Now, that may be a place some of us can go, but for others that’s going too far.  There are those who stand ready to profit from the destruction of others, and I am not going to ask everyone to let them off the hook.  I understand that.  I can tell you Thich Nhat Hahn, who lived thru a most horrific war, has learned to forgive those who attacked his students. Maybe some day in the future some of us will go there, too.  And maybe someday, we will all be saints and/or Buddhas.
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The subject of peace is a large one and there are many, places where we could begin our study and action.  In a sermon I preached in June entitled Go, and Make Peace, I introduced The Congregational Study/Action Issue, or CSAI for short, on Peacemaking.  The CSAI process asks us as a congregation to learn more about peacemaking, to comment on the CSAI, and take action in our own way.  In that sermon I mentioned some people enter the discussion on peacemaking at the global level, and they debate Just War Theory vs. Pacifism vs. the new pragmatic option called Strategic Peacebuilding.  It would be helpful if more people learned about these theories and made their voices heard whenever our federal government is contemplating military actions.  My sermon, which is still on our website, gave some good resources for further study.  For today, however, rather then take up the debate on whether or if to use military force, I would simply like us to start down the path of peacemaking on a personal level. 

If dehumanization, our tendency to see others as less deserving, less capable, less human than we are, is what allows us to make war, and to perpetrate other atrocities on people, what can motivate us to make peace?  Thich Nhat Hahn says, “It is difficult for people in the West to understand the situation in the Third World.  It seems to have nothing to do with their situation.”   How do we get Americans to care about people halfway around the globe?  I think the answer is, somehow we must be able to identify with the globe’s problems as our own.  UUs tend to look at social ills systematically, that is, we want to know their root causes and deal with the things that can most effectively change a situation for the better.  While I agree with that approach, there is a danger in it, which is that we can stay aloof, dealing with things in the abstract rather than identifying with the people who suffer.
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In order to Humanize Peace, that is to eliminate the abstractions which allow us to de-humanize people, we need to engage with the ideas of peace on a human level.  Building peace on a human level requires that we are able to feel compassion towards other people.  Practicing compassion is at the very heart and soul of peace making.  Will you participate in a little thought experiment with me right now to see how we can practice compassion?  This comes from Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. 

“Imagine three people sitting in front of you, a friend, an enemy, and a stranger (maybe an anonymous someone at the grocery store checkout). :::
Consider each person in turn, noticing how the image you have of them provokes a certain mood.:::
Just as the friend makes you feel relaxed and secure, the enemy makes you feel uncomfortable and nervous, while the stranger evokes only courteous disinterest.

What is it about them that makes you feel this way?...In each case, your impression of the other person is based upon how they have made you feel: you like those who make you feel good, dislike those who don’t, and care little for anyone else.  How you perceive people reinforces your feelings about them.  This can become a trap in which it becomes increasingly hard for us to disentangle other people from our emotionally charged images of them.  But, we are free to choose how we perceive the world.  We can reduce our prejudices based on a person’s skin color, religion or political party.  By suspending our judgments, we are able to look at the person with a fresh perspective.

Now just concentrate on your friend.  Imagine her or him being born, how precious she was at that moment.  Slowly follow her as she grows from a toddler to a child to a teen and then to the time when you first met her.  Try to picture what her hopes and longings were before she even suspected your existence.  Think of her as someone who values her own ideas and feelings in the same way you hold on to yours.  Then look into the future and watch her age, fall ill, and die.

It is much more difficult to try to do the same with the enemy and the stranger, but really all three are human beings, equal in birth and equal in death.”   When your friend shows up at your door and greets you, you can tell in an instant by just a look on her face that something is troubling her.  Your compassion for her is immediate.  Your response is to listen intensely to her story and to let her know she matters to you, and you support her.  But, it is not always like this.  When you come across a homeless person in the street, you may only feel a twinge of pity before tossing him a coin and hurrying on your way.  When we bond with others who share our preference for the Republican party or the Democratic party out of a desire for belonging it can lead to a hardening of the perception that it’s “Us” versus “Them.”  Isn’t it much easier to feel compassion for “Us” than it is to feel generously toward “Them”?  Interpersonal peace building requires that we do not restrict compassion to those we feel are on our side.  Practicing compassion towards those we don’t know and even, eventually toward our enemies cultivates a way of life where we can challenge the stereotypes and emotionally charged images by which we define others.
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It is as important to work on our own inner peace as it is to try to create peace around us.  It certainly helps to come to a place of clarity of mind and acceptance of our own reality before trying to fix the rest of the world.  Our personal spiritual practices: prayer, meditation, walking a labyrinth, reading poetry, walking our dog, you can name your own, aid in building our own inner harmony.  When we grow in self-acceptance and understanding of our own needs and feelings, we increase our capacity to understand others.  As we learn to create deeper peace inside ourselves, our relationships will benefit.  Compassion, which allows us to care for others, has to begin as our own inner quest to embody its essence, but compassion is not real unless we practice it in relationships.  We need relationships in which we show others we really care about them and vice versa.

In his article, “The Tyger and the Lamb, ” in the latest UU World magazine,  Rev. Dennis McCarty tells of his return home after working a job that had kept him hundreds of miles away from his wife and young daughter for months: “I was worn out by the time I arrived.  I walked in, hugged my wife and Erin and Colleen, and sat down on the sofa.  Colleen climbed up beside me and just stood there, stroking my arm and staring at me with an expression that I can only describe as ecstatic joy.  She was so happy, she was actually funny to look at, glowing with the pleasure of seeing her father again. Looking into her eyes, I realized that I was looking at something eternal, something truly holy.  There was a cosmic connection in that moment.  My two-year-old child was showing me what really mattered in life: the way human beings are meant to look at one another.  In stroking my arm, she was touching me the way we were meant to touch one another.

I was 35 years old, and I thought I knew something about life and love.  But in that moment, I realized that I didn’t know anything.  My two-year-old daughter was teaching me.  Without words, my daughter was saying to me, “This is what holiness is.  You matter to me, and now I know that I matter to you, as well.”

Reverend McCarty’s article goes on to explain how our covenantal faith tradition has always professed the idea that what happens between people in the here and now matters more than the authority of any particular belief system.  The values of the liberal church “Centers on the human condition, ethics, relationship, and the importance of each person.”  Our free churches, starting with the Puritans, have been formed by a covenant, a voluntary agreement between free and equal human beings.  Northern Hills Fellowship, follows this long established custom.  This is a place where people covenant to treat each other with compassion.  In this place we want to be able to say, “You matter to me and I can see that I matter to you.” 
:::
Ten years ago or so, I was sure I wanted to go in a different direction than my career had taken at the Tennessee Valley Authority.  I worked with a life coach to investigate jobs that would resonate more closely with who I had become and what I thought was important.  I looked at going into business for myself, at working for non-profits that advocated in areas of concern to me, and at working for environmental companies.  I was looking for a place to make a difference, to further social justice. I explored several possibilities, but I kept coming back to the church because I truly believe it is the place we can have the most influence on our world.  This is the place where people get the basics, the things that transforms lives, and empowered by those personal transformations they go on to better their communities.  That belief is how my call to ministry began to grow.

It is here at NHF where we can come to terms with ourselves, where we can practice caring relationships, and create a beloved community.  Building on these things we can bring more peace into the world.  It is a good thing to study peace, to practice building peace, and to commit to the goal of non-violence, but it is not possible to put all the ideas of peacemaking and nonviolence in a manual and expect people to pull it out and use it when the time for peace comes.  That is not how peace building works.  “The basic requisite is that you have the essence, the substance of nonviolence and compassion in yourself.”  Then when the need arises, if you are alert, you can depend on your creativity to tell you what to do.

Here at NHF, in our social gatherings, in our committees and in our new Covenant Groups we can practice creating deeper peace in our relations with others.  Here we can practice deep listening, and communicating our feelings and needs in effective, non-blaming and non-shaming ways.

Here at NHF, we can practice peace building within our entire congregation.  Our Committee on Ministry will soon help us build deeper peace within our congregation through a process of creating a covenant of beloved community.  We hope to increase respect and understanding for those who differ from us, to increase community by making congregational decisions in ways that build consensus and excitement for our future, and to have in place effective methods for resolving conflicts when they arise within the congregation.

We will not end our peacemaking efforts at the boundaries of our church, but the work we do on ourselves and in our family and church relationships will serve us well when we work for peace in our society and in the world.  We need to understand and to be active in the wider community in reducing systemic causes of violence such as racism, classism and other forms of cultural and economic oppression.  We need to understand the causes of war and intercommunity violence and to be active in our nation’s politics to findways to prevent war and genocide.As we do these things, we need to make peace personal by makingchanges in our own life styles that allow us to show respect for the inherent worth and dignity of all people.  Through self reflection we can make our minds more peaceful, but we cannot bring peace to the world by staying within ourselves.  Through a practice of compassion we learn our well-being is part of the well being of the interdependent web of all existence.  May we all find our own peace and contribute peace to the world.