"Let Us Live to Make All Free"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
May 9, 2010

Our country is at war, has been at war, and will more than likely remain at war for many years to come.  The US has thousands of nuclear warheads, which means we can destroy the world many times over.  President Obama recently declared in the Nuclear Posture Review that for the first time the US desires nuclear disarmament, but he also said the US would preemptively use nuclear weapons, that is, he still reserves the option to be the first to  use nuclear warheads to strike against rogue countries.   Whatever our politics, we must accept the facts of life and admit we are nowhere near eliminating war or the potential for nuclear holocaust.  Yet, here we are celebrating Mother’s Peace Day, idealistic liberals and pragmatic conservatives alike.  Are we unrealistic, starry-eyed romantics or are we visionaries the world needs to save it from more centuries of war and genocide or even total destruction?

I believe we can be the latter, but world peace, if not a rainbow whose end can never be reached, is nearly that elusive. What can we UUs, minority of minorities, do to bring about world peace?  Small as we are, the world still needs us to work for peace, but we must be more than “Peaceniks,” people who come to the march wearing peace signs, but whose actions aren’t effective in changing the world.  Actually, in order to be effective we don’t even have to wear the peace signs.  Let me tell you something my daughter Katy did when she was only 15 years old that made a real difference for world peace.

Katy participated in the Ulster Project, which allowed Northern Irish Catholic and Protestant teens to talk with each other about the ethno-cultural conflict which had been tearing their country apart for decades.  Each teen committed to a year of learning about the conflict, how it could be resolved, and to making friends with their peers on the other side of the divide.  Katy hosted Paddy, a vivacious Irish girl from Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, in the Summer of 1994, for the most intensive part of the program, a month during which all the teens ran from one event to another - morning noon and night - until they and the host parents were quite exhausted.  But all that frenetic effort was worth it.  Certainly the teens enjoyed the chance to learn about each other’s music, clothes, schools and families, and they probably valued the time they spent shopping, or cruising in cars from one party to another as much as the organized activities designed to teach them ways around their prejudices and stereotypes of each other.  However, the most important thing they did was to form relationships with people from across the divided city, which without the Ulster Project would have been impossible to imagine.  We know that many who participated as teens maintained friendships for years after their experience in spite of social divisions.

One day I took Paddy to meet the mayor of Chattanooga so she could deliver a message to him from Father Kerry Waterstone, founder of the Ulster Project.  The mayor engaged her and Katy in quite a discussion about the peacemaking tools and techniques they were learning.  He was genuinely interested in what the girls had to say.  He presented them with keys to the city for all the teens, and I told him he had done his bit for world peace that day - and I wasn’t being facetious.  While we can’t claim the Ulster Project was the sole reason things began to change in Northern Ireland, we know it was one of them.  “The Troubles” as the violence was known, began in the 1960s and stubbornly resisted resolution until the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 committing all parties to “exclusively peaceful and democratic means” to move forward.  By the 1990s thousands of Ulster Project alumni, some of whom participated as far back as 1975, its first year bringing teens from the two sides together, were leaders in their towns, businesses, churches and schools.  Today, as the tensions in Northern Ireland continue to recede, the need for the Ulster Project is less, but it has not gone away entirely.  I am so proud of my daughter, for having given one of her precious teen summers to the cause of peace, and I can tell you fifteen years later she has not lost her idealistic vision of creating peace.  Yes, there is something we can do.  Wouldn’t you love to see more such programs created to help end other conflicts around the world?
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Let’s back up a minute though.  Why am I even talking about peacemaking today - Mother’s Day - besides the fact I am a peacenik, UU, liberal minister?  Certainly Mother’s Day is for honoring our mothers, and we don’t want to take anything away from that purpose.  Well, one reason we Unitarian Universalists call this Mother’s Peace Day is that mothers standing up for peace was its original purpose.  We should know; we invented it - or, more accurately, Unitarian poet, feminist and social activist Julia Ward Howe first proposed a national Mother’s Day in 1870.  I am proud to be a UU, and I am guilty of playing a game popular among us - the “Famous UU Name Dropping Game,” but I want us to go beyond bragging about her to an understanding of her life and principles so we can follow her lead in working for peace.

Julia was introduced to liberal religion hearing William Ellery Channing preach and Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture and attending a conversation with Margaret Fuller.  Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Sumner, later a liberal US Senator, took her to visit the New England Institute for the Blind, where she met Samuel Gridley Howe; pioneer educator of children with multiple handicaps.  They were soon married and spent their honeymoon in Europe visiting schools with Mary and Horace Mann - a person who advanced the cause of public education in America and who was the first president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  Samuel and Julia supported the abolition of slavery.  Samuel, many years her senior, laid down strict rules for her to follow as mother and housekeeper for the family home, which she named "Green Peace."  Julia’s chafing at his insistence she not be a public figure created dissension in their home and led her to become an advocate of women’s rights.

She was already a committed reformer for before the Civil War, during which Samuel and Julia worked with the U. S. Sanitary Commission.  “For every man killed in battle, two died from disease - dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid and malaria - caused by unsanitary conditions.  The Sanitary Commission pressured the Army to 'improve sanitation, build large well-ventilated hospitals and encouraged women to join the newly created nursing corps."  While visiting Army camps and hospitals to see conditions first hand, Julia heard soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body Lies a Moldering in the Grave,” and she wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic to be sung to that tune.   Fitting to the Unitarian theology of the time, the Battle Hymn described a Jesus who would lead people to build a country where all were free and not so angry over slavery as to go to war with each other.  However, you won’t find it in our current UU hymnals because its warlike description of Christian salvation doesn’t fit modern UU theological sensibilities.  For example there is a famous line in the Battle Hymn, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”  My sermon title, Let Us Live to Make All Free, is an alteration of that line which might be more palatable to modern UUs.

Aside from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe’s work is little know outside UUism, but it should be.  Several organizations are using the this 140th anniversary of Julia Ward Howe’s “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” which was our Responsive Reading this morning, to publicly call for the renewal of her vision.  Her story is all over the internet, including on our own Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography  I recommend that website if you are interested in UU history.

Several strains of liberal thought came together in her life and in her work for social reform.  She became known for her poetry, essays and books, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” made her famous and allowed her to create a career as a lecturer and reformer.  She expressed her liberal values in her writing and lectures, and we see them in her anti-war proclamation.  After the Civil War, she became an important leader in woman’s suffrage organizations, preaching women’s rights and influencing women to create a new concept of womanhood with women as free agents, fully sharing with men every right and every responsibility.  With her anti-war Proclamation, infused with a mother’s abhorrence for the waste of children’s lives, “She began a one-woman peace crusade that passionately appealed to women to rise against war.”  Her work for freedom, education, sanitary living conditions, voting rights and commensurate responsibilities for women, the handicapped, and slaves combined with her motherly love for children to imbue her anti-war efforts with an enlightened and forward-thinking moral sense.  She is one of the mothers of our strong social justice tradition.  Our UU principles are the real deal; they are informed by the lives of reformers like her.  Now you see why I am proud to drop the name of Julia Ward Howe and explain to people how our UU Principles came to be what they are today.
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In 2005, when Peggy Logue’s son Mike went off to Iraq, we heard a constant mantra, “Support Our Troops.”  The Bush administration turned “Support Our Troops” into “If you don't support the war, you don't support our troops.” Peggy couldn’t have disagreed more.  The cover of her book, Skin in the Game: Journey of a Mother and Her Marine Son, says, “When Peggy's son was deployed to a volatile area of Iraq, Peggy suddenly faced an alarming challenge to her anti-war sensibilities. Should she remain silent or give voice to her feelings? Despite being called a "coward" by other members of her Marine family support group, Peggy took to the streets with anti-war protests in a determined attempt to understand the reasons for her son's duty to his country and the politics of war.  Peggy's protests, her stress over Mike's deployment, and her fierce pride in her son hurtled her along an emotional roller coaster for the entire year of Mike's tour. Yet not once did she compromise her beliefs, but instead asked tough questions and demanded answers. What she discovered, however, was humanity’s predilection for violence. She says, “Only by becoming warriors for peace will war cease to exist.”

Warriors for peace - a mother’s call - not to arms but to a different way of living together on earth.  Like Peggy, “Julia Ward Howe was sickened by the loss of life and the carnage that happened during war--and she created Mother's Day as a call for women all over the world to come together, and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict."   Today we renew the original Mother's Day call for pursuing peace - and women are responding.

The Peace Alliance  is promoting House Resolution 808--Representative Dennis Kucinich's legislation that would create a Department of Peace and Nonviolence .  For the last six years the Peace Alliance has held national days of action, taking pies to Congressional offices for Mother's Day to let Congress know, with unforgettable visuals and “tasteables,” that peace building wants and deserves a piece of the federal budget pie.  Their efforts have made a difference - highlighting the need for a Department of Peace and peace building infrastructure in the US.    Congressional co-sponsors of Kucinich’s bill increased to over 200 after last year’s visits.”