Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

“Peaceful Means”

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

September 9, 2007

Last week, spending some time running errands in the car, I listened to NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.” A guest on the show was claiming success for the “troop surge” in Iraq. Over and over again I heard callers who wrapped their questions in diatribes—their complaints about an Administration they believe to be one of the worst things that has happened to the country in its history. At first I was feeling exultant: “Take that!” But after the third or fourth time I began to wonder how I would respond if that were me. Would I be open to genuinely considering the raging callers’ point of view?

There is much to rage at in the world these days. The appalling catastrophe that is unfolding in Iraq might be the biggest thing on our immediate horizon, and it surely will have devastating effects for generations to come no matter what we resolve about whether troops should surge or ebb. Yet it is not the only place where human beings are doing terrible things to each other or to the planet for reasons that seem misguided, cynical, greedy, or vicious.

There’s no single target for all our right-minded indignation. There is no calculus of blame that somehow makes killers, tyrants, terrorists, torturers, exploiters, or environmental destroyers from one country or one side of the world’s conflicts better or worse than the ones on the other side.

It’s not only the injustices and oppressions of the world that can push us into anger. Our own commitment to our cherished vision of human possibility can become a source of bitterness when others can’t, don’t, or won’t see what seems so clear to us.

Yet responding to injustice, oppression, and destructiveness with anger, fear, and hatred is a dead end. It’s ineffective, and it harms us. If we spend our life on the front lines of resistance focused entirely on denouncing our opponents, we risk a lifetime of embittered and futile activism. We may even wind up congratulating ourselves on how few people see things our way, because it proves that we are special people with a deeper and better insight into the way things ought to be.

Sharon Welch, in her recent book After Empire: The Art of Enduring Peace, invites us to try another way.

Welch reminds us that there is a historic connection between certainty, anger, fear, and condemnation, on the one hand, and acts of domination, violence, and destruction on the other. Instead of giving in to those impulses, Welch calls us to consider a response to the wrongs of the world rooted in a new vision of the possible, rooted in beauty, in joy, and in love. Learning from the history of resistance among marginalized people, we should accept that progress will be slow, and that it is more important to be fully engaged in the effort to create justice than it is to succeed. Using absolute victory as our standard of success lets us off too easily, she says; since we always fall short in some measure, when we are discouraged we can decide we’ll never win, and give up. What might sustain us better is the knowledge that if the next generation starts the struggle one step further along than we did, we have been successful. What might sustain us better is the beauty of the world and of the spirits of those who reach for a better life; what might sustain us better our joy in our efforts and in our wonderful companions on the journey. What might sustain us better is our love for that next generation and for our ancestors in the struggle, who worked out of their love for us.

Welch is a Unitarian Universalist, a skeptic, and an atheist. She does not believe that any final certainty is possible to human beings, nor does she believe in an absolute power of good that will automatically come to our aid. Whatever power moves the Universe, she says, is like all power: It can work for good or evil, and it is our job to discern where it should be focused. Since we can never be sure, we must embrace our uncertainty and the high probability that some part of what we believe wholeheartedly is wrong. This respect for the incompleteness of our knowledge has deep roots in our Unitarian and Universalist heritage, which celebrates the idea that every belief is open to revision and to new discovery.

Welch’s way of activism is grounded in community. Since no individual or single group can resist and change all the ways in which domination and destructiveness afflict humanity and the world, we must form coalitions with others who are also engaged in resistance. But Welch’s sense of community follows the wisdom of traditions which teach that all of existence is intricately interconnected. We are not only in community with those who are suffering and with those who are allied with us. We are also in community with those who are doing harm, with those we passionately resist, and with those who passionately resist us. We must greet them in love as well.

Sharon Welch is, of course, not the first to call for new ways of engaging with the hurts and wrongs of the world. Martin Luther King Jr. said it this way: “Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that. We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. . . . We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.”