“Mother’s Day, Flowers, & Peace” Sunday, May 11, 2008

by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

In this service we remember two historic events: the ritual of the Flower Communion, first performed in the Unitarian Church in Prague in 1923 and brought to America in 1940. In annually exchanging spring flowers, we affirm the intrinsic value of every person, celebrate the variety and diversity in our congregation and in our movement, express our shared dream for peace and harmony for all people everywhere in spite of natural and acquired differences, and remember the heroism of Norbert Capek.

And we celebrate Mother’s Day, remembering and honoring the special women who raised and nurtured us. Over 140 years ago, our Unitarian foremother Julia Ward Howe – author of the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” – wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation, used as our Responsive Reading this morning. She spent years of her life and her own money travelling the world, promoting an international day of peace in honor of mothers everywhere. Though she gained important supporters, she was ultimately unsuccessful: many people found her idea “unpatriotic,” and suffragists thought that achieving the vote for women would accomplish the same thing.

Both Howe and the suffragettes were mistaken – mothers of the world did not unite in an antiwar crusade. As women gained the ballot and rose to political power, in most cases they proved to be just as bellicose as men. And when after a campaign by Pennsylvanian Anna Jarvis, Mother’s Day was finally made a holiday by Woodrow Wilson in 1914 (ironically, the year World War I started), it ended up as a sentimental tribute to the ideal of all-embracing, self-sacrifical maternal love, and definitely not as an appeal to put an end to war. (In all fairness, Ann Jarvis wasn’t too happy with what Mother’s Day became, and in her later years, disavowed all connection with the holiday.)

The fact that the original Mother’s Day was based on a hope for world peace has been almost entirely lost. In histories, in books and on the Internet, most accounts begin with Anna Jarvis, and not with Julia Ward Howe. But we Unitarian Universalists, heirs to her faith tradition, should not allow this omission to stand. This morning we celebrate both Mother’s Day and Flower Communion, and we honor our mothers and grandmothers, our stepmothers and foster mothers, and all the women in our lives, mothers or not, who were and are our nurturers and comforters, and we also lift up the tolerance and acceptance that at our best characterizes Unitarian Universalism. And these are all good things – but our hearts still long for peace, real peace, true peace.

We live in a time desperately in need of peace. The war in Iraq continues to rage, with unacceptable casualties on all sides. Our situation in New Orleans seems to get worse every day, with the city’s police department short hundreds of officers since Katrina, and new class of young people traumatized by the Storm and its aftereffects turning to violence against each other that spills into the wider community. Every day brings us news of more violence, more crime, more hatred, more killing, more war. Everywhere we turn, people are hurting and killing other people who are different in skin color, ethnicity, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender identification or even nieghborhood – or simply because they’re in the line of fire.
Some of us have decided that the only way to deal with the daily barrage of bad news is to tune it out, to ignore the news, not to listen. Others of us, dealing with our own trauma, have become inured, desensitized to stories of war, genocide, racial hatred, violence against gays and lesbians, starving children, sobbing refugees from anywhere. It’s just the way the world is, we think; nothing can be done. We know it’s going on, but we no longer feel the impulse to do anything about it. I sympathize with both of these points of view – I know how easy it is to get compassion fatigue, I know how hard it is to sustain involvement when things here at home are so hard.

But our Unitarian Universalist principles call us to be aware, to be involved, to act. If we are who we say we are, then we’re not allowed to stay blind or pretend to be ignorant, to concentrate on ourselves and our own families, for we know in our heart of hearts we are part of the great human family; we know there is but one world, not our world and then some other world. We religious liberals are called to live out our principles in the world in ways that help make the words “justice, equity, and compassion” more than just words on a page in our hymnal.

We live in a time where the notion of true peace is foreign and aggression and violence of all kinds are seen as normative. Just as in Capek’s time of World War II and in Howe’s time of the Civil War, refusing to deal with evil amounts to a tacit acceptance of evil. Passive acquiesence to war and violence contributes to a climate where aggression is normalized, and is seen as the right reaction to everything, from actual insult to imagined slights, leading from war and torture to youths killing youths, to road rage and domestic abuse, all the way to the low-level emotional violence of argument and division in homes and churches and communities.

When our country is at war, as it is now, violence permeates everything, and we citizens are faced with a moral dilemma, a challenge that is essentially spiritual in origin. What is the right way to act? What does it mean to be patriotic, to love our country? How can we support the young men and young women in our armed forces, without turning a blind eye to potential violations of international law and our own principles and values perpetrated or ordered by their military or civilian superiors? How can any war be honorably and effectively ended, no matter how it started? Is it possible for Americans to feel safe without resorting to violence?

Some people resolve all this tension by deciding that the only way to be patriotic is to support whatever happens, whatever decision is made – as in the old Vietnam-era bumper sticker, “My country right or wrong.” Others are convinced that they know for sure exactly what’s wrong and exactly what to do about it, and in strong and angry terms express how they feel. These 2 sides often face off, privately and in public, accusing and bitter and loud, each convinced that the other is completely and totally wrong. On both sides, the name-calling is ugly and unrelenting – apparently neither thinks that there can be any good on the other side.

There has to be a better way. When we polarize like this, this Manichean face-off of good vs. evil (the side we’re on being good, of course, and the side that disagrees with us being evil), we can’t hear each other, we can’t honor each other’s humanity, we can’t learn anything or grow. We all forget the bigger picture and cannot devise solutions, since anything said by “the enemy” is suspect. Think of the grace of Norbert Capek offering coffee to the arresting Nazi officers; think of women on both sides of the Civil War nursing wounded soldiers whatever the color of their uniform. We must learn or relearn the ways of love and compassion, not just for the folks who agree with us, who are on our side, but for all people everywhere. There is no virtue in loving the folks who love you; there is no righteousness in wanting to care for those who think just like you.

As Thicht Nhat Hanh once famously said, peace is not an end, but a process, a way of life. It is a way of life we must begin to live NOW – or risk reaping the whirlwind. Peace must first be lived on the micro-level – how we treat those closest to us, in our most intimate relationships, in our families, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our congregations, and only then in wider and wider circles, reaching those we don’t know and possibly mistrust and fear in our local communities, in our country, wider and wider and wider until finally we reach the macro level of other countries and the whole world. We cannot find peace in more and more activities and busyness, however worthy these might be in themselves. We cannot buy peace in material possessions. We cannot find peace in escape by tuning out, by concentrating on ourselves, by ignoring everything that is happening in Central City or New Orleans East, or in the rest of our country and in our world. We must learn to BE peace, to live peace, to walk peace, to speak peace – to spread peace by everything that we do. Everything matters, and peace is in every step. On this morning, on this Mother’s Day when we have celebrated with our beautiful and beloved ritual of the Flower Communion, let us rededicate ourselves to the process of life and thought and behavior, the way of life, that is peace. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!