Mother’s Day Prayer for Peace

They gathered more than four thousand strong,
at Symphony Hall, in Boston.
The year was 1910,
and the voices of the gathered crowd rose in song:

   Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;    He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;    He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;    His truth is marching on.

The author of this Civil War call to liberation, the great Unitarian author and reformer, Julia Ward Howe, had died at age ninety-one, and a nation mourned the loss of her vision and her commitment.

The year was 1861. Julia Ward Howe visited a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington, D. C. She heard soldiers singing the song “John Brown’s Body,” and she was inspired by the strong marching beat. The next morning she wrote the hymn that was to inspire a nation.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage
gives us some remarkable gifts.
On this day when we step back from the busyness of our lives,
to reflect on motherhood,
to give thanks for the mothering that brought us into the world and
to this place of recognition,
let us step back even further,
to remember how this celebration of motherhood began.

Julia Ward Howe, went on from inspiring a nation to abolition,
to devoting her will to the causes of women’s suffrage
and peace.

Her experiences of the Civil War,
her confrontation with death and disease,
the suffering of those maimed,
and the torn lives of widows and orphans,
on both sides of the war
opened her eyes, her heart and her mind
to the work of compassion, healing, and peace.

As the world’s attention focused on the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870,
Julia Ward Howe called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms.
She wanted women,
the mothers of soldiers across the nations,
to recognize their calling to overcome barriers and
find peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

She longed for a Mother’s Day, devoted to peace.
Her “Proclamation for Mother’s Day” called out:
   Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

   Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

   We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. Fromthe bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balanceof justice."

   Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

   Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

   In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Julia Ward Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace. There was no international peace gathering of women. But she planted an idea that has called for attention ever since.

And, this morning, we witness the cries of Iranian children for a peace that will save their homes, their families, their ancient land from destruction. These drawings, these pictures we have seen, and will see again, were created by children seven to fifteen years of age throughout Iran. Some of them were displayed in Tehran, at the Peace Museum of the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support.∥

Other drawings are from an upcoming peace exhibit, to be held this June to commemorate the sad twentieth anniversary of the gas attacks against the civilian population of the Iranian town of Sardash.  Children throughout Iran were invited to submit drawings on the theme of “Peace and Friendship.”  The objective was  “to promote peace awareness among children as well as to develop a cultural exchange between children of those countries that have been affected by war and weapons of mass destruction.”

One child has written carefully in English on the side of a drawing:
“We the children are the messengers of peace and friendship.  We, the children, like the peace and friendship in the world and dropping flowers instead of bombs over the cities.  Thanks.”

These drawings, these pictures we witness,
expressing the pain of violence and the yearning for peace,
call to us to make of this Mother’s Day more than a commercial holiday,
more even than a private appreciation of those who nurture,
or who have nurtured us.
These images, from children in a far away land,
as close as our compassion,
call us to rededicate our lives to peace.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage gives us some remarkable gifts.
Since the days of World War II,
helping refugees escape Nazi oppression,
the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
has worked for peace and to relieve suffering around the world.

A major focus of the Service Committee this year is attempting to stop the genocide in Darfur by advocacy in Washington, D.C.

UU Service Committee members at this church are engaged with our children, right now, making of this Mother’s Day a “Justice Sunday,” offering activities through which they can express concern for the world.

Justice Sunday continues after this service, and you are invited to join the activities in the Social Hall, and beyond.

Make a paper flower for a mother in Darfur. Write a letter to President Bush. Learn about water issues here in California, and walk the obstacle course for a living wage.

Peace is not a new idea.
It reaches to the core of our being.
Perhaps no one has said it more simply than Lao-Tse, twenty-six centuries ago:

   If there is to be peace in the world,
   There must be peace in the nations.

   If there is to be peace in the nations,
   There must be peace in the cities.

   If there is to be peace in the cities,
   There must be peace between neighbors.

   If there is to be peace between neighbors,
   There must be peace in the home.

   If there is to be peace in the home,
   There must be peace in the heart.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage gives us remarkable gifts to learn about peace, within our hearts, and throughout the world. In the spirit of Julia Ward Howe, last year at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the delegates adopted the Peacemaking Congregational Study Action Issue resolution.

It calls congregations to engage in a four-year process of study, reflection, and action on Peacemaking, contributing to an Association-wide vision of peace, justice, and security in the world.

While some denominations, like the Quakers and Mennonites, have declared themselves “peace” churches, Unitarian Universalists have never taken such a broad stance. We affirm the right of individuals to decide for themselves such matters, so part of what is at stake in this four-year conversation is the balance between individual rights of conscience and the authority of our covenanted communities to take stands.

Embracing the idea Lao-Tse presents, Rob Keithan, Director off the UUA Washington Office for Advocacy, suggests our conversation needs to be grounded in the personal while considering the global.

In calling us to a thoughtful discussion of our history and theology related to issues of war and peace, Rob says:

   “To be successful, this discussion has to be personal. We must hear each other’s stories and honestly reflect on our experiences and beliefs—and why we have them. We must be willing to disagree with each other in ways that are healthy and respectful. We should pay special attention to those who have suffered and continue to suffer the effects of violence, hearing their stories and providing support when possible.

The topics of the materials offered to support this discussion range from “interpersonal peacemaking, forgiveness, and congregational peace, to building larger cultures of peace.”

This morning we welcomed infants and older children to life and to this congregation. We want for them a world of creativity and nonviolence. We want them to grow and learn the ways, as Julia Ward Howe said it, “of charity, mercy, and patience.”

How better to do so
than to give them the blessing of our own becoming
agents of transformation,
partakers of peace,
servants of compassion.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage gives us some remarkable gifts.
The year was 1993, and this congregation buried twenty-one handguns on the hill beyond the parking lot in memory of all who are killed violently. A year later, on that site, a “Guns to Plowshares” monument was erected, and in 1997 a memorial plaque was dedicated at the entrance to the path, inviting all to climb the hill, to take time to recommit themselves to nonviolence.

It’s a hill worth climbing.
If there is to be peace in the world
there must be peace in the heart.

In the spirit of Julia Ward Howe’s original Proclamation,
If you are motivated to take your embodiment
of protest of war and calling for peace
beyond this day and into tomorrow,
join in spirit with 10,000 mothers who will descend on Washington, D.C.
to surround Congress and call for peace.
Or join others in Union Square in San Francisco,
tomorrow morning at 9:00,
to call for an end to war funding.

Peace is elusive and complicated.
When I feel overwhelmed, with too much to do,
and not enough time to do it all,
I have a longing for peace.
I want to quiet myself, to let go.
Often my meditation practice at such times
is a frantic moving back and forth from my active “monkey mind,”
to relaxing and letting go,
only to discover some other “to do” has taken over.
I long for peace.
And sometimes it comes.
Sometimes in the letting go I am peace.

In those moments I am renewed.
I am reminded of the essential oneness of all,
and I am reaffirmed in my embrace of nonviolence.
And that is good, because the peacefulness does not last.
The activity of living asserts itself.
When it does I want to carry with me the embrace of nonviolence.
When I am active again I want my creativity to express compassion.

The year was 1861.
Julia Ward Howe had visited the wounded and dying
at the Union Army camp on the Potomac River.
She was exhausted and needed to rest.
In the evening she fell asleep into peacefulness,
and stirred in the night.
She wrote of her awakening:

“I awoke in the grey of the morning, and as I lay waiting for dawn, the long lines of the… poem began to entwine themselves in my mind, and I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses…!” So I sprang out of bed and in the dimness found an old stump of a pen, which I remembered using the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”
“Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, His truth is marching on.”
“In the evening I hear everything more clearly.
In the evening I am at peace.
A wind brushes by me
whispering
grass and leaves,
flowers glow against the darkening trees.
In the evening I am at peace.

Yet in the night I have no peace…”∥
twisting, turning, the visions come
And in the early morning hours
I awake with the excitement of human imagination
bursting forth from my heart and mind…

Calling:
May the full force of your creativity and love be released and shared.
May you know peace.
Amen.