Rev. Matt Alspaugh

Introduction

This, some of you are variously sad, or glad, to know, is my last feature-length sermon at UUYO. Rev. Joseph and I will share the sermon next Sunday, and come following Tuesday, inshallah, I’ll be behind the wheel of a Penske moving truck, hurtling south on I-79 or is it I-77 toward some dog-friendly motel and our first night of the next phase of our life. Toward Mexico, and multi-site ministry, toward helping a lay-led church grow by being their first professional minister.

Talk about creative response to change! That’s our theme for this month. Even as Liz and I are entering a time of rapid change, so this church is too. We are all steeped in changes, and our creativity is a key to successfully navigating that life of change.

As for today’s sermon, I promised that at some point I’d return to the topic of peace, which was a sermon topic requested through our last All Church Auction. And I am honoring that commitment. Better late than never. And certainly, the topic is timely, and urgent.

War and peace in America

We live in a world that is far from peaceful. Just this week, fear-mongerers in America got new wares to sell — what with North Korea launching a missile that could reach the United States, if Alaska counts. This  week Trump and Putin tried to put together a cease-fire in Syria — ignoring the fact that the last cease-fire, back in February, quickly failed.

As a country, we’ve been at war continuously since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. This is the longest single span of war in our country’s history.

We long for peace. For many, we long for the peace of earlier decades, that peace known as Pax Americana. A time of American superpower peace in which no-one in their right mind would dare cross us, given our formidable military might.

But was it much of a peace? Those of us who remember the Cold War might beg to differ.  That time of peace didn’t really feel peaceful to many of us. We studied war very well. Last week, Tom spoke of duck and cover drills we did as kids. Beyond the existential threat of nuclear mutually assured destruction, MAD, the time of Pax Americana wasn’t that peaceful. We engaged in numerous proxy wars in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, letting others do our fighting for us.

So, even though we lived in peacetime, things were not all that peaceful.

Positive and negative peace

The principal founder of peace studies, Johan Galtung, made a distinction between negative peace versus positive peace. Negative peace is simply the absence of violence. Negative peace is the peace of the cease-fire. Negative peace is that cold war peacetime that many of us experienced.

Positive peace, on the other hand, addresses the root causes of violence to create a more just and peaceful situation. As the peace organization irénées.net put it,

Positive peace is filled with positive content such as restoration of relationships, the creation of social systems that serve the needs of the whole population and the constructive resolution of conflict.

[Positive] Peace does not mean the total absence of any conflict. It means the absence of violence in all forms and the unfolding of conflict in a constructive way.

Peace therefore exists where people are interacting non-violently and are managing their conflict positively – with respectful attention to the legitimate needs and interest of all concerned.[1]

The writers define peace as simply “well-managed social conflict.”

But to learn to manage social conflict well, one must start with managing one’s own internal conflicts well.

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

Peace in the heart, peace in the family

I had a particularly vivid dream a few months ago. It was shortly after the Trump inaugural, needless to say, a difficult time for me. The dream was dark and grey.  I witnessed a clockwork thing, black orb, with turning gears and moving parts. It was grinding people up. The orb was the world with all its violence and suffering, and to launch yourself into that orb would chew you up, but it might stop the machine.

Do any of you have dreams like this? Nightmares, but with morals?

But then the dream shifted, and I found myself in a conversation with some kind of wisdom teacher, or therapist. Different parts of me were having conversations with the therapist — there was this whole multiple personality thing going on — and the therapist at one point stopped me — or some part of me — and said “stop talking all that psychobabble.”

Then in the dream, I returned to my childhood, with all these parts still talking to me, and I saw myself as this little kid, in shorts and plaid shirt, hiding under the safety of the kitchen table, watching in terror while my older sister fought it out with my dad. 

A part of me asked a question somehow suppressed — could my older sister, my half sister, been sexually abused as a child by someone in the family? A father, an uncle, a cousin? It was so hard to hold this thought, and yet it fit the profile. My half-sister was a wild person, she had a hard life, had cut off contact with us, and died young. No, not young, but curiously, at just the age I am right now.

In the dream I wondered how all this turmoil I saw as a child affected me, made me who I am. That I learned to shut down my emotions, to isolate myself from feelings. At one point in the dream I said to the therapist about my sister,  “I would feel sad in that case”, and she said: “well then, feel it, feel sad! – quit distancing!”

If you want peace in the heart

The dream recapitulated work I’ve been doing for much of my adult  life, the work of deep self-examination. I’ve worked with therapists, psychologists, counselors, spiritual directors over the course of decades. Fred, Frank, Mary, Terry, Judy, Greg, Cat, Barbara. It’s been challenging, difficult work to uncover past wounds and failings, and to somehow reconcile, forgive myself and others, and heal.

While I still make mistakes and hurt people, while I still suffer from the assaults and cuts of our imperfect world, I do feel that I recover more quickly these days, that I repair things if I can, and improve what I can. In a more fundamental way, I am much more at peace with myself than I was ten or thirty years ago, or even fifty plus years ago, when I was that terrified little kid. Maybe I’ll even be willing to wear plaid shirts again, or shorts in public. On second thought, maybe the shorts are not a good idea.

Obviously, as they say, “your mileage may vary”, but based on my own experience, I’m now a huge proponent of counseling and other forms of psychic care and healing. When I officiate weddings, I often recommend that the couple seek marriage counseling when times are good, the easier to understand how it works when times get tough. I have recommended therapy to many others — to many of you — as you tussle with your own demons and distresses. Counseling is one important tool to use, as a creative response to negative changes in life.

We need to ask for help in healing and growing, if there is to be peace in the heart.

Peace in the nation, peace in the world

During our visit to General Assembly in New Orleans, Jim Rogers and I drove about an hour up the Mississippi river to visit the Whitney Plantation.[2] This plantation recently opened as the only museum in the USA dedicated to the story of slaves and slavery. This was a compelling, chilling exhibit. We heard and read slave stories. We examined the manacles and torture devices used on slaves, stepped into a slave jail, walked through small, rough hovels in which slaves were housed. 

As I stood in the broiling heat and humidity, under the Mississippi sun, dripping with sweat, I tried to imagine how it would have been to work all day — from can’t-see to can’t-see, cutting sugar cane, in that heat. I could not imagine it. I could not imagine the endless, hopeless horror.

Our tour guide mentioned one thing that gave me pause. She said that most of the slaves in this country were bred right here in the USA.  In fact, there were slave breeding farms in Virginia and Maryland, right around our nation’s capital. I’ve subsequently done more reading about the slave industry, and come to understand more deeply how it is core to the very being of this country.[3]

Our country was born and came into its age on the backs of slave bodies. Slavery runs through our laws and culture. Consider: the peculiar organization of the electoral college was created to protect the interests of slave states. Or: The second amendment was written primarily to allow slaveholders and slave state militias to suppress slave attempts for freedom. Or: That time and motion studies and efficiency experts had their origin in getting the maximum output from slave bodies[4]. Or: Our system of debt financing developed in part to allow southern slaveowners to mortgage their slaves to northern bankers so they could buy more slaves. Even after emancipation, laws against trespassing and vagrancy, served to limit the freedom of mobility of former slaves.

But I, and I think, most of us, learned little of these things in school. These are the dark secrets buried in the heart of America.

As a country, we have been unwilling, even oppositional, to examine and reflect on this history. Consider that slavery, in its day, was the largest enterprise in this country, that the value of all the slaves exceeded the value of all the buildings, railroads, ships, factories — all the other means of production.[5] And yet we have little tangible public recognition of this fact. No monuments honoring slaves, no museums exploring slavery, save for this one private plantation museum.

Confronting the dis-ease in our heart

A high point at General Assembly is the Ware Lecture, which brings an outside voice of note to speak to the attendees. Among previous presenters are Krista Tippett, Elaine Pagels, Kurt Vonnegut, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Linus Pauling.  This year, acclaimed public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson spoke[6]. In his talk, he confronted our nation’s racist history. He started by saying:

“I’m not interested in punishing America for this history—I want to liberate America,”

Then, talking more deeply about about slavery in our history, Stevenson said:

“I don’t think that the great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude or forced labor. I believe the great evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we created to legitimate enslavement.

We wanted to feel moral and just and Christian, while we owned other people, so we made up this narrative that black people are different than white people, they can’t do this, they can’t do that, they’re not fully human, they’re not evolved, this ideology of white supremacy, that was the true evil of American slavery. …”

It is this narrative that I — Matt — believe leads to a fundamental dis-ease in the core, the heart, of our nation. It is our unwillingness to examine this narrative, our unwillingness to go into collective therapy, if you will, that prevents us as a nation from being at peace with ourselves.

And it’s apparent to outsiders.  Stevenson compared our nation to other nations with difficult histories, saying this:

“If you go to South Africa, they will make you hear about the history of apartheid. If you go to Rwanda they will make you understand the damage done by the genocide. If you go to Berlin, Germany today, you can’t go a hundred meters without seeing a marker or a stone that was placed next to homes of the Jewish families [lost] during the holocaust —  the Germans want you to go to the holocaust memorial. But in this country we don’t talk about the genocide, we don’t talk about slavery, we don’t talk about lynching, we don’t talk about segregation, and we’re not going to get where we need to go until we talk about it. And changing the narrative, I believe, is essential…” [7]

If there is to be peace in the world,

            There must be peace in the nation — our nation.

If there is to be peace in our nation, we must turn inward, to heal our nation’s heart.

Conclusion

The Dalai Lama once gave a speech which my colleague Rev. Douglas Taylor of Binghamton NY shared. The Dalai Lama said,

“We often talk about world peace. And world peace is important. But how can we attain world peace? World peace will not come from the sky, nor from the earth. World peace must come through mental peace. Genuine peace is not just the absence of war. Peace is more than that. Peace means genuine tranquility; I think peace must come from individual transformation. So, whether at the level of family members, or at the national level, I believe a good heart is the foundation.”[8]

A good heart.

There must be peace in the heart.

Our hearts.

And if, through thoughtful self-examination, change, transformation, a few of us find peace, in our hearts,

and then more, and then many, we will be like the wildflowers in the field of the world, first a few, and then many, because the world must have it: wildpeace.[9]

Because the earth, forever turning, must have it: wildpeace.

Notes:

1 http://www.irenees.net/bdf_fiche-notions-186_en.html

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html?_r=0

3 see Ned & Constance Sublette, “The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry”

4 see e.g. https://books.google.com/books/about/Realistic_Visionary.html?id=IuQHciwgYzUC, p. 149

5 Ta-Nehisi Coates, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

6 http://www.uuworld.org/articles/stevenson-2017-ware-lecture

7 (from a similar lecture) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FINmQ0lmXGM

8  Dalai Lama, as quoted in http://uubinghamton.org/2007/09/having-peace-being-peace/

9 Wildpeace – Yehuda Amichai