2003 Homily: Peace and War

Homily at Interfaith Service for Peace at the beginning of the 2003 War in Iraq
Helen Hills Hills Chapel, Smith College

c 2003 Jennifer L. Walters

The author Anne Lamott tells a story of spending the night in a hotel with her son, Sam. He was a toddler at the time. He locked himself in the bathroom and began to wail. Unable to open the door herself, she phoned for help. Sam continued his panicky cry and Annie began to feel panicky herself. Unable to reassure him with the sound of her voice, she found a tiny space between the locked door and the threshold. She poked her fingers into the open space and urged Sam to find her there. Touching the tips of her fingers with his, he began to breathe and stopped crying. There they sat for long while in the dark waiting for help.

In the darkness, there are moments of calm, moments of clarity – moments that can dissolve -- almost instantly, it seems -- into confusion about who and what to believe. We are haunted by doubt – doubt about whether our small efforts to bring peace and understanding -- to stop the war from starting -- are worth our efforts; doubt about how to console a worried friend, doubt about what to believe about what we read and hear about the reasons for our nation's march to war.

Because the great calamity of war is upon us – ordinary unheroic people – men and women -- most too young to rent a car -- are being sent abroad to fight. And ordinary unheroic children, factory workers, students, mothers and grandmothers – people like us --- are suffering. Even some of us are suffering the anxiety and worry about people we know or love and who are in harm’s way. We feel sadness and grief for people we do not know, but whose faces we have seen on TV or in the newspaper. The prisoner of war. The wounded child. The grieving parent. We may be feeling again the suffering and the grief over those we have already lost – even long ago.

Some of you may wonder, is it okay to go on with my life as it is? It seems obscene to bother myself with worry about homework, or paperwork, or housework. Is it okay to feel what I am feeling when there is so much suffering? How does one go on with one's mundane ordinary life when a great calamity is upon us, but also so far away?

One moment I am the frightened child suddenly alone in the darkness. And then, I am the panicky mother on the wrong side of the door. And then, just for a moment – though sometimes longer – I am in the place where the fingers kiss. In that moment, there is calm, and stillness, relief, and peace. That is where the love is -- the desire for connection, where flesh meets flesh in peace.

In our coming together we can be at once aware of the terrible suffering of the world, a suffering inflicted by human arrogance and war --- not just this new war, but wars and violence on every continent and in every nation – and also aware of the healing power of love that is also at work in the universe and in our own communities, in our own lives. While the agony and arrogance of war is upon us, so is peace as people reach out to one another to talk, to organize, to care.

Is it okay to go on with my life? It is the only one I have. But the question is how to go on with it. To what purpose do I dedicate my one and only life? To come together where we are – wherever we are – is to nourish us and the world for a long and difficult journey. To come together in prayer is to begin a spiritual uprising against the disorder, the chaos, and the suffering of the world.

There is nothing abstract, nothing trivial about people coming together to pray, to meditate, to sing, to cry. Maybe today, we can rededicate ourselves to hope. May God make our lives a prayer that never ends, a living instrument of divine love and peace.

May it be so for us and for the world.