Thinking of Peace on Family Weekend

Remarks at the Smith College Family Weekend Interfaith Service, October 22, 2006

This chapel stands on the campus, not as a college church but as a meeting house -- a place where we can talk about anything; a gathering place for students of all faiths or no faith, for those who have strong convictions and those who have serious doubts. It is a place for conversation, learning, music, poetry, art, politics as well as prayer, meditation, and worship. At Smith, when we think about religious life, we start with Life. All the experiences, disappointments, frustrations, anxieties, longings, hopes, and fears of our lives travel with us – and they are all welcome in this place – even though they can make us feel uncomfortable. If we bring all of it here – with prayer, compassion, intention, and worship – we come to know them to be sacred and know this life is a gift even when it’s hard.

Interfaith gatherings are quite rare in this world. And given that religious conflicts and political conflicts couched as religious are at the center of the most intractable and violent situations on the planet, it is no wonder. Sitting together amidst our differences is difficult work. Sunday morning in America is still the most racially segregated time of the week, and probably the most politically segregated as well. This, I imagine, causes God great sadness.

One of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, marvels at her Protestant brethren on Sunday morning. If they really believed that God would show up, she writes, they would come to church wearing crash helmets, such is the force of Divine Power. But, she points out that often we make no room for God. We are doing all the talking.

But perhaps crash helmets are not always needed. As the Jewish scriptures tell us, God is usually not in the wind, or the fire, or the earthquake but in the still small voice within. And in the voices of the vulnerable: the voices of children, the voices of those who suffer needlessly, in the voices of young people at the start of their journey as well as the old who are nearing the end of it. God is in the silence. If, in humility, we people of different faiths can gather – knowing that divine power is greater and more mysterious than we can comprehend -- but united in universal human longing for peace -- then maybe we can make room for the divine to do something new and unexpected with us.

When the students gathered to plan this family weekend service, the murders of Amish children in Pennsylvania were fresh in our minds. The horror of it. That young girls were singled out. That they were not safe in their school. That the adults could not protect them. That even a community that intentionally distanced itself from modernity was vulnerable to violence. Our students were startled that the Amish began to practice forgiveness right away, by including the killer’s family in their mourning and teaching their children not to hate him.

Is every person in that community feeling forgiving? Probably not. However, the Amish are teaching us that when we take up a spiritual practice, we practice it regardless of what we are feeling, or else it is of little use. Extending forgiveness to another who has hurt us -- to one who has killed our precious daughter – is perhaps, the most difficult thing any of us could do in our lifetime. The capacity for such forgiveness does not come without actively cultivating it. The practice of forgiveness yields more forgiveness. In a small way, this service is part of that practice of reconciliation, of peace-making. If people of different faiths and philosophies (even red states and blue states) can be together in prayer, that is the essence of hope for peace.