Looking for the Prince of Peace

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

And I can't think of that verse without hearing this chorus from Handel's Messiah in my head.

This week one of my friends was missing from the Christmas Eve choir rehearsal because he believes in the Prince of Peace. Jim is a veteran and he was in Washington, D. C. with Veterans for Peace. On Thursday we got an email from our pastor that Jim had been arrested in front of the White House for civil disobedience. He was among 131 people arrested, including Daniel Ellsburg, who released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.

When I did a Google search on: Veterans for Peace arrest December 16, 2010, I got a number of internet blog entries, led by postings on the Veterans for Peace website, but there were no immediate hits from any major newspaper. Peace protests and 131 arrests are not news? When I searched on the Washington Post website, there was no mention of the arrests. Nor was there anything in the New York Times, except for this individual comment following an editorial about President Obama's remarks about Afghanistan. In the Boston area, there was only this article in the Merrimack Valley newspaper, but nothing in the Boston Globe.

On Veterans Day this year I started reading Shelly Rambo's book, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Rambo speaks of three aspects of the "lens of trauma," "alterations in time, body and word" (p. 18-21). Trauma takes a person to an in between space, a liminal place, out of time, where at any time the person may re-experience the traumatic event—the past does not stay in the past. Trauma becomes part of body memory, bypassing conscious control by the brain over memories, so at any time body memory can be evoked by a sound, a smell, or a sight. In that way, trauma also bypasses human ability to put words to the event, because the suffering is imbedded directly in the body, and this isolates the sufferers because they can't access language to interpret their experiences. Rambo talks about the usefulness of theological language about and acts of witness as one way we can begin to be pastors and healers to those suffering from trauma. I have to confess that her book is one that I have needed to digest in small doses, but I was glad that I had read what I had about trauma when we heard from some of the veterans we were honoring after church the Sunday after Veterans Day.

The most memorable witness for me that day was the slender, even slight, young woman who was a Marine heavy diesel mechanic who, when she found out that she as a gung-ho Marine, couldn't get to Iraq using her mechanic's skills, volunteered for "mortuary affairs." It is clear that she really didn't know what she was volunteering for, and that perhaps there was no way in a two week training that she could have been prepared for what she would face. She shared a powerful witness to her time there: opening the body bags where every person was dressed like you, had the same kind of boots, dog tags, watch and wallet (because that's what the PX sold), and wondering which person you might find, and in what condition you might find this person's "remains." She now is studying to be a counselor, because she knows that veterans will need to talk to someone who understands. She is someone who speaks for peace, because she knows the cost of war.

For unto us a child is born…

I too have a yearning for peace. I want to stop grinding my teeth and tightening my muscles because I am stressed about budget cuts and increasing bureaucratic regulations at work that negatively impact thousands of elders, who are poor, sick, isolated and lonely people, because I am worried about friends and loved ones with chronic disease and pain, and because I have been confronted with the visible signs of incivility toward one another in this season in too many ways.

So today, instead, I want to celebrate and bear witness to the generosity of my colleagues who gave a thousand dollars so that we could buy grocery store gift cards for elders who don't have enough food to eat, and to understand that caring for people is an act of peace. I want to make my year-end donations to organizations that make a difference in my life and in the lives of the hungry in body and spirit, and in that act of giving know that our generosity and giving is a movement toward peace and healing and community. I want to applaud my friend Jim who has the courage to stand for peace and be arrested for his witness, and to shout out that ending war is a first step toward peace. Professor Valerie Dixon started each class session of "The Ethics of Peacemaking" with a time of meditation and prayer because she believed that we have to have peace inside, to know peace ourselves, in order to work for peace. We must know peace in order to do the work of the Prince of Peace.

My prayer today is that we each take the time to know or find a moment of peace within ourselves. Then may we share that peace with others and may we each be a witness for peace and healing, the holy wholeness that is shalom, in the world.

Bells for Peace and a Silent Center

On the first Sunday of Advent this year, my church choir had the pleasure and privilege of being/singing the prelude for one performance of the Huntington Theater's production of A Civil War Christmas, and then we got to stay for the show.

The show, which closed this weekend, featured music of the period, including a musical setting of the poem by Cambridge, MA poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that he wrote in reaction to the Civil War: Christmas Bells. Nowadays hymnals leave out the verses about the cannons of the Civil War, and I had not heard the whole of the poem in context, so I looked up a collection of Longfellow's poems. The irony of this poem about bells ringing the songs of peace on earth was pointed out in the play, because in the South during the Civil War bells no longer rang out in carols of peace from churches and town halls because the bells had been melted down to become cannon balls.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!

While I had heard the tune that they used, it was less familiar to me and somehow more haunting than the one I first learned, and it has stayed with me these past few weeks. I found versions by Harry Belafonte and Sarah MacLachlan that I liked, although neither of these captured quite the pure despair and simplicity and hope, that I had heard in the play.

Unlike Longfellow, the bells that I've been hearing lately have mostly been ringers in front of a Salvation Army kettle, not so loud and deep, but jangling, not singing of peace, but of need.

So, peace on earth has been in my thoughts in recent weeks and the ironies continue. The President of the United States announced that he was escalating the war in Afghanistan on December 1—I listened to the last of his speech on my way home from a service that I participated in for World AIDS Day. Hm, what if we took the money we're using for war and devoted it to medicine for the millions dying of AIDS? Did you know that AIDS is one of the leading causes of death for women worldwide? (Interesting side note: both Belafonte and McLachlan use some of their artistic work toward the health of women and children in Africa, including fighting against AIDS.)

Then the irony was heightened as President Obama went to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace prize. He noted in his speech, "But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars." You think?

I didn't hear him live and I had to search hard to find the text of his speech to read it because on Thursday I was busy helping a loved one check into the hospital because she suffers from a disease that may in fact be a perfect example of the mockery of peace on earth. Crohn's is an autoimmune disease, which means the immune system goes haywire and attacks the body or doesn't protect the body correctly when something else attacks the body, or sometimes both, at once. The increase in such diseases is attributed partially to the increasing amount of environmental toxins we create and spread and ingest, and her flare-ups, though this was a more extreme one, are almost always related to periods of high stress.

She is Jewish and we virtually lit the first candles of Hanukkah while she has been in the hospital (virtually meaning no flame—too many people on oxygen). So then my thinking of peace took a personal and a Jewish turn. The Hebrew word, shalom, while usually translated as peace in English, really has a broader meaning, more like holy wholeness. Hospitals, in contrast, really are about sickness, not about health or wholeness. Hospitals are about care, often and maybe usually intrusively and noisily provided, not about rest or quiet. Saturday, after my third day of just visiting her in the hospital, I was so jangled I came home absent my own quiet center, my own piece of peace on earth.

And in despair, I bowed my head: 'There is no peace on earth,' I said.

On Sunday morning as we began choir rehearsal our choir director began with a prayer as he always does, but today after he said, "let us pray," he paused. He held that pause until it became pure silence, and in that moment before spoken prayer, not measurable in time by clocks, but only by the sense of the Spirit moving among us. As I sat surrounded by friends and people of faith and preparing to sing and to worship, I was both surrounded by and filled with peace.

God is not dead, nor does God sleep.

May we each find our way, through prayer, through music or poetry, or through your own path, into peace and wholeness and centeredness, especially in this season where the bells are not always singing the songs of peace on earth.