Peace does not mean appeasing those powers that perpetuate social injustices and environmental degradation.
Rather, peace means nonviolently but actively confronting all such institutionalized principalities.
And for inspiration and guidance on how to do just that, I turn to the wisdom in my own faith tradition of Unitarian Universalism, and I begin with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson, a Unitarian minister as was his father, resigned from his pulpit at Second Parish in Boston and moved to Concord in order to tromp through the woods for the good of his soul. Steeped in the deep wisdom of the natural world, he came to know first hand that inner human nature is intricately interconnected with outer Nature. And then he wrote about it.
His essay on Nature was twice read by Harvard student Henry David Thoreau, who then became his follower and friend.
In fact, it was on Emerson’s land, a patch of woods that walled in a pond, where Thoreau built a cabin and spent two years immersed in the natural rhythms of the place. When he returned to Concord village, he realized that his inner vision of how the world could be was not how the world was becoming.
What to do? Change his inner knowing to fit the outer world? Or change the outer world to be in accord with his inner truth?
We all pretty much know how the story goes: that Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail.
This was not the first time he’d refused to pay his tax. One year it was because he didn’t want to help fund the federal system that institutionalized slavery. This time it was about underwriting the impending Mexican American War; Thoreau did not believe that it was our ‘manifest destiny’ to conquer the land and subjugate the Mexican and Indigenous peoples that lay between Texas and California (including Nevada!).
So he deliberately withheld his share of the funding.
No big deal, except that Thoreau was an author as well as an activist, and those of us who have to write do so, as Ellen Meloy has noted, because we can’t shut up.
His little written treatise about his insights and experience ended up in the hands of Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Oops!! It became part of an evolving manual on how to actively resist the forces of social evil, and insist on change.
This ‘instruction manual’ is being put to use today. I mean literally THIS day. For all across the continent today, September 21, thousands of our fellow Americans are risking arrest in an effort to stop global warming and reverse climate change.
In fact, over this past summer, two thousand of us ‘trained up’ to be able to organize and participate in non-violent acts of resistance to the XL Keystone Pipeline that author/activist Bill McKibben has realized would be
“a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.”
The personal has become the political in this global effort to preserve and protect the planet. For as Thoreau has noted:
“What’s the good of having a nice house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on?”
It is our watch now. We have changed our light bulbs, traded in our gas guzzlers for hybrid and electric cars, and solar paneled our roofs, and now is the time to take to heart the U.N Millennium Development Goal
#7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability.
And so I celebrate World Peace Day by sharing this quote:
“A good friend will come and bail you out of jail….
But true friend will be sitting next to you saying,
Damn…that was fun!”
No Comments