Two Selfish Kings (From the Buddhists)
What is worth fighting for? Two KINGS HAD FOR MANY MONTHS been quarreling over a small piece of land. There a high bank had been made to stop a river from flooding the fields around it. "This bank belongs to my country," said one of the kings.
"No," said the other king. "This bank belongs to my country."
The more they talked, the angrier the kings became. Finally, since they could not agree peaceably, they decided to fight the matter out. Each one called his army to prepare for battle. Each king planned to be ready the next day to lead his army forth to fight the other king and his army.
Buddha heard that the two kings were planning to fight each other. He sent a messenger to each one saying, "Before you go to war, will you please allow me to hear your com-plaints? Perhaps I may help you to find some other way of settling your quarrel."
Neither king was very happy about meeting Buddha. Still they both consented and came to the house of the teacher. There the three men sat down together to talk the whole matter over.
Buddha began, in his gentle way, to ask the kings certain questions. First he would put his question to one king and then he would ask the same question of the other king.
"Why do you say that the bank belongs to your kingdom?" he asked. "Of what use is the bank to you if it does belong to you? What will you do with it?"
When Buddha thought he understood the reasons for their quarrel, he asked another question, first of one, then of the other. "If you go to battle over this bank of earth, will not many of your soldiers be killed?" May not you yourselves even lose your lives?
"That is true," the kings admitted. "Many will be killed. But what else can we do?
"Which is worth more: a bank of earth, or the lives of your men, or your own lives? asked Buddha.
"Of course the lives of our men are worth far more than a bank of earth." Both kings agreed on that.
Buddha had one more question still to ask. "Which would take more money: to build another bank or to put back the lives of men once dead?"
"The lives of men cannot be brought back with all the money in the world." said the kings. "The lives of men are priceless."
"Are you then going to risk what is so precious that no money can ever buy it back, in order to have a small piece of ground that is like the ground on a thousand other hills?"
As the two kings talked and listened, they began to lose their angry feelings and to work out a peaceable agreement, In the end they did not go to war, and for many years the people of the two countries lived side by side in peace.
Wilfred Owen - The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
A Jain Prayer, by Satish Kumar
Lead me from Death to Life,
from Falsehood to Truth.
Lead me from Despair to Hope,
From Fear to Trust.
Lead me from Hate to Love,
From War to Peace.
Let Peace fill our Heart, our World, Our Universe.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
- Rumi "Portrait of a War"
Rev. Susan Maginn
Wy'east Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Note: This sermon was preached more or less extemporaneously and the following are Rev. Maginn's notes.
Imagine... you have a neighbor named Keith that has been in Iraq. You don't really know where he was or what he did there. But you know he was there, seems like almost a year. You have seen his wife being the single parent to their two small children for months now. She has been working more than usual. Relatives or friends seem to cycle through the house to be of help to her during the time that he is away. Now he is back. You don't know if he is home to stay or if he has to go return to Iraq. Maybe he doesn't even know. You don't see him very often but when you do, he doesn't look right. He looks like he hasn't slept in days or maybe he is drunk. He has started smoking. Before he went to Iraq, he would talk to you and to any other neighbor he saw â about the block, about how your neighborhood is changing, about yard work. But now when you see him, he doesn't talk at all. He hardly lifts his gaze from the ground in front of him. He looks like he is seeing ghosts. You don't know what to say Keith, so you decide not to say anything.
The numbers are staggering. One third of all soldiers returning from Iraq and Afganistan are coming home with symptoms of PTSD. The suicide rate among these soldiers is astounding. In response to this, the VA has just started a national suicide hotline. The VA is the largest provider of mental health care in the nation. This year, the Department will spent about $3 billion for mental health. Our own Gina O. is one of them. She has been a psychologist with the veterans administration hospital for the last 12 years.
Edward Tick has worked with veterans for years and wrote War And The Soul. He asks, "What happens to the soul when someone is at war?" Tick believes that when someone violates what they believe to be right and wrong, then they risk losing their soul. Tick has worked with many veterans who have reported an experience of soul-less-ness when they get back home from war. As if their soul has been left in the war zone. It has been said that "PTSD is the moral defeat of our nation, internalized in its veterans" (Tick, 276).
The moral defeat of our nation... what is meant by this is that we are fighting this war in such a way that is violating some very basic human morality and when this basic human morality is violated, soldiers feel it and many live with the effects of that violation for the rest of their lives, long after they have left the war.
Rules of War that go back thousands of years... Deut. 20
"PTSD is the moral defeat of our nation, internalized in its veterans" (Tick, 276 )
I want to be clear that I'm not saying that veterans are facing post-traumatic stress disorder because they have violated the Bible. Rather I am saying that writer of this passage in Deuteronomy had some profound insight into what is right and wrong in war, long before the Geneva Conventions. And that the reason why it is said that you must not violate these principles is that if you cross these lines, you loose your soul, you loose your God.
We see many individual soldiers struggling to find peace with what they have seen and done.
God asked Abram to sacrifice is son Isaac on Mt.Moriah. Poet and WWI soldier Wilfred Owen wrote about this while recovering from shellshock from World War I. This is what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was called then... shellshock. Owen said that Mt. Moriah represents the war zone. And that the father figure of Abraham represents a country going to war, obeying the voice of God and ready to sacrifice the country's children, the soldiers.
In Owen's poem from WWI, Abraham could not stop himself from the killing. This is not the biblical story. In Genesis, Abraham does follow the angel's command not to kill his son Isaac.
But I often think of this sweet boy Isaac. It is good that the boy is alive, but does surviving such an incident make it all better? Think about what Isaac witnessed: His own father preparing to murder him. How do you recover from that? I think about our veterans who have survived, who have come home after seeing what they have seen. Wouldn't the boy Isaac be forever scared?
The boy would be haunted by the father's breach of morality, just as our veterans are haunted by having to breach their own morality to obey the bending morality of our country.
If we breach morality, we are haunted.
There was a moment when I felt that our country was capable of the highest morality. It was actually in the hours and days right after the attacks of September 11th. I was so proud that we were not retaliating. See, I was a couple miles outside of New York City on that Tuesday morning and I could see and smell the burning and felt that if retaliation was going to happen it would be immediate. Dropping bombs right away. When that didn't happen. What happened is that there was silence. There were people coming out of their homes to hug neighbors, to find out if everyone was OK, to light candles in the front yard. I was full of hope when this silence came, so full of hope that we had restrained ourselves. Now I see what I thought was restraint was really just taking time for calculation.
I think of the high morality of Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address delivered on March 4, 1865, just days before the end of the civil war and just days before his own assassination. Even though he was on the verge of "winning" the war, his tone in the speech is a deeply somber one. There was no triumphalism. There was simply too much blood spilled for him to celebrate anything. In the second inaugural he says that the country has committed a great offense to God by building an economy on slavery. Lincoln said: "...God [sic] gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, So the losses of the Civil War are seen as the price paid for such a grave offense to God."
What price are we paying now? Are we paying it or are our soldiers and veterans paying the price so that we don't have to pay it or even be reminded that there is a debt to be paid?
There are so many to choose from, so many debts we need to pay, so many violations, so many breaches of morality.
And Rumi said..."Come, come. Even though you have broken your vows a thousand times, come, yet again, come."
The following passage is the end of the Lincoln's second inaugural address. It was subsequently adopted as the mission statement for the Veterans' Administration.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
I still don't know why we are there. I'm long past thinking that it could have anything to do with 'liberating the Iraqi people" but I'm still not sure why we are there even for the most corrupt of reason. My guess is that many soldiers wonder why as well and that this just complicates their whole involvement. There is no clear cause. What is clear is that construction companies and the defense industry benefits and the oil industry benefits. And then I see this disturbing connection between the war and our oil addicted lives and the melting glaciers and the temperatures in the oceans and the hurricanes and all of a sudden it becomes pretty ironic that we did not have enough troops available to help in New Oreleans. Because they were busy getting more oil, so that we can drive our cars so that the ozone can be further compromised and the glaciers can further melt and the gulf temperatures change and I become dizzy wondering where does this start and where is it going and what is it all for?
To My Fellow People of Faith,
On September 6th, I faxed a message to every member of Congress telling them, 'Not another dollar. Not another life.' To make sure they heard me, I am headed to Capitol Hill with my colleague Rev. John H. Thomas, the United Church of Christ's General Minister and President. On October 10th we will be walking into your representatives' offices to tell them to end the war; and I want to bring you with me!
Rev. William G. Sinkford
Sign the following petition to be among the 25,000 Unitarian Universalists joining Rev. William Sinkford as he speaks truth to power.
Along with thousands of Unitarian Universalists, I call for an end to the war in Iraq, an end to our reliance on violence as the first, rather than the last resort, an end to the arrogant unilateralism of preemptive war.
I call for the humility and courage to acknowledge failure and error, to accept the futility of our current path, and I cry out for the creativity to seek new paths of peacemaking in the Middle East, through regional engagement and true multinational policing.
I call for acknowledgment of our responsibility for the destruction caused by sanctions and war and a beginning to rebuild trust in the Middle East and around the world.
I call for truth-telling in our nation and for the recognition in our congregations that security is found in building beloved community, not by dominating others.
I will join protest to prayer, support ministries of compassion for victims here and in the Middle East and cast off the fear that has made many of us accept the way of violence and return again to the way of love. Thus may bloodshed end and cries be transformed to the harmonies of justice and the melodies of peace. For this I yearn, for this I petition, and toward this end I rededicate myself as a member of our human family.
If you would like to sign this petition, I will have copies up here, ready for you to sign. You can also go to uua.org and sign an online version of the petition.
Signing a petition is good. But what about here and now? What can we do for these soldier coming home so disoriented? For years now, I have been asking yourself these dizzying questions and saying, "It is time to bring the troops home." But when they do come home, what do I say to them?
Imagine...You are in your front yard, trimming bushes and you see Keith walk out of his house. He is sitting on his front steps, smoking a cigarette. You look away, pretending not to notice him. The bush is trimmed and the cigarette is finished and you start walking across the street. Your heart is racing and walk right up to him and you say, "Keith, it is good to see you. Welcome Home. And thank you."
The shooting continues. Whether you are a pacifist or believe that some wars are just. Whether you are opposed to this war or believe that it is necessary Whatever your personal position on this war or any wars When the shooting starts, all of us mourn. We take this time to acknowledge our mutual grief.
But even in the midst of this grief, there is hope - there is always hope. We light this candle as a symbol of that eternal hope.