Peace Be With You

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

May 9, 2009

To all the mothers here today. To all the women who have played a nurturing and loving role in the lives of others. To those who have taught little hands and opened small minds. To those who have mentored and guided those who were lost or unsure. To all who have kissed a boo-boo and made it feel better, or stroked a fevered brow, or stayed up late until a teenager has come home well after curfew. To those who race from work to soccer practice to oboe lessons to the school play. To those who try to be Wonder Woman and June Cleaver wrapped into one, AND to those who feel like Marge Simpson and Peg Bundy wrapped into one. To those who kept it all together and to those who tried their best but couldn't. To the women in our lives who gave us life. I wish you a Happy Mother's Day.

From this pulpit you've heard me speak about my mother, and you've heard me speak about your mothers. Today I want to tell you about another mother, a mother who raised five children, and who lost the sixth at a young age. A mother who lived in Boston more than a century ago. Her name is Julia Ward Howe. She was a Unitarian and she wrote the words you heard in our reading today. And we can trace the origins of Mother's Day back to her.

Let me give you just a brief biographical sketch of her life. Julia Ward was born in 1819 to a wealthy socialite family in New York City. She had access to tutors and private schools, and she was a brilliant student who spoke French, Italian and German, and who later learned Latin and Greek. By the age of twenty, she was a published author. She met and married Samuel Howe, an activist and an advocate for people with physical disabilities and they settled in Boston. Julia's husband, while himself an outspoken member of the anti-slavery movement, did not approve of his wife participating in public causes, and tried to keep her barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Julia, it seems, was going a bit stir-crazy at home with five children, and the thing that seemed to save her sanity was her frequent attendance at Sunday services conducted by the great Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker. She worked secretively on her writing and had two books of poetry published without her husband's knowledge or permission, and when he found out he wasn't pleased. In fact, he shipped her off to Europe. But Julia wouldn't be cowed, and she continued to pursue her passion for writing.

As the country entered the Civil War, the Howes became well known among the liberal elite of Boston, and they went to work for the Sanitary Commission, the precursor to the Red Cross. They were invited to Washington by Abraham Lincoln, and it was after visiting a Union encampment that Julia was moved to pen the words that would become the Battle Hymn of the Republic. They were published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, and the Hymn soon became the abolitionist anthem of the War. Much to her husband's dismay, Julia became famous for this piece and was thereafter much in demand for speaking engagements. It's fair to say that Julia blossomed under this notoriety, and she lent her voice to many causes including women's rights and the peace movement.

By the end of the Civil War, and with another war erupting in Europe, Julia came to appreciate the potential power that the women of the world held on the international stage. She began to believe that they alone had the ability to bring peace to a violent world. It was in 1872 that she wrote her Mother's Day Declaration. It was her attempt to rally the mothers of the world to unite to rid the planet of the scourge of war. She traveled to London to promote an international Woman's Peace Congress and later she initiated a Mothers' Peace Day observance that was celebrated in Boston and other state capitals for several years. Her focus later shifted to women's suffrage, where she worked side by side with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but she didn't live to see the day when women were granted the right to vote.

Our modern-day Mother's Day celebration is a far cry from the international peace-making congress of women that Julia Ward Howe envisioned. But for today I'd like to reclaim this part of history, this part of Unitarian history, our history. Because issues of war and peace are, unfortunately, no less prominent in our world today than they were in Julia's. Although we will soon begin a responsible withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, the Obama administration is escalating the war in Afghanistan and it appears that soon that war will be expanding into Pakistan. Armed conflicts continue between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Iran is threatening to develop a nuclear arsenal. Russia continues to terrorize former Soviet states along its border and North Korea has launched a missile capable of delivering intercontinental warheads. Our neighbor to the south is engaged in a bloody war that is largely fueled by our own culture's hunger for drugs and love of guns. No, the picture isn't any prettier now than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century when Julia penned the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Mother's Day Proclamation.

What interests me in particular is the contrast between these two writings. Ten years before she wrote the words "From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice," Julia Ward Howe proclaimed the righteousness of the Union cause, where God has "loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword" to trample "out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." How does a person, over the course of a decade, move from being a vocal advocate for violence to become a radical peacemaker? What experiences or awakening took place to spark such a transformation? I can only speculate, but here are some possibilities. First, as a staunch abolitionist Julia declaimed the degradation and oppression of African Americans through the institution of slavery. To the extent the Civil War was a conflict to resolve the slavery question, her passionate belief in the need to abolish this scourge from the American landscape likely led her to her own theory of "just war." On balance, she perhaps thought, it is better to use might and power to defeat an evil than to let that evil persist. This same thinking has enabled people to support violence and bloodshed for centuries, perhaps as long as humanity has existed. Perhaps Julia Ward Howe's transformation was a result of the Union victory and the elimination of slavery. With her passion for justice quenched, she found no other basis for which a "just war" should be fought.

Or maybe it was the carnage of that war itself that transformed her. It was a vicious, brutal conflict where tens of thousands of lives were lost in a single day, day in and day out. The reports of bloodshed and death were constant during those years. There were no restrictions on the press back then preventing images of flag-draped coffins from being shown on the nightly news. As a member of the Sanitary Commission, Julia witnessed first-hand the devastation of the Civil War, a war in which more men died as a result of disease than they did in combat. Having witnessed this devastation, perhaps Julia came to realize that God's terrible swift sword acted indiscriminately, cutting down the virtuous as well as the reviled, that the "sifting out the hearts of men" was better left to God than to generals and politicians.

My last theory about Julia Ward Howe's personal transformation is that, in the intervening years between the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Mother's Day Proclamation, she discovered the power of love. The power of love to wipe away all differences, to overcome all fears. Remember that during this time Julia was able to use her notoriety to slip from under the heel of her domineering husband. She was able to find her own voice. A woman's voice. A mother's voice. These words from her journal lead me to believe that during this time Julia Ward Howe came to see that there is another way, a way that rejects violence as a solution to conflict. She wrote:

With the scales lifted from her eyes, Julia saw the world anew. She saw it not just with eyes that were equal to those of men, but with eyes that saw there is another, a better way. And with this new-found vision she proclaimed that "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience." This was a statement not just about war and peace, but about the relationship between the sexes. About the equality of women and men, and perhaps even the superiority of women, or at least their perspective, in the arena of conflict resolution. To frame this resolution as a "Mother's Day" proclamation certainly seems to say so. Rev. Forrest Church suggests that Julia Ward Howe framed the resolution as a "Mother's Day Proclamation" to "remind us that the whole world would be a better place if only everyone might rise to the challenge of motherhood; nurturing life, fostering peace, and giving love."

As a congregation we voted just a few months ago to support the Unitarian Universalist Statement of Conscience on Peacemaking. That statement tells us that "building a culture of peace at all levels of human interaction requires a transformation of consciousness, individual lifestyles, and public policies. At the heart of this transformation is the will to understand the truths voiced on all sides from a stance of empathy and love." Out of this new consciousness, we are called to pursue a path not of pacifism nor of Just War. Instead the Statement calls us to engage in something called "Just Peacemaking." Just Peacemaking requires us to "ask not what justifies war, but what justifies the humanitarian preservation or restoration of peace." The Statement goes on to read: "If force is ever to be used, it must be in the service of ending violence of much greater magnitude… Our Unitarian Universalist values commit us to work toward a culture of peace that makes war and all other forms of violence avoidable and universally recognized as reprehensible and ineffective for honoring human rights and human dignity. Just Peacemaking melds love and justice in moving us toward a culture of peace at all levels of human interaction."

By affirming this Statement of Conscience, we have agreed as a congregation to undertake peace-making activities in our community, nation and world. Most of us are familiar with the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao-tse, who wrote:

We're also familiar with the words of the song that say "Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me." What we learn from these words, and what we learn from Julia Ward Howe's life and legacy, is that the way to peace is the way of peace. It begins with us, in our hearts. And what better model for a way of peace than the heart of a mother? Motherhood, whose highest goal is to love unconditionally, to nurture life fully, to work tirelessly, to give selflessly, to hope eternally. How better could we honor our mothers, and all mothers of the world, than to find that place of peace in our own hearts, and then to take it out into the world? Happy Mother's Day, Julia. Happy Mother's Day, Mom. Happy Mother's Day, everyone.

Salaam.

Ashanti.

Ashtee.

Shalom.

Pacé.

Sula.

Peace.

Closing Words: From the fourth chapter of the Book of Micah:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Did this sermon bring forth any special feelings, thoughts or concerns that you would like to share? Consider this link as providing you with an opportunity to talk back.