Google “spirituality” and you’ll get images of quiet prayer, serene meditation, or a blissed-out moment of disconnection. We think of spirituality as “your moment of Zen” (which has nothing to do with Zen). Of course spirituality is much more than peace and quiet, but it’s not wrong to crave a life of peace and quiet, too.
Watch a video of this worship service
Today we reach the end of a series of sermons offering answers to the spiritual question, “Why does it matter?”
The spiritual question, “why does it matter?” is the question of meaning, one of the three particular concerns of spirituality: identity, meaning, and purpose.
We looked at identity at the beginning of this church year. We’ll look at purpose starting in April and through the end of this church year.
Meaning is the question of, what does it all mean? What is life for? What is the goal, the direction, the aim of life? What am I living for, in a personal sense. And is there a larger goal for all of us, or even a goal, or goals, for the universe itself?
Is all existence just randomly spinning and flying out from the big bang? Is it merely a happy accident that we’re here and our lives and all of creation around us doesn’t really add up to anything significant or meaningful?
Perhaps.
But we have an inherent sense that life does matter. We’re constantly making choices between options as though our choosing matters. We’re constantly pointing our lives toward goals that feel important. We’re constantly judging the world around us, celebrating good things, and complaining about and working to change bad things.
This would make no sense in a meaningless universe. In a meaningless universe, there would be no good or bad. “It’s all the same to the clam,” remember. In our moments of cynicism, we might hold that nothing matters, but in our lives, we act as though it very much does matter. We live as though there are better or worse ways to live, that right and good and beauty and truth, matter.
So if our lives matter. If our choices matter. Then our lives, and perhaps the universe itself is pointed toward a goal. We have something we want to achieve. We orient our lives toward some meaningful ultimate.
I’ve named a few sources of meaning that you may be striving for: order, service, beauty, wisdom, loyalty, joy, power. My life is meaningful because I am advancing toward my goal. There are other goals, too. And I’ll offer one more in my sermon today.
Now a goal is an immaterial thing. You can’t pick up a goal, like a rock; you have to think about it, picture it, imagine it. A goal is purely a mental object. To have a goal is to have a conscious thought that the world around us could be different than it is now. Only conscious beings have goals. Rocks don’t have goals. To have a goal requires consciousness. Therefore, for the universe to have a goal, if the universe has a goal, the universe must in some way be conscious.
I’ve always felt that my life had meaning. Even when I’m feeling down, or hopeless, I still think life matters. But I have been less sure about the universe having a larger meaning. Maybe meaning is just something we make for ourselves.
But that answer never completely satisfied my intuition. It never satisfied me to think that my life has meaning but that I’m existing within a meaningless universe. It never felt true to my intuition about existence that I would be living on a little island of meaning in a great sea of meaninglessness. Because, if the universe around me, and long before me and long after me is meaningless, then I can’t really hold much claim that my little life in the midst of that void has any meaning either.
In an interdependent web of all existence either it all matters, or none of it does.
And yet I do think my life has meaning. I do think my life matters. I always have. And I do believe that all people are persons of inherent worth and dignity. Worth that comes not because they make it for themselves, but inherent in our being. And so, if my life matters, and all life matters, then ultimately all existence must matter.
Which must mean, therefore, that consciousness, the ability to imagine a future reality different from the current reality and set a path toward that goal, must be a feature built in to the structure of the universe and not merely a happy accident achieved by a few living creatures on earth.
I’m sorry. We’re getting deep into theology now. But if not now, when?
And so, for me, following my deep sense that my life has meaning, that all life has meaning, that all existence has meaning, and that meaning only comes from an ability to judge consciously between values like right and wrong, and good and bad and beauty and truth and so on, from which it follows that consciousness must be a feature of the universe…
I’m led, then, to a belief that there is a mind of the universe. A holder somewhere of immaterial values giving meaning to words like right, and good, and just. A conscious element of the universe, related to the material parts of the universe but immaterial in itself, in the way our minds relate to our brains. And that the immaterial part of the universe presents to us the ultimates that we strive for and which give our lives meaning:
Ultimate goodness. Ultimate beauty. Ultimate truth.
And that, finally, when we make the personal choices that give meaning to our lives, we are being drawn toward these ultimates. The ultimates are attracting us, luring us, toward a better future, that is truly “better” not just different, because that conscious element of the universe gives objective meaning to our judgments of better and worse.
Today I want to add to our list of ultimates the word “peace.”
We started our worship with a reading from the students of the Lincoln School, which is a primary school for girls in Providence, RI, in the Quaker tradition.
The reading offers several definitions of peace. Some of which may seem obvious.
“Peace is quiet and calm, it is rest; it is silence after a storm.”
“It means that nations are friends;”
“It means the strong respect the weak, the great respect the small, the many respect the few.”
Some of the answers are more poetical:
“It is like spring after winter;”
“It brings sunshine into the world; it is like sweet music after harsh sounds.”
“It is love and friendship;”
But two answers, in particular, struck me as amplifying my theme for the day:
“Peace means the beginning of a new world.”
And,
“it is the world’s dream of dreams.”
If meaning is about making choices that lead toward goals: goals that we can imagine as a future reality different from the present, and that we can consciously judge as better than the present, then when we phrase the definition of peace as, “peace means the beginning of a new world” then we place “peace” as a locus of ultimate meaning:
“Peace means the beginning of a new world.” A different world. A better world. A more peaceful world. A peaceful world achieved by being peaceful.
“It is the world’s dream of dreams.” When the world dreams of a better future, it dreams of many things: love, peace, justice. But when all the ultimates dream together, they dream of peace.
Here’s a little song I learned from Mr. Rodgers, that I have sung all my life:
Peace and quiet, peace, peace, peace.
Peace and quiet, peace, peace, peace.
Peace and quiet, peace, peace, peace.
We all want peace.
We all want peace.
For some, peace is what they want. Peace is what they are pursuing. Peace is what they want from their day. It’s what they want for their life. It’s what they dream for the world.
Seeking peace, they find the quiet places. They sit still. They learn to listen, and to breathe. They calm themselves and they work to calm others. Seeking peace, they come to church.
This could be a place of peace. Just as it is a place of joy, and a place of beauty, and a place of wisdom. A sanctuary from the chaotic, anxious, restless, reckless world outside.
Friends. No stress. Candlelight. Soothing sounds and words. Comfort.
Just as this could be a place where we use our power to make justice, this could be a place where we make peace: peace for ourselves, and peace for each other, and peace for the world we share.
Peace is a perfectly legitimate desire to ask from a place of worship.
“Peace is quiet and calm, it is rest; it is silence after a storm.
It is like spring after winter;”
Indeed, many people would say that peace is the only goal of a spiritual community. Some people use peace and spiritual almost as synonyms.
Peace is meditation. Peace is silence, or a soft chime. Peace is the stillness of a mountain, or the gentle flow of water over stones. A single cloud floating through a blue sky. A cat curled asleep in a patch of sun. Peace is no thought. No action.
But I think we are wrong to think of peace only as an absence. There is an active quality to peace, also. Peace is not merely what we have when the fighting stops. Peace is also the tool we use to stop the fighting.
Jesus didn’t say, “blessed are the peaceful.” He said, “blessed are the peace-makers.”
This, I think, is a lesson we can learn from the prayer of Thich Nhat Hahn we used as our meditation this morning.
He prays, “Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.”
Peace is something we do. Peace is something we make for ourselves, and for the world.
Peace comes not only because the annoying, loud, angry person has left the room. Peace comes because we call peace up for ourselves, from inside ourselves. We make our peace, by quieting the annoying, loud, angry voice in our own head. We make our peace, As Thich Nhat Hanh says, by returning to ourselves, by becoming wholly ourselves. By becoming again the peaceful person it is our nature to be.
And then, Thich Nhat Hanh lifts our personal peace, to the level of a universal, in the way I was talking about at the beginning of this sermon, relating our peace, to an ultimate form of peace.
“Let us be aware of the source of being common to us all and to all living things. Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion–towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
My husband Jim tells a story of when he was a young man.
He’s here today, so you can ask him his version of this story, but here’s my version.
He was in his early twenties, maybe even late teens. He was in a new relationship with a guy and they were having an argument. All right, it was a fight.
No blows were being thrown, but tempers were getting hot. Angry words. Yelling. I don’t think Jim ever told me what they were fighting about. He probably doesn’t remember himself.
But what he remembers, and what is the point of this story, is that they were standing in a kitchen, and Jim picked up a plate. And he remembers, very clearly, as he picked up the plate, that he had learned from watching adults on television, or maybe in a movie, that one of the things that you do when you’re having a blow-out fight with your mate is that you pick up a piece of crockery and you throw it at him.
And then your mate ducks and the plate crashes against the wall. We’ve all seen it a million times. It’s very dramatic. It’s just what you do.
And so, not even really feeling like he wanted to throw the plate, but just kind of acting out the role that he felt was expected of him at times like this, he reached for the plate, grabbed it, and hauled it back getting prepared to throw it.
And Jim’s boyfriend, a little older than Jim, and a little more mature, saw what Jim was about to do, and he said…
“No.”
Very calmly. Peacefully. Breaking the spell. He said, “No. You’re not going to do that. We’re not going to do that, here.”
Jim put down the plate, that he hadn’t really wanted to throw, anyway. And they found some other way to end their argument.
Jim learned that he can decide for himself how he wants to behave. We don’t have to let the worst of television sit-coms teach us how to behave. We can choose. We can be peace-makers for others, as Jim’s boyfriend was in that story. And we can choose peace for ourselves.
Now, Jim and I have a magnet on the side of our refrigerator that has the word “DRAMA” in big letters surrounded by a big red circle with a line through it, the international symbol of “No.” We choose to live our lives without drama.
And that phrase, “We’re not going to do that, here” has become a tool I have used in my life ever since Jim told me that story, and told me how his boyfriend got him to put down that plate. “We’re not going to do that, here” calls out the bad behavior and breaks the spell. And by the way, I tell it to myself more often than I say it out loud to anyone else.
“We’re not going to do that here” reminds me that I have choices. I am in control. I can put down the plate. Here is the boundary. We can fit our words and actions inside the acceptable lines of what we do here. And if you’re about to step outside the line, here’s your chance to choose another way.
We’re not going to call each other names. We’re not going to shame people, or shun them. We’re not going to threaten people. We’re not going to shout people down and refuse to listen. We’re not going to throw things. We’re not going to twist people’s words, or imagine the worst possible interpretation of what they’re struggling to say. We’re not going to do that here.
We’re going to live in peace. Peace means the beginning of a new world. It is love and friendship; it is the world’s dream of dreams.
We shall live in peace.