The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

Amen.

 

Today’s message is brought to you by Ben and Jerry’s ice cream! Ben and Jerry’s is my favorite. The price is a bit too dear here in Canada for me to justify buying it very often, which is just as well, for my health. Even so, today’s message was inspired by one of their newer flavors…Imagine Whirled Peace. Whirled. W-H-I-R-L-E-D.

 

I discovered this flavor in the States last summer. Yum, yum. If I’d been able to find it here, I would have brought you some for today…really I would have. But I couldn’t find it, and you’ll have to be satisfied with my verbal descriptions. Imagine Whirled Peace is made of Caramel & Sweet Cream Ice Creams Swirled with Fudge Peace Signs & Toffee Cookie Pieces. Well, all I can say, again, is yum, yum.   On their website, they say:

“When Ben & Jerry's wanted to talk about peace, we couldn't think of a better person to exemplify the message than John Lennon. Through his art and lyrics he imagined a world without war and asked us all to 'Give Peace a Chance'. We hope this whirly mixture of toffee cookies and fudge peace signs enlightens your bellies and souls and makes you ask what you can do to promote peace in your lives.”

 

I guess it worked…because eating it…sucking on the toffee pieces and crunching on the fudge-y peace signs…gave me pause to consider what I can do, what we can do, to promote peace in our lives. So, thank you Ben and Jerry. Mission accomplished. Imagine….just by eating ice cream.   If only world peace were that easy.

 

As you might ascertain from my newsletter article this month, it is really the quality of ‘whirling’ in this picture of peace that attracted my attention. There has been, for a long time, a popular bumper sticker that uses homonyms for world peace…inviting us to imagine green vegetables swirling. Imagine whirled peas.   It always makes me smile. 

 

Why the hand motions? During this past week, I attended a storytelling workshop at which Diana Primavesi told a story which involved hand motions. As I began to work through the words for this message, I found that I needed some way to clearly articulate what I was saying… and Diana’s hand motions inspired me to find the appropriate sign language for world, as in our whole green earth, and whirled, as in dervishes or Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

 

And so I found myself ruminating on the quality of whirling…of mixing things together…of experiencing diversity and embracing it. I wondered if caramel ice cream likes to co-exist with sweet cream ice cream. And, does toffee enjoy hanging out with peace signs made of fudge? Like it or not, here they are locked in the same ice cream, their individual contributions creating a new and tasty flavour combination….a sensational flavour, actually.   How many different ingredients could we whirl and twirl together and still enjoy the mix? 

 

At the Fall Regional Gathering in Guelph a couple of weeks ago, I attended a workshop put on by two people from Don Heights Unitarian Congregation in Toronto, in which they told about a program they put into place last year that they call Engaged Diversity. The goal, as I understand it, is to focus their learning on exploring and confronting both external diversity and internal prejudice.   Each month at Don Heights several services and classes are dedicated to looking at different areas of diversity…racial, socio-economic, cultural, intellectual, sexual, etc, etc, etc. And they have invited in a variety of guests and speakers from various marginalized groups to share their perspectives and experiences. All of this with a very intentional desire to ‘engage diversity.’

 

Many of you know that historically, the Unitarian trinity, if you can live with such an oxymoron, is a trinity composed of reason, freedom, and tolerance.   Over time the word ‘tolerance’ has been replaced with ‘acceptance’ and more recently ‘celebration of’ or the ‘embracing of’ difference….moving forward along a spectrum from a position that smacked a bit of superiority to a place of mutual respect and even admiration. It is very different to ‘tolerate’ something than it is to ‘embrace’ it. To tolerate requires your head only. To embrace and engage requires your heart.

 

When I first imagined this service, I thought about how we tend to divide ourselves…into families, into age groups, into social clubs and castes…which led me to think about extreme separatist actions such as the apartheid in South Africa and the wall of separation between Israel and Palestine. The word ‘apartheid’ in Afrikaans, literally means ‘apartness,’ and the crime of apartheid was defined by the International Criminal Court as inhumane acts "committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." Maintaining that regime. The intention of apartheid is to ensure that we keep separate from those who are different than we are, and to that end laws are enacted and walls are built that will maintain ‘apartness.’ This is what happens when we walk the other way from tolerance, toward intolerance, and beyond that, to acts of literally extinguishing difference.  

 

I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to digest the fact that such intolerance exists in the world. If I focus on it for very long, I come to feel quite hopeless. The machine of the regime of intolerance is so huge, and often so far away, and millions are directly affected by it, if not killed, and I don’t know what I can do about it. Ben Wolfe reminded me, in a conversation recently, about Stephen Covey’s teaching that we each have both a circle of concern, and a circle of influence, with the circle of concern usually being much larger than one’s circle of influence. World events are often in our circle of concern while outside of our circle of influence. Covey’s suggestion is that always working within your circle of influence will keep you moving forward, and will prevent you from wasting your time on things that you can’t change or influence. 

 

My hesitation with swallowing his suggestion is that there is the danger that focusing on our circle of influence will shrink our circle of concern, and I believe this only can only lead to more egocentricity and fear and separation. We need to remember that Covey’s work is about how to be more effective…not necessarily about how to be the best human beings that we can be, and I would encourage us to ever enlarge our circle of awareness and concern, even as our hands stay busy within our circle of influence. 

 

The circles overlap and inform one another, you know? What we see in our circle of concern educates us, and softens us, and informs our actions. What we do within our circle of influence gives us our identity and ripples out to affect things well beyond that small circle. 

All of this is to say that within our circle of influence, we have the potential to ‘whirl’ together the little peas, the ingredients in our small lives, and in so doing, to have some effect on ‘world peace.’  

 

See that motion for peace? It is the combination of two words…’become’ and ‘settle.’ ‘Become’ is for one thing to turn and to become another…and then to settle into that. In other words, it takes more than one thing to make peace. We need to interact with something that then turns us into something else…becomes us. So we must be in environments where we experience difference, where we bump up against something that we bring into the mix that is us.

 

It happened just in the making of this sermon…it happens each week in the making of a sermon. I bump into things, interact with things outside of myself, and they change me, inform me…so that I can bring those things into my message. In this case, it was the unlikely combination of a pint of ice cream, and a story telling workshop, and a CUC event, and a conversation with Ben, and…many things I can’t even name. The list of ingredients is long. 

But mixing up a celebration of diversity, we must distinguish between two common recipe directions. It’s the difference between making a soufflé, for example, and making brownies.   One requires that you whip or beat the ingredients into a frothy blend until they are completely indistinguishable from one another. The other simply asks you to fold the ingredients together gently. In sociological terms, one is to assimilate and to eventually lose difference, and the other is to acculturate, or to combine things that are different in the same environment. The second is what it means to embrace difference.

 

Within the boundary of a self, as individuals, we are in the constant process of assimilation…taking in new information and experiences and germs and food…and digesting it all into the person we are, body and mind and spirit. But we get confused and try to apply this same process within our groups… erroneously thinking that we should be able to mix everyone together and come up with a single homogenized entity. It just doesn’t work that way. As much as we think we come together as like minds, we are constantly surprised by comments and ideas expressed by others. As much as we think we come together with the same values, we might find ourselves shocked by the choices made by those around us. 

 

This is the misnomer that peace is somehow synonymous with quiet. Again, this could be true on an individual level…that if you can get away from everything and everyone, and all is quiet, then you can experience peace. But this is an impossible vision of peace for a community or a world. Peace in a diverse setting, peace beyond one individual, is not found by blending everything together into a bland batter, or by keeping everything apart and separate, but by learning to live with…no, learning to embrace…the cacophony of the mix.  

 

So how might we crave peace and noisy, rather than peace and quiet? How might we choose to walk toward celebration rather than toward separation? 

Here’s what I’d like to suggest for the small circle of influence that is this religious community…and know contained herein is the truth that you can influence this community.

 

I suggest that we cultivate a culture of gratitude for difference. When someone doesn’t do it your way, see it as an opportunity to be grateful for the diversity of styles among us. When I, or someone else, expresses a belief that is different than your own, thank them for sharing it…for allowing you the opportunity to question your own position. When someone is noisy when you want quiet, respectfully express your preference for quiet even as you struggle to enjoy their different way of being in the world. When something jangles your nerves, embrace the chance to look at how your nervous system is wired, and to see if you might stretch or re-train that wiring. 

 

I suggest that we influence this circle by committing ourselves to a wide path. Without a doubt, it is more difficult than it is to walk a narrowly defined path, because it means that as we encounter difference, we must regularly check our compasses and re-gain our bearings. A wide path is walked only with a wide-open heart and mind, refusing to exclude anyone or anything without cause, and which respects the rights of other. This is not an ‘anything goes’ policy, but an openness to learn and to assume good intentions across differences. 

 

I suggest that we strive for a true and lasting peace that may only be found in an embracing co-existence that celebrates the incredible diversity around us. This means really getting to know each other and allowing ourselves to be known, so that all of who we are enters the mix. It won’t be quiet. It won’t be easy. It won’t be a frothy homogenous soufflé.

 

But it will be incredibly flavourful. It will be an exciting mixture of individual gifts and possibility. The presence of each of us…of every age, colour, class, sexual orientation… is indispensable to the peace process, because peace is not possible if we’re not all part of it. Together, in our gathered diversity, we form the whole. A whirled world at peace. 

So be it.