Peace Meditation

Delivered at the Isaiah Wall opposite the United Nations on Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Let us invoke the Love that moves above us and below us, around us and within us. Let us invoke the Spirit of Love that made the banner I saw hanging over the freeway in East Orange, New Jersey, this morning: an outline of a dove and in letters five feet high one word: Peace.

Let us invoke the living spirit of the peacemakers who have gone before us. We have recently lost Philip Berrigan and Nicholas Cardell. Let us invoke their spirit. Let us invoke the Spirit of Love that is lived as solidarity of each with all, of one with the other:

man with woman…
adult with child…
black with white…
Christian with Buddhist with Jew with Muslim…

Let us acknowledge our interconnectedness.
Let us make real the solidarity we know we may make real as we acknowledge that it is broken…

…broken by criminalizing and imprisoning young men of color way out of proportion to their numbers…
….broken by taxing every penny earned at minimum wage while hardly taxing fortunes made on high profits…
….broken by inadequately funding of education in rural towns and inner cities, the education of children who are poor or black or immigrant and by under funding of education making military enlistment in the so-called voluntary army the only way up that many can see…
…broken by sending these oppressed young men and women to kill and be killed by other oppressed men and women, conscripts of a dictator or conscripts of a dictatorial economy…
…broken by bombs however precise that destroy homes, shatter neighborhoods and make children orphans or even kill them.

Let us invoke the Love that moves above and below us, around us and within us.
Let us invoke the Spirit of Love that is greater than us, but which is made real through us -- and only though us.
Let us invoke that human solidarity that makes justice possible and through which by making justice, we make peace possible.

Let us invoke love and live it as solidarity.

Our lives are our prayers.

Amen.

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