Until Every Land

(photo of a statue of Saint Francis)

“Until Every Land is Covered by Tranquility,” my short essay on a peace demonstration, was published this week at Mindful Matter. (You can read it at: http://hlst.ee/1N0wx1L)

That it was a protest against nuclear weapons in Berkeley, California is not unusual. That it was peaceful is affirming. That it was led by seminarians and faculty from nine Protestant and Catholic seminaries is notable because too often religion is silent on matters of ethics when society is for the status quo.

The demonstration took place in 1980, which is halfway between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and where we sit today. This year, on the 70^th anniversary, there was another protest. This means that politicians and the military still like their big, bad toys, like easy answers instead of lasting ones, that our work continues, and that we still don’t trust them to tell us the truth.

What touched my heart about our protest in 1980 was the presence of Japanese nuns of the Buddhist Lotus Sutra sect. One of their traditions is to beat on drums softly at protests as a way of sharing the peace in their hearts with others.

Later that year, at another protest, I stood beside them in the rain, listening to the beat of their drums and feeling the rhythm of compassion flow into me.

It’s discouraging that the use of weapons to settle differences continues. It depresses me that governments think it’s okay if 20 civilians die for every Islamic insurgent, because the ends never justify the means. It is coming out now, in the middle-of-the-road media, that the U.S. government supported terrorist death squads in Central American that killed off a generation of creative and humanitarian minds from the 1960s to the 1990s, as well as supported dictators before and after that.

This has been known to journalists for decades, but their work has been censored by the corporate media that is more beholden to their shareholders than to the truth.

Yet I am heartened that people continue to protest the backdoor schemes of politicians and the deaths of innocent people for economic gain.

Lasting peace is never achieved by killing. Peace starts with the compassion we feel in our hearts, and expands from there to the hearts of others.

May the beating of the drums remind us of this.