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THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Blessings of the Season

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, Dec.30-Jan.6, 2008

This is a season of reflection and hope. We join together with friends and family, sharing stories, renewing connections and counting our blessings. It is also a time when many of us turn to the foundations of our faiths to ask what meaning they hold for us as we assess how we are living.

In recent years far too many of these faiths have been silent in the face of steady corrosion of our capacity for compassion for one another, wonder at the mysteries of our world and love for all of life.

That is why the efforts of more than sixty ministers, rabbis and imams this week in Iowa are so important. As people of faith and as voters, a group named the Interfaith Peace Committee decided to challenge the presidential candidates crisscrossing their state to remember that their highest responsibility is the creation of peace. The group published a statement called “A Pax on Both Our Houses.”

The statement, written in the wake of the National Intelligence Estimate acknowledging that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, begins:

“Now that we know that Iran is not making nuclear weapons, the God of peace and justice calls on Americans and Iranians to choose a full peace with each other—not dither any longer between peace and war. For as the Prophet Elijah cried out, ‘How long will you keep hopping between two opinions? Choose!’

“God calls us to choose Peace—because, as the Bible teaches us, every human being is made in the Image of God, and as the Quaran teaches, to kill one human being is to destroy the world; to save one human being is to save the world.”

It ends with these words: “We call upon the peoples of the world to support this call, for the sake of conscience and survival.”

The statement is sponsored by the Iowa Chapter of the Methodist Federation for Social Action and the Shalom Center. The full text can be read at interfaithpeacecommittee.org.

It is a model of the kind of questioning, reflection and public action that we should all be doing as part of our celebration of the sacredness of this season.

The crisis in our country is fundamentally one of our hearts. We have hardened them against the pain of others. So we are able to justify war, torture and violations of human integrity in the name of protecting our own security and privilege.

Yet, more and more people of faith are raising questions and seeking alternatives. Along with those in Iowa, the national Network of Spiritual Progressives, under the leadership of Tikkun magazine, is calling for a new spiritual covenant with America. They see their mission as creating

“A community of people from many faiths and traditions, called together by the Spiritual Covenant with America (see www.spiritualprogressive.org) and its vision of healing and transforming our world. We include in this call both the outer transformation needed to achieve social justice, ecological sanity, and world peace, and the inner healing needed to foster loving relationships, a generous attitude toward the world and toward others unimpeded by the distortions of our egos. Our movement will encourage a habit of generosity and trust, and the ability to respond to the grandeur of creation with awe, wonder and radical amazement.”

This holiday season we, the people, have the responsibility to look deeply at ourselves and our traditions and find ways to call forth the best in one another.

Nowhere is this obligation more sacred than on the question of war and peace. We know that it is the peacemakers whom history blesses.

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