Wherever we look these days -- on the international scene, the education and health care systems, in some cases in our own families or work environments -- there's conflict and protest, along with feelings of grievance (that word so closely related to grief) and a sense that action must be taken to bring about justice – and along with feelings of fear, about war on the international scene and fighting in our very personal lives. Today, let's ponder those things for which we will take a stand even when it may put us at odds with people we love and respect, and those things about which we must reluctantly say, "I’m not sure." Let’s think particularly about those things, the ones we’re not sure about – the ones which are therefore the most fertile ground for our learning and growth.

The first time I spoke on a subject rather similar to this, it was stimulated by the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. That was the terrible killing of fourteen women students, which impressed on us all the awful fact of our helplessness in the face of deliberate violence, especially with guns, and the even more terrible fact of the hidden hatreds in our society which occasionally explode into killing and often into abuse of less dramatic kinds. The Montreal Massacre was also symptomatic, not only of violence against women but also of the many resentments, hostilities and anger which become embodied in forms such as civil disobedience, strike action, protests of greater and lesser degree, and wars just and unjust. I'm going to use some reflections by my colleague Brian Kiely, minister in Edmonton, as an introduction to the more general topic of how to strike the balance between peace and conflict.

Brian reminded us of the circumstances of the massacre and then asked, "What did you feel? Shock, anger, deep grief? Perhaps, if you are a woman you also felt fear for your own safety." It was, he said, an incident that touched us all, truly a national tragedy. A lot of predictable things happened quickly:

Gun control activists cried for tougher laws, and gun club lobbyists cried in retort that, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."; the Montreal Police and the Justice Minister were attacked for not somehow stopping this tragedy; women's groups and some men took to the streets to grieve, rage, advocate change and protest; and of course some tasteless humour emerged.

Watching from thousands of kilometers away, I think I saw something else. I watched the tv commentators in the first night's telecasts [as they] spoke of a deranged madman ...... they spoke of an isolated incident, sad, of course, but something remote...a one-time occurrence. They failed to recognize that this horrible moment in our Canadian history is repeated day after day on a one-by-one basis. ....... The real tragedy was not that 14 women were murdered and many more wounded in a few moments on a December Montreal night. The real tragedy is that most failed to see it as part of a pattern of violence. How wrong we were. ................ And yet, touched as we were, the violence continues unabated. We were touched, but as a society, we have not yet begun to change.

Brian then recognized that he could not speak from experience about the fear and anguish experienced by women, because he is a man, and a physically large man at that. He says,

I have never been threatened, never known fear while walking down a deserted street. I have never felt the terror or confusion of having a lover rage at me. I have never felt even the possibility that a lover might...or even could...beat me. I cannot speak the experience of battered women.

Like Brian, I have never personally known these things. Nor have I known what it's like to live in a war-torn country (I was too young for World War II to affect me much), or what it's like to struggle to provide for dependent children on an inadequate wage, or what it's like to have so much hatred in me that I am pushed into violent action against the target of my hate, or what it's like to have lived so long with the idea that a certain group of people are my enemies that I can no longer see them in any other way. There is so much I've never experienced, that perhaps I cannot speak at all on the subject of peace and conflict and finding our balance, because without these experiences it's like someone who's never had children trying to comfort a parent who's lost a child. But after acknowledging his inexperience, Brian goes on to say,

In the same way, I can say, and I invite you who lack some particular experience to say with me, "What I can speak is my own experience, and that's important, for it is I who must change." People who have grown up in war-torn countries, people who have to struggle on inadequate wages, people who have so much hatred in them that it explodes against the target of that hatred, people who have lived forever with the concept of "enemy" -- these people don't have nearly as much responsibility for trying to stop violence as I do, as we do. It's our responsibility. I believe there's always more obligation on those who are advantaged to find the way out of conflict than there is on the disadvantaged. "To whom much is given, of them shall much be required "

Brian Kiely tells of the men's meetings which he attended after the Montreal Massacre in an attempt to respond in some positive way to what had happened. The first positive step taken by them towards defusing the negative power of their own anger about the event was to acknowledge it. Not to act it out against one another or anyone else, but to acknowledge that it was in them. This we can all do, and it is a positive, peacemaking action -- to look into one's heart and find there the emotions we share with others however like or unlike ourselves they are. Resentment of those who're doing better than we are; bitterness towards those who look as if they may catch up with us though they don't deserve to; rage against the hand life has dealt us. These things are not the prerogative of the poor, or those in hard circumstances of any kind -- they're in us all. They come out in the form of "road rage", and in the form of desperate impatience with our family members sometimes amounting to emotional abuse, and in the form of determination to control outcomes and force issues. If we can acknowledge our anger, we can begin to find more peaceful ways to handle it than through hostility to our fellow human beings. Not to deny it or suppress it, but to channel it towards the kind of justice which is our only hope for peace.

At the meetings of men after the Montreal Massacre, some people had come with hope for political action based on an understanding of the violence as not simply one man's madness but as a symptom of a pervasive sickness. And this, I think, is another point of delicate balance in the tension between peace and conflict: personal transformation is necessary if peace is to be achieved, but it's not enough. There must also be the kind of collective effort which we call political action. I’ve sometimes argued with friends who claim to disdain the world of politics and think that they can stay out of it. Politics is just a word for how we act in groups rather than as individuals, and I don't think there's any way a person who cares about the future of the world or any part of it can be non-political. I believe, if we truly want peace, it's vital for us to look as carefully at our society as we look at ourselves, to see the anger and fear and frustration which take such abusive forms, and strive towards more just political ways of dealing with them.

Some of the men at those meetings came to grieve with one another. You may be aware that in recent years it's become usual in psychotherapeutic circles to talk about coming to terms with loss as "grief work". It's been recognized that sorrow is not a passive emotion simply to be waited out, but an activity of the soul, a process of transformation from one state of being to another. When we've recognized our anger, if we can then recognize the grief which underlies it -- the loss of our dreams of security, perhaps, the loss of financial or emotional support, and more and more the loss of an optimistic outlook for ourselves, our jobs, our province, our country, our world -- if we can work with all this grief without letting it overwhelm the joy which is still to be found in life, then we'll be on our way to a place of peace.

A few of the men at those meetings realized that they needed to be with others, to talk with them about what they were experiencing. It's been remarked often that men have particular difficulty making close friendships, but to some extent this is an issue for most of us. We need to be able to talk to other people about our feelings, negative as well as positive, and be heard non-judgmentally. Only as we can feel supported and cared for in our weaknesses as well as our strengths will we be able to transcend our hostilities and resentments and envy and competition and become peaceful people in our hearts and our daily lives. If you don't have someone to talk to, please find one! However isolated you feel yourself to be, a listening ear is available to you. There are friends in this congregation for you, if you will reach out with your need. There's your Minister, too. Your part is to say what you need, knowing that by doing so you'll contribute to a more peaceful world, one which is striving for wholeness.

And finally, men came to those meetings after the massacre to express their deep dissatisfaction with the way we are taught to relate to one another in our society. Surely we, as Unitarians respecting the worth and dignity of every person and the interdependent web of existence, can echo this dissatisfaction. More and more we seem to be absorbing an ethos of competition as a self-evident good. That first time I talked on this topic, I came down very hard on the idea of competition, suggesting that its aim is to put us in a “one-up” position relative to someone else or some other group or country, which I thought of as quite antithetical to peace. Maybe I’ve mellowed a bit since then – and it might have something to do with marrying a man who’s competitive to the core! – because I now tend to believe that competition is a whole lot more deeply-rooted in human nature than I once thought, and that, just like our anger, it needs to be acknowledged and channelled productively much more than it needs to be dismissed or put down or labelled bad. There are other aspects of humn nature that we need to take account of, too, if we’re to have a chance of ever achieving a peaceful world. Not only anger, and envy, and competition, but the biggie, aggressiveness.

Even if we can see the roots of anger and envy and competitiveness in a deprived childhood or a flawed upbringing, aggressiveness seems to be present to some extent in almost all human beings, even in close-to-ideal circumstances – even in some women, for gosh sakes! Just wishing it away is perilous, I think; it has to have acceptable outlets, even if they don’t look like the meek and mild behaviours that we sometimes confuse with peaceful. Acknowledging the existence of aggression as a human trait, accepting it as potentially a neutral, at least -- perhaps even positive -- characteristic, could be a step towards finding a peaceable balance for ourselves and the world.

I’ve never forgotten an experience I had four or five years ago which opened a small window of enlightenment for me. I was in England, as I am each summer, and visiting my sister who’s a part-time magistrate in juvenile court – she gets a half-day off from her teaching job each week to fulfill this civic duty – and she invited me to observe. One of the cases was of a teenage boy (about 15, I think), who’d been caught for the umpteenth time driving a stolen car at very high speed through the city, fortunately late at night when there wasn’t much other traffic, but still seriously endangering public safety – quite apart from the fact that it wasn’t his car and he didn’t have a licence. The easy part was finding him guilty. The almost impossible part was deciding how to deal with him.

I think the lad was sent to reform school, but I don’t remember very well because I was so caught up in the epiphany, the crystal-clear realization that something like this was going to happen again, as soon as he was free again, and probably over and over again, until he killed himself or someone else, or until the aging process took away his energy, or until some creative genius discovered a way of channelling that yearning for speed and power and machinery – none of which, surely, is intrinsically bad. How would you deal with it? ... How about giving him access to a racetrack, letting him learn from the fastest drivers there are, encouraging his yearnings rather than squelching them? Yes, I know all the flaws in that solution – but what can we do with competitiveness and aggression and the need to dominate? They exist, folks, and not only in mentally sick people of today, but in healthy people of history and prehistory, all over the world. They exist in us, each one of us, overtly in some, in others disguised as initiative, assertiveness, ability to manipulate, wish to control, passive agression, perhaps. They are not bad; they are human. As the classic Greek philosopher Socrates said, “In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep,” – that is, in the moments when we are most naturally ourselves.

One of my ministerial colleagues wrote recently about working with Myers-Briggs and other models which seek to understand the differences between people’s personality types. He said,

I have come to believe that violence is going to erupt when one subset of the collective human intelligence is allowed to dominate the others -- the thinkers talk so much the feelers can find no comfort zone, the feelers meditating and thinkers abstracting until the sensers have no place to present what they see and hear. Etc. Etc. All of this, of course, recognizing that Myers-Briggs was set up to help colleges to judge applicants and therefore leaves out those millions of kinesthetic beings, often known as men, who work in large muscle language and feel completely disrespected by the whole process. ...... [Our task is to manage] the tensions ........ [and to] encounter and learn from each other.

I am so prone, as perhaps you are, to fall into the same trap I think many world leaders have fallen into, as well as us little people – the trap of thinking that everything would be all right if only everyone were like us. Continually I have to remind myself to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, perhaps particularly those who see things so very differently from me. Continually I must remind myself that our task is to encounter and learn from each other, and to try to find our own balance – a unique but impermanent, tentative position, always open to being shaped by new knowledge and understanding and love.

Let me end with a story that I’ve told before. Like all the best stories, it bears retelling. It’s called “The Wolves Within” and I ask you to think of yourself as you listen to it, more than of George Bush or Saddam Hussein, or Colin Powell, or even the United Nations. Think of yourself.

A grandson told of his anger at a schoolmate who had done him an injustice. Grandfather said:

"I, too, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But, hate wears you down and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me: one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The grandfather solemnly replied, "The one I feed."

Let us strive for peace. Let us look into our hearts and May we be granted the wisdom to find the balance between acting for justice and tranquilly accepting the world as it is, the balance that will bring peace to our hearts. So may it be. Amen.