The title of this reflection came to me from an internet discussion among Unitarian Ministers; the discussion was initiated by one of my colleagues who had become intrigued by these words which are found in several sacred texts and have more or less entered our verbal heritage, "The Peace that Passes Understanding." My colleague asked, "Do these words reflect a sense that we have to give up or overcome our understanding or reason in order to find peace?"

The peace that passes understanding. It seemed to me worthwhile for us to reflect on that question this morning, at the beginning of a year in which we all hope deeply for a lessening of the world's hostilities as well as for peace in our own hearts. And, as happens quite often, I found that I was mixed up about the exact wording of the title - had I written it as "Peace that Passes Understanding" or "The Peace that Passes Understanding" - as one definite quality, applicable to everyone, or as something that might be more open to our Unitarian individualistic outlook, different for every person?

Turns out that the newsletter says the indefinite kind of peace, leaving it wide open for me to explore with you, without rejecting the possibility that perhaps there is something special and unique that's meant by the phrase when it's used in poetry and other sacred writings. I want to stay open to that possibility, but on the other hand I want to suggest something that might seem rather ordinary and unpoetic - that the "peace which passes understanding" may not be very different from what we call "happiness" or contentment -- an acceptance of things as they are, an enjoyment of things as they are, of the world as it is. One of the responses to my colleague's question on the Internet was this:

I thought of the peace that arises in a group when each speaks from the heart and is deeply listened to by the rest of the group. For instance, the . . . process, where each [person] speaks . . . what their present truth is and there is no cross-talk . . . just a reception of that person's offering. We do not try to change a person's mind, or win a debate. We allow for the possibility of a new reality to emerge, a tapestry, if you will . . . for me this . . . is the "peace that passes understanding".

It took a while for me to see the link here, between listening to one another and being at peace, but eventually I saw the connection as acceptance - not struggling to change a person or a circumstance, but rather accepting it, peacefully.

I can already hear some of you saying, "But just accepting the way things are isn't peace; it's passivity, or even stagnation. It might be the absence of war, but that's just vegetating -- it's certainly not 'the peace that passes understanding'!" And I'm inclined to agree - except that I'm drawn to some crucial words from the piece I just read, "We allow for the possibility of a new reality to emerge . . . " Have you ever heard the phrase "active listening"? As any of you can testify if you've tried to learn it, and to do it, it's a challenging skill, truly at the opposite end of the spectrum from passivity. The temptation is always to respond with words or actions rather than to attend, to hear, to understand, to allow the possibility of a new reality to emerge.

This is rather a mystical thought, isn't it - that when we're listening to one another, attending to each other, being present with each other, something may happen, a new reality emerge, a more peaceful reality? It goes beyond logic and rationality, towards something that passes, or overtakes, understanding. And I think it depends on a central, core conviction, a Universalist conviction, that the world at its heart is friendly and good, rather than hostile and bad - that the world can be trusted, in fact. Listen to these words from a man who was dying of cancer as he wrote, and who died shortly afterwards - Dan O'Neal in 1996:

Thanks for this, a day in my life. Thanks for the stars, the earth. Thanks for the illness, the cancer. Thanks for death, which makes life so precious and so vibrantly alive. Thanks for it all, no exceptions. And with this final Thanks, we already control the entire world. We become friends with all human and other things. We become large and good. We become it all. Nothing left out. Escrow closed. Deal done. Amen.

I think that could only have been written by someone with a deep faith and trust in the goodness of the universe - something totally unprovable, undemonstrable, something which passes understanding and yet is, for the person concerned, as real as their own being.

And it leads back to what I suggested a few moments ago, that peace and happiness may be intimately related. You and I can repeat till we're blue in the face that the universe is friendly and good, but unless it's experienced that way by whoever's listening, we're spitting into the wind or talking to a brick wall. It may be this simple: the best thing we can do for peace, in the world and in our own hearts, is to find happiness ourselves and help bring it to others. Happy people are good people, peaceful people! (As I wrote that sentence, which some of you have heard me say in recent conversations, I realized that that's the core of what I need to express to you today. It's so simple, even trite, and yet I think it's a profound truth, one which goes beyond rational understanding. It's a condensation, or concentration, of the words of Howard Thurman which have become one of my personal mantras: "Don't ask what the world needs; ask what makes you come alive, and do it. The world needs people who have come alive."

Let me tell you a story. At the end of 1989, I was working in a good and secure and quite well-paying job, one which had even been interesting and engaging to me for the first few years. For various reasons, having to do with bureaucracy and also with my personal, non-professional life, I had been finding less and less joy in my work and because of this could feel myself becoming less and less good at it - less helpful to the people I was supposed to be serving and to my colleagues. I eventually decided to resign and look for what would make me come alive again - which turned out to be UU Ministry! That move didn't bring me money, or security, or success in the usual sense, but it has helped to bring me happiness, and peace of mind - a peace which passes understanding. When I was in the later stages of that office job, my unhappiness was making me a rather angry and joyless person; when I came back to life again, all kinds of loving and peaceful potential was released. The "pursuit of happiness" is not, I suggest to you, selfish in the destructive sense; it's the prerequisite of peace. I think this is the way peace happens - not that we persuade angry people to stop their warfare, but that we find ways to lessen anger.

In case you think I'm being hopelessly unrealistic and Pollyanna-like in suggesting that peace in the world is just a question of spreading happiness, here's something which might carry more weight because of its source. I found it, naturally, on the Internet.

Dr. Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in his lecture at the University of Puerto Rico last June, 2001, shared the following story:

"I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.

One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father asked me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced.

When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, 'I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together.' After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00. He anxiously asked me, 'Why were you late?'

I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, 'The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait,' not realizing that he had already called the garage. When he caught me in the lie, he said:

'There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk [the 18 miles home] and think about it.'

So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered. I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again.

I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me [conventionally] . . . whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday."

Perhaps I'm pushing my point rather far in using this story to illustrate the connection between happiness and peacefulness, but I ask you to keep this in mind, as a possibility at least: as Gandhi's grandson discovered, punishing children or adults, whether by spanking them or dropping bombs on them, is highly unlikely to influence them for the good, but caring about their state of mind and being, even if painful, can be radically effective. (I say this as a parent (and a person) who has come to this conviction much later in life than I now wish I had.)

Someone tells how two men were arguing loudly in a Hong Kong street. An American, who observed the argument, but couldn't speak the language, asked an Asian friend what they were arguing about.

"They are having a discussion about the ownership of a boat," came the reply.

"They're getting so wrought up, won't they start fighting soon?" the tourist asked.

"No," his friend said. "These men will not start fighting because each one knows the man who strikes the first blow admits his ideas just gave out."

It's true, says the teller of this anecdote. Those individuals and societies who are quick to violence admit their ideas just gave out. And if they genuinely try to care about people, even their enemies, then when they strike the first blow they also admit their love just gave out.

All this places the source of peace, even the peace which passes understanding, in a happy and loving heart; and so we come back to my thesis that what is most crucial for bringing about peace in the world is finding happiness, coming alive, following our bliss, or however else you might express the state of being that has been called "flow," or the kingdom of heaven. If you're not happy, don't try to cover it up or ignore it. Try to find out how you can be happy - and even if your unhappiness comes from a great sorrow, it can be transformed. As an elusive author has written,

It doesn't matter too much if the story you are telling me is true: it matters if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty every day, and if you can fill your life from God's presence;

It matters if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake, and shout to the silver sliver of a moon, "YES!"

It doesn't matter too much where or what or with whom you've studied: it matters whether you are sustained from the inside when all else falls away; it matters if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

I suppose that all I've done with these musings, so far, is to flip around the old adage that we, and the world, need to be good in order to be happy. Is it any more helpful to say we, and everyone, need to be happy in order to be good, or peaceful? Only, perhaps, if it somehow liberates us, or gives us permission, to follow our bliss, to do what we know we need to do to come alive, however out of step with our own or others' conventions that may seem. I told you earlier that I began to come alive again when I made a big change in my life. But like the Velveteen Rabbit becoming real it didn't happen all at once, and it hasn't happened completely -- probably never will. Peacemaking is a process, a way of life, not an event or an achievement.

In 1991, when I was completing some courses at Divinity School, I was still experiencing deep sorrow and feelings of failure -- in relationships particularly - feelings that weren't at all conducive to joy and peace, although the anger and bitterness were slowly diminishing. A wise and wonderful professor in a course on Ministerial Authority, of all things, gave me a reading which I found more than helpful - transformative - and I've passed it on to as many people as I could in the years since, when they seemed to need it. I'm going to end my reflection by sharing it with you now, in the hope that it may help some one among you to move from feelings of desperate insufficiency towards the peace which passes understanding and which can transform the world. It's oriented very much to a certain situation of women, but I believe its core is universal and I call on you to make the appropriate translations to your particular world. It's called, YOU ARE ENOUGH, and it's by Rosemary Haughton.

It is not enough, said her father, that you get all A's each quarter, play Mozart and dance. YOU MUST COME HOME ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT.

It is not enough, said her mother, that you smile at Auntie Lockwood, take cookies to the neighbours, and keep quiet while I am napping. YOU MUST CURE MY ASTHMA.

It is not enough, said her husband, that you write letters to my parents, fix pumpkin pie, and forget your name was Bauer. YOU MUST ALWAYS . . . YOU MUST NEVER . . .

It is not enough, said her children, that you make us brownies, tend our friends and puppies, buy us Nike tennies. YOU MUST LET US KILL YOU.

It is not enough, said her pastor, that you teach the second grade, change the cloth and candles, kneel prostrate at the altar. AS LONG AS THERE ARE STARVING CHILDREN IN THE WORLD YOU MUST NOT EAT WITHOUT GUILT.

It is not enough, said her counsellor, that you integrate your childhood, struggle with demons, leave when time is up. YOU MUST STOP CRYING, CLARIFY YOUR POETIC SYMBOLS, AND NOT FEEL THAT YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH.

"I give up," she said. "I am not enough," and she lay down into the deep blue pocket of night to wait for death. She waited and finally her heart exploded, her breathing stopped. They came with a stretcher, took her clothes off, covered her with linen and went away and left her locked in the deep blue pocket tomb.

A voice said,

"YOU ARE ENOUGH: NAKED, CRYING, BLEEDING, NAMELESS, SINFUL. YOU ARE ENOUGH."

And on the third day she sat up and asked for milk and crackers, took a ritual bath, dressed herself with wings, . . . and flew away.

May you find, in this new year, a revival of the spirit which will help to transform the world. And may the peace which passes understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of truth, and of all that is well and good.