“The Princess and the Pea: The Spirit and the Peace”
A Sermon for February Focus Month: Peace and Justice
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
February 3, 2008
READINGS:
Our first reading is from the Tao Te Ching (Dow-De-Ching), by Lao Tzu, Chapter 54; translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English:
What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honored from generation to generation.
Cultivate Virtue in yourself,
And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family,
And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village,
And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation,
And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe,
And Virtue will be everywhere.
Therefore look at the body as body;
Look at the family as family;
Look at the village as village;
Look at the nation as nation;
Look at the universe as universe.
How do I know the universe is like this?
By looking!
The second reading is from The Nobel Prize Lecture, given on December 11, 1989 by the Dali Lama:
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.
When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities, and so on. When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. And there are ways in which we can consciously work to develop feelings of love and kindness. For some of us, the most effective way to do so is through religious practice. For others it may be non-religious practices.
What is important is that we each make a sincere effort to take our responsibility for each other and for the natural environment we live in seriously.
SERMON:
Several years ago I had a group of friends that got together regularly to explore the meanings of myths, fairytales and dreams. There’s really much more in common among them than the casual observer might notice. Mythologist Robert A. Johnson holds that in each of them, the apparent veracity, or lack of it, in no way impinges upon the deeper, more significant inner truths found in the symbolism of the narrative. The myth, the fairytale, or the dream, “…may be a fantasy or a product of imagination, but it is nonetheless true and real. It depicts levels of reality that include the outer rational world as well as the less understood inner world.”
Just because the children have already left the service doesn’t mean that we can’t still enjoy a good fairytale. “The Princess and the Pea,” is a good one. It actually comes out of the folklore of Denmark, where it lived in the oral tradition for generations and was eventually published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1835. Of course you already know the story, but just so we can remember it together…
Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to find a princess, but she would have to be a real princess. So he traveled all around the world to find one, but there was always something wrong. There were princesses enough, but he could never be sure that they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not quite right. So he came home again and was sad, for he so much wanted to have a real princess.
One evening there was a terrible storm. There was thunder and lightening! The rain poured down! It was horrible! Then there was a knock at the city gate, and the old king went out to open it. A princess was standing outside. But my goodness, how she looked from the rain and the weather! Water ran down from her hair and her clothes. It ran into the toes of her shoes and out at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.
"Well, we shall soon find that out," thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the bedroom, took off all the bedding and laid a pea on the bottom of the bed. Then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty featherbeds of eiderdown on top of the mattresses. That was where the princess was to sleep for the night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.
"Oh, horribly!" she said. "I hardly closed my eyes all night. Goodness knows what there was in the bed! I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It is horrible!"
Now they could see that she was a real princess, because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty featherbeds. Nobody but a real princess could be that sensitive.
So the prince took her for his wife, because now he knew that he had a real princess. And the pea was put in the art gallery where it can still be seen, unless someone has taken it. Now see, that was a real story!
As I began to think about our approach to February Focus Month and revisiting the theme of Peace and Justice, I wanted to be sure that we would ground our exploration within a spiritual framework. Too often, I think, in this age of information, we get overly caught up in things we know or think we should know, and we spend precious little time focusing on our inner lives and on things we believe. If we were really to believe the things we often lay claim to, I suspect that peace and justice would not need to be issues that we would even have to discuss. Instead, they would be part of the realities of our lives – inner and outer realities – much like language, literature, art and other cultural pursuits and expressions that we fluidly share.
One might ask, as someone that I spoke with this week did, "Why were people more concerned with finding out whether she was a real princess rather than trying to find out what had actually happened to her and helping her? Why didn't anyone question the Queen's decision to ‘test’ the princess –wasn't it further traumatizing someone who had already been through enough?" "Why wasn't anyone's first question – what happened to her?" Why didn’t anyone say to her, ‘Are you ok?’”
I would hope that if these events happened in real life, these would be the questions we’d want answered. But the fairytale invites us to experience the story as our own inner story, about our own psychological and spiritual development. So, what might be the significance of the Princess and the Pea for us? Here is how I see the symbolism of the story lighting the way to a better understanding of our part in the creation of peace and justice – it draws us into the conflict because peace can never be true, be real, if it seeks to be about the absence of conflict.
Usually in myths and fairytales, when there is a prince in search of a princess – or a princess in search of a prince – the story isn’t really about royal lineage or ascendancy. And as far as any prince looking for a prince or a princess looking for a princess, it casts no aspersions but it’s not really about that either. It’s not at heart a story about romance at all. It’s about each of us, and about our search to find that complimentary fulfillment of who we are as a complete person. One prince plus one princess equals one complete person. If the addition were made simply, without a struggle, a journey or some kind of major challenge in which failure is a very real possibility, well…it wouldn’t be much of a story. And so it really wouldn’t have much significance in helping us to navigate our lives.
The prince in this story is looking for a true princess, worthy of his own best self, as well as challenging him to indeed be his own best self. He travels all around the world, not as an egotist, but as one in search of achieving excellence and fulfillment in his life. He searches and searches until there is no place else to look. And then in frustration, he comes back home. This is another huge mythological theme, found not only in The Wizard of Oz. If we want to find out something important to our lives, we’re eventually likely to find it right at home. But the truth is that we’re not very likely to recognize it unless we’ve learned an awful lot about the world, by being in and connected to the world. Figuratively, simply staying at home is about being naïve. The search and the journey are about hard knocks and disillusionment of shallow perspectives in order to open the way in our lives for greater experience, meaning and understanding.
The prince encounters the world, finds plenty in it, but not what he thinks he’s looking for. So he comes home, only to have the princess show up soon after. She arrives at his door in the midst of a storm. The storm is no accident either, as the road to deeper truth is often climated by a stormy journey. If it wasn’t for the turbulent struggle, we’d never let go of our smaller, more convenient truths.
So the princess shows up, soaking wet and looking pretty scrungy from being out in all the weather, maybe a bit like one of the drowned rats from the Pied Piper story. And she claims that she is a real princess.
“We shall find out,” says the queen who goes on to produce a test, which, oh by the way, would be impossible for anyone to pass – one tiny pea under twenty mattresses and another twenty featherbeds of eiderdown. Parents always want to protect their children; at least good mythological parents do. The queen doesn’t have to represent a real mother, but could be our own internal parent who wants to protect our internal child. Protect from what? From imposters and other dangers, yes, but also, if the parent is honest, even protecting the child from growing up. The odds of the child maturing, exceeding the parent and attaining fulfillment are nearly impossible. And yet that’s the child’s job – to overcome the impossible. And wonder of wonders, the princess doesn’t fail the test; she passes it. She doesn’t sleep a wink.
We might think of the pea under all that insulation as a kernel of truth. Because the princess is a true princess, no amount of insulation in the world could allow her to deny the truth of that kernel. Because she is a true princess, she is unable to close her eyes on it, unable to take any comfort in denying it, unable to keep it’s hardness from banging her black and blue, through the night.
She is a princess true and true. And so they are married; oneness is accomplished. Now that was a real story. I can’t really speak about whether or not the pea might have found its way to an art gallery. What I suspect is that the pea, the kernel of truth that makes each of us real, goes to bed with each of us every night. And, though perhaps more disguised in the light of day, it is with us still in each waking hour of our day to day lives.
What does all of this have to do with our theme of peace and justice? I suspect it has just about everything to do with it, that is, if indeed we hold peace and justice as high ideals that we aspire to. The kernel of truth, the pea under our mattresses, could represent any high ideal for which we strive. So for today, the pea is peace.
Each of us then could be seen as a prince of peace…in search of the truth of peace – peace in our lives and in our world. The search for that truth, the integrity required if our journeys are to be true to it, belongs to each of us.
No matter how long any of us has been around, we’ve all been around long enough to know that the search for peace is no easy quest. At least that’s true if our quest for peace is not a naïve and shallow endeavor, if we’ve been willing to recognize that just saying something is so doesn’t make it so. Our president standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier claiming victory and the onset of peace comes to mind. Naïve? Shallow?
In the story there were plenty of princesses, but the prince could never be sure they were real ones. The search for peace is much the same. There are many ways of having peace, but few experiences of the real thing. Pax Romana comes to mind. It was the peace enforced by the Roman Empire on its subject nations. That produced a kind of peace but how true was it? Instead of true peace, it was more of a threat.
The modern day manifestation of that kind of peace can be found in the Bush doctrine of threatening and attacking those whose world view does not conform to the world view of American hegemony. I would even dare to say Halliburton hegemony. It might ostensibly be about peace, but in truth it’s about defense – defending a privileged way of life that is increasingly at risk.
There are personal kinds of peace that are similarly suspicious. Often, they too are types of denial in which folks choose to live in their heads with a self-imposed, limited vision of their surroundings instead of living in their hearts, more fully connected to their own lives, to those around them and to the world. Religious fanaticism that ranges from all kinds of orthodoxies to many brands of New Age spiritualism are often embraced by those who would insulate themselves from the hardness of that kernel of truth.
A little closer to home, perhaps for some of us here, might be the kind of insulation that comes from our culture of consumerism. If we can work hard enough, earn enough money, we are assured that we can purchase a sort of peace that we can afford, and perhaps for a while, sleep very comfortably – thank you very much. Naïve? Shallow? Dangerous?
Still, the kernel of truth calls us. Under it all, we know that if there is going to be peace in our world, that peace must begin with each of us. We can’t accomplish that by being naïve or shallow. We can’t accomplish that by denying the realities of our lives or of the world around us. The kernel of truth calls us to be restless in our efforts to come to terms with the realities of our lives and of our world, holding the pieces together, transcending the struggle and the pain, embracing the hole.
The Dalai Lama wrote, “Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.”
If there is to be peace and justice in the world, it will be because each of us has decided to wed ourselves to the ideal of peace and justice in our own lives. Retired Unitarian Universalist minister and social justice activist, Richard Gilbert, tells a story about Manuel Lubian, who is a Mexico City taxi driver. Manuel refused a reward after spending two days hunting down a passenger who had left $53,000 in his cab. Explaining why he didn't just keep the money, he said, "I felt that I would lose the beauty inside of me."
There is beauty inside each of us, my friends. The story of Manuel Lubian speaks to us of peace and justice. It speaks of love for the other that grows out of love for one’s self.
Feminist theologian Carter Heyward speaks of love as a kind of truth that we ought not to deny. In her book, Passion for Justice, she writes:
“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relations with one's friends and enemies.
“Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.
“For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love." Love is a choice – not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity – a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.”
As we go into this month’s focus on peace and justice, it seems this is a good place for us to begin, with the thought that peace and justice are the products of a hard won, hard earned love. And we might remember that love, like the pea buried so deep beneath the mattresses, love is pursuit that takes us into, as well as out of, ourselves. However difficult the journey might be, we are each called to be aware of life, to be a prince of peace, and to be worthy of our own best self. If the journey were too easy, it wouldn’t be worth the investment of our lifetimes. And in the end, it is not by ourselves that we are fulfilled. It is by love that we are made more whole.
Now you see, isn’t this a story that is real! It is possible to live in peace…with justice
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