"From Achilles' Mother to The Crises in Kosovo"
A Mothers Day Sermon
by Charles Blustein Ortman
May 9, 1999

The idea that war and violence are a natural and divinely endowed element of the human character is as old as the gods themselves. In Ancient Greece, the gods and the goddesses were continually at odds with one another. Insults, misunderstandings and high jinks often set the scene for ensuing warfare. Greater and lesser members of the pantheon plotted with and against each other to win power and revenge.

In one such story, the matriarch of Athens, the goddess Athena, lost a beauty contest to Helen of Troy. Athena sought to avenge her insult by enlisting the services of her Goddess-Son, Achilles. Achilles actual mother was the nymph, Thetis, whom you may remember as having dunked Achilles into the River Styx to make him immortal; the river shielded him from harm everywhere except on the heal that his mother held as she dunked him under.

His heel, that was his vulnerable spot. It would eventually, of course, provide for his downfall in a war that he could not win. Until then though, Achilles had nothing to lose and so was totally dedicated to the act of killing. The chief heroes in the story, Achilles and Hector, (Hector was Helen's champion) were both destined to have a premature and violent death. But the story attributes to them a large measure of grandeur because of their code of honor and their defiance of death.

Like the immortal spirits, the human mothers of Athens also embraced the grandeur and the romanticism of combat. "With your shield or on it," was the common farewell as Athenian women sent their sons off to Troy or to any of the many conflicts that fill the pages of the history of that ancient era.

We can go back much further in time than Ancient Greece. In the creation and origin stories of many peoples, mythologies are filled with divine ordination and glorification of war. From the earliest histories we find religious affirmation and zeal for a reliance on violence. In the Judeo-Christian story, we are informed that evil and violence are a part of our nature as a result of the Fall in the Garden. In the Book of Exodus we find a developing propensity for divinely decreed combat. It was the Jehovah-prescribed destiny of the Children of Israel to smite any of the heathens who hindered their journey to the Promised Land.

These kinds of stories come from all over the world. They are stories that ascribe divine affirmation and justification to violence as a legitimate response of a people, any people, in furthering the self-perceived righteousness of their cause, or in attaining their manifest destiny.

The claim that violence and war have always been, the way things are, is well grounded historically. From prehistoric times, this is the way things have so often been accomplished. The claim that this is the way things must always be though, while maybe grounded in history, is not grounded in a vision of the future that can sustain survival.

Before going on, I'd like to briefly comment on the relationship of today's theme with this holiday on which we honor mothers. I want you to know that I have a mother, and that I know many other mothers. Mothers are my friends. I love them dearly. I'm not here to attack the institution of motherhood, or of parenthood.

What I hope we might do is come to recognize that, if we perceive violence to be such an integral part of our history, our culture and our way of being in the world, we might do well to recognize the mythologies that have encouraged us to believe and to act as though violence is our god-given right and nature. By mothers and fathers throughout time, acquiescence to the inevitability of violence has been passed on from generation to generation. Perhaps it's time we create new mythologies or new understandings that can better help us, and the generations to come, in order to survive the possibilities of global destruction in which we have immersed ourselves.

As a world culture, we have chosen violence as a viable alternative over other means of conflict resolution. Though it has become interwoven into the fabric of human relations, it is not a viable alternative. It is simply not viable.

This tendency toward violence itself, may prove to be our Achilles heel, the vulnerable and tragic flaw that might in the end lead to our human demise. To survive, we will need to recreate a way of being in the world. We will need to find a way to make new decisions, if there are to be ongoing future generations.

The legacy of Achilles' mother now provides the images for our large screen TV's, and fills the pages of our daily newspapers. Currently the datelines are from Littleton, CO, from Kosovo and from Iraq. It's all a part of the same thing.

Some of you may have read my letter in this month's issue of the Gazette. In it, I commented on how, a couple of weeks ago, as I watched the footage coming out of Littleton, it was occasionally interspersed with other footage from Yugoslavia. Back and forth, images on the screen alternated between now familiar visions of terrified high school students running in panic with their arms waving in the air, to scenes of buildings destroyed by Cruise missiles with mangled bodies being carried out on stretchers into the night. The similarities and the contrasts of the two stories were striking.

The cruelest similarity was the devastation wrought as lives and communities were shattered by violence.

The contrast was evident in the way the stories were being presented by the newscasters. Their framing of the events, as I fear is often the case, reflects the sentiment of much of the nation. In Colorado reporters accounted for the violence as an isolated enigma, a case of aberrant and inexplicable insanity. But in Kosovo, they portrayed the inevitability, the necessity and the legitimacy of the violence in order to promote the agenda of a New World Order.

In both Colorado and in Kosovo the struggle for life was tragically overcome by the arcane belief that force is evidence of righteousness. Many of us argue that military action is not only justified in Yugoslavia, but required in order to protect the innocent. Many of us too, question what is wrong with today's youth that they would resort to the use of semi-automatic assault weapons and bombs in a sick and misguided expression of alienation, frustration and despair. Many of us though, fail to recognize the connection: that children learn what they see and not necessarily what they are told.

Violence always begets violence; never peace. How will our children learn ways of peace when we continually rely upon war in response to questions that demand an answer that includes life? Only when we have studied peace well enough to claim it as our path will we be able to answer the question, "When and where will this sort of thing happen again?" with a resounding‹never, never again!

For the past two weeks, the newspapers and TV's have been filled with a quest to find the cause for what happened in Littleton. Television, computer games, movies, music, misdirected alienation of youth, absentee parents and easily obtainable weaponry all play a part in this tragic story. These are all issues that require very serious address. But these are not the causes; they are the symptoms of a culture which refuses to wean itself from a dependence upon violence and force.

In 1946 Albert Einstein warned, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." A few years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. added, "If we assume that life is worth living and that [humanity] has the right to survival, then we must find an alternative to war."

We will soon surpass the time allotted us on the learning curve. We've grown too clever in our technologies of violence. Our intolerance no longer wreaks havoc, death and grief in only a local vicinity, which would be bad enough. It is leading us in a direction of planetary destruction. Everything, except our modes of thinking has changed, and we are drifting toward unparalleled disaster.

It's time we change those ways of thinking. It's time we realize on a personal level that violence can only bring harm to ourselves and those around us; it can not further our cause. It's time we recognize on an international level that violence, committed in our names, as is currently taking place, can only kill and destroy; it unravels the fabric of the principles, freedom and justice for all, we would uphold.

Perhaps there was a time when we could consider the legitimacy of a justified violence. If there ever was such a day though, and I'm not sure there was, it has passed. The world has grown too small, and in its smallness, too vulnerable, too much at risk, to tolerate the ever escalating cycle of violence that leads to ultimate death.

Children killing children becomes part of our milieu, and then we find that we have even more children killing children. A violent response to the tyrannical violence in Iraq and in Serbia, doesn't end those atrocities, it perpetuates them. And then we have more Iraqs and more Serbias, and still more children killing children. Eventually, perhaps one of the smaller nations in the world is backed into a corner, and seeing no other recourse in its desperate attempts to win at the unwinnable game of violent retaliation, pushes the button and launches a nuclear Armageddon. Then there are no more children to worry about.

The United States is the country that brought us the nuclear bomb. We must now find a way to become the nation that begins to create a lasting peace. It won't work in the style of Pax Romana. We can't enforce peace; it's something we have to offer.

For all of history, up to this moment, the human race has relied upon might to answer questions of integrity. We have mistakenly studied war to answer questions that can be resolved only through lessons in love, understanding and peace. Violence has perpetuated violence. Isn't it time to study peace, so that we might see if it, too, has a chance of escalating. It's not a new idea, only one that has never been given a full chance.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the earliest Universalists, was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He believed that Universalism was the best agent to establish political and religious equality in the new land. He saw a harmonious combination of the spiritual and the worldly. Benjamin Rush translated his Universalist theology into a proposal for an "Office of Promoting and Preserving Perpetual Peace in Our Country" as part of the United States Constitution? You'll note that it was not adopted by our founding fathers, but listen to his proposal from 1787:

Let a Secretary of the Peace be appointed to preside in this office, who shall be perfectly free from all the present and absurd, vulgar European prejudices upon the subject of government; let him be a genuine republican and a sincere Christian; for the principles of republicanism and Christianity are no less friendly to the universal and equal liberty.

To inspire a veneration for human life, and a horror at the shedding of human blood, let all those laws be repealed which authorize judges, juries, sheriffs, or hangmen to assume the resentments of individuals and to commit murder in cold blood in any case whatever. Until this reformation in our code of penal jurisprudence takes place, it will be in vain to attempt to introduce universal and perpetual peace in our country.

To subdue that passion for war, which education, added to human depravity, have made universal, a familiarity with the instruments of death, as well as all military shows, should be carefully avoided. For which reason, militia laws should everywhere be repealed, and military dress and military titles shall be laid aside; reviews tend to lessen the horrors of a battle by connecting them with the charms of order; militia laws generate idleness and vice and thereby produce the wars they are said to prevent; military dresses fascinate the minds of young men and lead them from serious and useful professions; were there no uniforms there would probably be no armies; lastly, military titles feed vanity and keep up ideas in the mind which lessen a sense of the folly and miseries of war.

In the last place let a large room, adjoining the federal hall, be appropriated for transacting the business and preserving all the records of this office. Over the door of this room let there be a sign, on which the figures of a LAMB, a DOVE, and an OLIVE BRANCH are painted, together with the following inscriptions in letters of gold:
PEACE ON EARTH-GOOD WILL TO MAN. AH! WHY WILL MEN FORGET THAT THEY ARE BRETHREN?

May we find that peaceful path and on it learn to walk humbly with one another and in the presence of goodness as we seek to find our way.