May 22, 2011
Reflection: “We are facing an age where the politics of the world must be carried out by each individual who repeats the words “May Peace Prevail On Earth” thus becomes a great force for realizing Peace in the world.”- Founder Masahisa Goi
The Peace Pole Project was started in Japan by Masahisa Goi (1916 – 1980), who dedicated his life to spreading the message, “May Peace Prevail on Earth”. The Unitarian Church of Staten Island, as a member of the Building Bridges Coalition, participates in the Peace Pole Project by installing the traveling Peace Pole during our Worship celebration. The Peace Pole will reside at the Unitarian Church of Staten Island from May 22nd till June 4th. The musical group, Brother Sun, who played during this service, also held a concert on May 22nd at 7 p.m.
Call To Community by Sally Jones, Co Chair of the Social Justice committee at the Unitarian Church of Staten Island
What do you think about when you think about a Pole? A May Pole? Dancing around a center with a stream of flowers celebrating the joy at the return of summer? Totem Poles carved by the first peoples to live in the Pacific Northwest, with the story of their families, history, and legends carved top to bottom? Or do you think of a Flag Pole? A Barber’s Pole? A utility pole? The North Pole? The South Pole?
How about a Peace Pole? In my travels across the country, I have happened on a Peace Pole here and there – in front of a museum, beside a church, in a town square. The words on the side of the pole that read in different languages “May Peace Prevail on Earth” made me feel a little more welcome and a little more open. I didn’t know anything about where they came from or who planted them.
The idea of the Peace Pole came from a man who was born in Japan in 1916 - Masahisa Goi. After the horrible destruction of World War II and the dropping of 2 atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Mr. Goi dedicated his life to teaching others about his vision for global peace through spirituality, meditation, and prayer. In 1955, he initiated an international Movement of Prayer for World Peace with the message “May Peace Prevail on Earth.” He died in Japan in 1980 but his movement continued. One way it continued was with the Peace Pole Project.
I read that there are 200,000 Peace Pole markers around the world, in every continent, in every country, in every conceivable language.
Planting a Peace Pole has come to mean that a community is putting down a marker to
· Symbolize the oneness of humanity and our common wish for a world at peace
· Remind us to think, speak and act in the spirit of peace and harmony
· Stand as a silent visual for peace to prevail on earth
Doesn’t this make you want to have a Peace Pole in our own community, here in Staten Island? Like so many places, we have suffered from violence, from glorifying violence, from a lack of understanding between religions, from being part of a nation at war. We are looking for change.
Today we fulfill this wish of putting down our own marker, our own silent pole, a reminder of our potential – a Peace Pole that is traveling around to 18 places of worship on Staten Island and will find its permanent home at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal on August 28th, 2 weeks before the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.
In this way we become part of a movement of healing that is long overdue and needs to deepen and grow in our own community here on Staten Island.
Chalice lighting Gandhi Peace Prayer led by Unitarian Church of Staten Island youth
Gandhi Peace Greeting
“I offer you peace.
I offer you friendship.
I offer you love.
I see your beauty.
I hear your needs.
I feel your feelings.
My wisdom comes from within and without.
I honor that wisdom in you.
Let us work together.”
Installation of the Peace Pole:
No matter what language we speak,
There is a desire for peace in the human heart.
This Peace Pole, a symbol of that yearning,
Written in eight languages—Arabic, English, Hebrew, Hindi,
Italian, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish,
The words, “May Peace Prevail on Earth”
Echo the deepest strivings of the religions of the world;
Indeed of all the people of the world.
As we install the Peace Pole,
We bring our greatest hopes for
Understanding and cooperation between the people
Of this church
and our Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist
brothers and sisters on Staten Island;
between those who have different customs and cultures;
those who immigrated from distant lands
and those who have lived here since birth
or came in recent years.
May the presence of this Peace Pole in this church
Renew our commitment to build the Beloved Community
And to grow the spirit of peace within our hearts,
This church family and all the communities of Staten Island.
Will our youth please come forward and install the Peace Pole?
Installation of the Peace Pole
Closing Prayer to the Installation Ceremony
Spirit of Life, God of many names,
We take a moment to rest in
The peace and quiet of this sanctuary.
To realize how we are connected in this world
To those who worship in temples, cathedrals, mosques,
Or sanctuaries,
In homes, nature, lodges, under the open skies.
We are human beings, capable of great love and compassion,
Who also forget our common birthright
In the flash it takes to lash out, to wound, to scar.
Today as we join together for worship,
We are filled with the hope and joy
Born of the one earth we share and
The fragile lives of all beings entrusted to our care.
Spirit of life and love,
Let the words on this Peace Pole
Be our prayer, our mantra,
Our invocation—during these next two weeks
And for the duration of our time upon this Earth.
We lift our prayers for world peace in the languages on this Peace Pole:
hu ping (heping), mir, Peace, Paz, Pace, Salaam, Shalom, Shanthi.
May Peace Prevail on Earth
© Rev. Susan Karlson
May 22, 2011
It’s good to have you join us today. It could have been a lonely place here if you all were swept up in the Rapture or maybe the pews would have been full —who knows.
Yesterday, Sally Jones, the social justice co chair, and I attended mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel at the invitation of their new priest, Father Liam O’Doherty. Father Liam described a chat he and I had at our monthly Staten Island Clergy Leadership meeting where we were planning how we would transfer the Peace Pole from his church to ours during the mass. Another clergy member asked when and where we would be meeting. When Father Liam told him the mass was at 5 pm on Saturday the 21st at Our Lady of Good Counsel and it would last about an hour he told us that we were in the worst possible place at that hour on that date—for when the earthquake strikes that signals the beginning of the end, and the last place you want to be is at a church or any kind of house of worship. Well, we made it and so did you!
Today is a joyful day—installing this Peace Pole is a huge passage for us. It signals that we are part of a wider community here on Staten Island, that we are not alone even though we may feel very different at times than other faith groups.
When I first came to Staten Island, some of my clergy colleagues on Staten Island suggested I join the Building Bridges Coalition, an interfaith group that many of them had already joined.
The Building Bridges Coalition was formed in 2003 to promote dialogue and foster greater understanding and peace among the various faith communities on Staten Island. The Unitarian Church of Staten Island has been involved with Building Bridges since fall of 2008 after I learned about the Coalition. That first year a number of members went to the Thanksgiving service, some people singing in the interfaith choir. The choir did a moving rendition of Spirit of Life at the suggestion of one of our members. It was an incredible worship service with phenomenal music, readings and prayers representative of the various faiths.
Several of our members have been active the last two years on the Youth Unity Project which is open to all youth from grades 6 to 12 who want to submit posters, art, dvd’s, poems or essays on the chosen theme. Carol Lodato and I have served as judges for the contest. Since 2010, Building Bridges has partnered with the Temple of Understanding, a United Nations non- governmental organization for high school students working on completing Interfaith Dialogue and Education Action training (acronym, IDEA). The awards were given recently to winning entries and everyone received acknowledgment.
Besides the Youth Unity Project and the Thanksgiving worship service Building Bridges sponsors an interfaith Seder in March or April and a Respecting Differences Program where participants walk to two or three different houses of worship with events planned at each location.
This past year, the Board voted to become an official partner of the Building Bridges Coalition. The Building Bridges website has a link to our website and we now have a link to theirs. Our participation in the Peace Pole Project is the first event we’ve participated in as a church and so, this will mark a significant moment in our church history. I hope that many of you can join me for the Building Bridges walk on Sunday, August 28th from St. Peter’s Catholic Church to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal where this Peace Pole will be permanently installed, as Sally said, just two weeks before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
There are many aspects of ministry that I love—one is the personal relationships built over the course of a person or family’s life cycle-- the weddings, child dedications, blessings and celebrations of life we hold as a religious community. Interfaith work is another aspect that I find deeply significant. For all that we stand for and signify as a singular faith community, our strength lies in the connections we forge with others; what we can do when we come together to promote peace and healing and recognize in those outside our walls, a kindred spirit.
This congregation is filled to overflowing with people that do good work out in the community. I have never seen so many people in one church who do such viable and much needed community work. We are teachers, actors, playwrights, therapists, community organizers entrusted with the care, nurture and protection of our children and seniors, slogging away day after day at healing abusive relationships, correcting inequities in employment and caring for the most vulnerable and forsaken.
Making peace is not only about global concerns. Peacemaking is righting those relationships that have gone sour. It’s reconciling when we’ve slighted someone or made unfair assumptions or have regrets too big for our hearts and conscience to hold. It’s doing the work of “Building Bridges” of mutual trust and understanding, moving past the stereotypes about someone from a certain religion, culture, race, or ethnicity. It is expressed by this Peace Pole with its eight different languages and the vision of Masahisa Goi who could not bear to be passive in this world of the atom bomb. It’s the look in Father Liam’s eyes when he shared that about fifty of the people he buried during his ministry in Nagasaki in the 1980s. These were people whose cancer and leukemia deaths were the delayed result of nuclear exposure after the 1945 bomb.
This Peace Pole is a symbol of our commitment to peace—peace inside, peace amongst all the beings that share this earth, peace within our families where our peace-able-ness is sometimes most tested.
Peace is a small word in most languages—huping, mir, pace, paz, peace, salaam, shalom, or shanthi. So often it is just a cliché –like the perfect answer for a beauty pageant contestant –“I believe in world peace.” Your dedication of this Peace Pole is not a cliché. It represents an integral part of living your faith. Your faith is not placed in the reward of Rapture but in the everyday healing acts that you perform, believing that you are, in frequent, small, often-unheralded ways, making peace on Earth. You will prevail in those efforts. The keynote speaker at the Metro New York annual meeting, the Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed, told us that we could have absolute confidence in this statement made by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker before him, when they said that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. Peace will prevail on earth.
May you continue to find the courage and the resolve to repeat this meditation, this prayer during your waking life. May Peace Prevail on Earth. May Peace Prevail on Earth. May Peace Prevail on Earth.
The word Amen often signifies a blessing or means “so be it”. So be it—may peace prevail on earth. Could I hear an Amen?
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