Belonging Our Way to Peace | PASSAGES :002
“Where there is One, that One is me; where there are many, all are me.”
Last weekend my wife Cherie and I attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Milwaukee’s gorgeous Bradley Symphony Center with my parents and my brother and sister-in-law. This eighteenth century musical masterpiece is a Christmas tradition in my family. I grew up with my dad blasting the multiple-CD album, especially the “Hallelujah Chorus,” in the days leading up to Christmas (even though that’s really an Easter song!). And my dad grew up listening to his dad rock out to the vinyl version. In college, Cherie and I joined a choir along with a bunch of friends and performed the Messiah.
All of this is to say that as the choir sang the other night, I was often singing along in my head—and remembering melismas I couldn’t keep up with (melisma, btw, is the fun word for “a group of notes sung to one syllable of text”) as well as the notes I couldn’t hit.
Like one of the famous lines the angels proclaim to the shepherds: “And peace on earth!”
I just could never quite hit the bottom note.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that there’s something really fitting about that. Because as human beings, collectively, we just haven’t been able to hit all the notes of peace on earth.
Mother Teresa spoke to why peace on earth remains out of our range when she said, “If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.”
IF we have no peace?
There is plenty of evidence of our lack of peace—depression and anxiety, loneliness and polarization, oppression and terror, and a host of other problems. And all of this lack of peace points to the underlying reality Mother Teresa names: we have forgotten we belong to each other. We have forgotten our fundamental oneness.
This forgetting has been going on for a long time.
In the Bhagavad Gita, the 2000+ year-old Hindu text, on the eve of a great battle between members of his own family, Prince Arjuna is distraught. But as he awaits this massive, violent expression of no peace on earth, what is the message that the divine charioteer Krishna teaches, challenges, and comforts him with?
“Where there is One, that One is me; where there are many, all are me,” Krishna says. Again and again, throughout the Gita’s verses, he repeats this theme, speaking of the unity underlying everything. It’s as if he’s saying, “Wake up to your oneness!”
The Gita isn’t alone in this regard.
It’s what the Tao Te-Ching is getting when it speaks about moving from separateness back to our common source.
It’s in the thirteenth century Masnavi, regarded by many Muslims as the most important work of Islamic literature behind the Quran, when Sufi poet Rumi writes of our yearning to return to our original state of union.
And it’s what Jesus, whose arrival the angels announced to the shepherds (both in the Messiah and the biblical text it comes from), is praying about when he asks that all things be brought to complete unity.
The great wisdom traditions are all about calling humanity out of our amnesia and waking us up again to the reality that we all belong to one another. After all, the word religion, which comes from the Latin religare, means to connect, to bind back together. These paths are trying to help us remember our oneness so that we can sing all the notes of peace on earth.
This work of remembering that we belong to each other is what Mother Teresa was up to too.
In 1946, a young Mother Teresa was on a train traveling from Kolkata to Darjeeling in the Himalayan foothills for her annual retreat at her comfortable home convent. While on the train, she had a mystical experience in which she received what she later described as “the call within the call” to serve the “poorest of the poor” on the streets of Kolkata. She responded to this divine call by founding Missionaries of Charity, which grew into a network of 4500 nuns in over 130 countries. While she provided care for all kinds of vulnerable people, she was especially known for establishing hospices where people of all religious backgrounds, lepers, and people with AIDS could die with dignity.
Of course, upon her death, Mother Teresa became a saint. But that’s not what motivated her. If we read her life through the lens of her quote above, we see she wasn’t just trying to commit random acts of kindness. Serving others wasn’t her solution.
Her mission was deeper, wider: she was on a life-long campaign—her call within the call—to awaken herself and others to our fundamental oneness! Each act of service was a form of actively remembering that we belong to each other. Every expression of care for the ignored, the vulnerable, and the oppressed was a recollection of our unity. And the result was more peace on earth.
It begins with belonging, with remembering it.
Then, this reality of belonging is the gracious catalyst for compassion, generosity, and humility.
These qualities get expressed through acts of service.
And the outcome is peace on earth.
So if you find yourself hearing about peace on earth this time of year and wondering how you can play your part, even as the problems feel so massive, the wisdom passed down through the ages and embodied in sages like Mother Teresa says:
Wake up to your oneness.
Yield to the truth of unity.
Remember that we belong to one another.
Start here. This is what will grow in you the kinds of virtues… that will be expressed in actions… that will help us, together, move from the restricted range of no peace towards singing with our lives the clearest, fullest version of peace on earth.
Reflection Questions
Close your eyes and spend a couple minutes contemplating the oneness of everything that these ancient writings speak to. What comes to mind? Who comes to mind? What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel it?
Who are the people in your life that have helped you experience belonging? How? Who have you helped experience belonging? What did that look like?
Where in your life or with whom are you suffering from amnesia about our oneness? What might it look like for you to wake up?