Peace Among Friends, by Rev. Dr. Linda Olson Peebles, Aug. 7, 2011

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“Peace Among Friends"

The Peace Camp at our church this year asked – who is my neighbor? That’s an important question. Who is my neighbor, and what does it take to live in peace with my neighbor?

Every year, I pause at this week, to ponder something that happened before I was born. It is something that reminds me of how terrible things can get when people cannot learn to live with their neighbors.

I am thinking about two cities in Japan - Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In those places, back in 1945, on August 6th and 9th, we saw the ultimate of what can happen when people are not able to talk to their neighbors, and ending up having to fight; and fighting didn't even work. And it led to the biggest bombs – nuclear weapons – being dropped on two cities, killing innocent people, wiping out neighborhoods, and leaving the survivors with psychic trauma and radiation illness. It was a terrible scary thing.

This June, I heard a story about Japan, but one that didn’t lead to making enemies and warring -- a story about seeing people as neighbors, as friends, when things get scary. The story was told by Rev. Kosho Niwano, who travelled from Japan to visit the UU General Assembly to help the UUA celebrate its 50th anniversary. She is a young woman who is now the president-designate of the very large reformed Buddhist religion in Japan called RKK. Rissho Kosei-kai is a worldwide Buddhist organization founded in Japan in 1938 by Nikkyo Niwano, Rev. Kosho’s grandfather. It combines the wisdom of both the Lotus Sutra and the foundational teachings of the Buddha. Its purpose is to bring these transformative teachings to the modern world. It has more than six million members – but back when it started with only 30 people, and during World War II and immediately following, it was a little understood, new religion. Back then, Niwano’s grandfather was a very young man and his nation was suffering through a scary time of conflict. And then the war between the US and Japan finally ended with the A-bombs in 1945 – exactly 66 years ago from this week.

As Japan slowly recovered from the bombs of August 1945, over the years, RKK grew into a big faith group. And the founder Niwano wanted to find a way to make his religion help people even more. In the 1960s, he met Dana Greeley, who was the president of a brand new church – tiny in comparison to the RKK – the merged Universalists and Unitarians. Dana Greeley had also been a young man – an American – when Japan attacked his country, and after years of war, the US bombed RKK's country with devastating destruction of the atomic weapon. You’d think it would be hard for them to like each other – different nations, former enemies, different religions (one large, one very small). But these two men became close friends, even though they were from different cultures and spoke different languages. In their first meeting, they talked for hours about what mattered to them. They shared the same dreams for peaceful ways to work for understanding among all people – no matter who they were or where they lived.

When Greeley and Niwano met, it was another scary time in history. People were filled with fear that enemies would drop an atomic bomb on THEM, and the nuclear arms race was out of control. The war in Vietnam was escalating and students were seizing campus buildings in protest. The struggle for civil rights for African-Americans had led to violence across the US. In the very year, 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Greeley and Niwano planned and began the first World Assembly for Peace. They started a group called the IARF – International Association for Religious Freedom and another – the World Conference on Religion and Peace – both of which have done amazing works in the decades since.

Niwano told people that meeting Rev. Greeley and becoming friends with that American, not only changed him personally but moved him to lead his entire religious group to activism for world peace. Before the friendship, RKK had become huge and successful, but was inwardly focused. Today, RKK is recognized as the foremost Buddhist group doing international interfaith work and a world-wide religious leader for peace. Why do I tell you this story? Because it is about how incredible this friendship was – and how much it meant to so many people!

1. It meant a lot to the young woman who told us – Niwano’s granddaughter. Those men first met and began their work for peace just three days after she was born – and their friendship made all the difference to the kind of life she has since lived.
2. And it meant a lot to these two men’s lives - “They were soul-mates” for each other.
3. And their friendship meant a lot to both of their religions, and all the other groups that benefitted from the work of many faiths working together.

In 1945 Japan and the US were two warring nations, and ended up causing so much pain and devastation.

In the 1960s two leaders – from different religions and different nations that had been enemies - became friends and worked together for peace in a turbulent scary world.

And - In 2011, this year, in March, when the massive earthquake struck Japan and the tsunami washed whole cities away, people of hope and faith found themselves again reaching out to help the people of Japan.

That young Japanese Buddhist woman, Kosho Nikkyo, came to the US, to the General Assembly in June to help the UUA celebrate its 50th anniversary, yes. And she came to tell us the story of the friendship between her grandfather and the UUA’s first president. Yes. And she came to thank the UUA – to thank us - Unitarian Universalists, for contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars for relief work after the tsunami struck Japan earlier this year. She told us about the pain, the overwhelming devastation, AND about the importance of helping others. She said the disaster has helped her own members of her RKK church in Japan – once again - to “uncover the meaning of their own lives through helping others.”

“We made friends” they said. And that makes all the difference.

Here in Arlington, through our interfaith work with VOICE, with neighbors in Buckingham and Greenbriar, we have been making friends with people of different religions and ethnicities. This week, the neighbors at the Dar Al Hijrah mosque have invited us to join them in an Iftar, a prayer and feast celebration as a part of this month of Ramadan. And in a couple weeks, we’ll help the neighbors in Greenbriar celebrate getting a bus to take them to the human services building. We’ve made friends and reached out to one another – and it helps us get through tough times.

Who is your neighbor? Who could be your friend? Find out. Reach out. It can change everything. It can give us hope when things are scary. Just reach out your hand, take another’s hand, and find out. It can bring peace, to you, to your neighbor, and to the world.