There are times in life when a soul needs to hear Barbra Streisand singing “Avinu Malkeinu.” It needs to hear Verdi’s Requiem. It needs to hear John Coltrane’s saxophone screaming A Love Supreme. Peace Day 2011 was such a day. Peace Day, the UN International Day of Peace and Global Ceasefire falls on September 21 every year. It coincides with the opening session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The day represents a hope that a time will come when humanity will end its violent conflicts. Peace One Day.

Since 2008, I try to publish one or more short essays to honor Peace Day, and I had intended the same for this year. I thought about writing something about peace as a contagion. I had not yet decided whether to write it as fiction or as a proposal. The weekend before Peace Day, I went to see the movie Contagion. I thought it might give me some ideas.

The movie is about a virus that spreads through touch. An infected person can touch another person or a surface, leave the contagion, and someone else touching the same surface can pick-up the contagion. Panic sets in. Social order breaks down. I tried to imagine the opposite. I tried to imagine a world where humankind has the power to think peace, breathe peace, and pass the peace through touch. Imagine a world where we could leave traces of our own peace on surfaces for a complete stranger to catch with only a touch.

But, when Peace Day came, I was no longer interested in thinking about peace as a contagion. It was the opening day of the UN General Assembly, and the world awaited what President Obama would say about the Palestinian plan to apply for full UN membership as an independent state. I also was eager to hear what the president would say. In this impasse between Israel’s need for security and the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for an independent state clouds were gathering in my soul.

At the same time, for me, there was another sad cloud looming over the day – the scheduled execution of Troy Davis. The State of Georgia had scheduled Davis’ execution on Peace Day. Did not the idea of global cease fire include state executions? I felt dispirited because clearly we have much more work to do to inform people about Peace Day and its possibilities. However, more than that, I was one of more than a million people across the globe who signed petitions to sop the execution of Troy Davis.

I oppose capital punishment in any and every case, but this case was a case where there was too much reasonable doubt in the guilt of the man condemned to death. Davis had been convicted for the shooting death of off duty police officer Mark MacPheil. Davis had been fighting to prove his innocence, preserve his life, and clear his name for more than 20 years. Now all of his appeals were exhausted, and he was scheduled to die before the day was done.

So, all day on Peace Day, I kept an eye of the proceedings at the United Nations while also hoping and praying that by some miracle of American jurisprudence Troy Davis’ life would be spared. Davis died at 11:08 EDT after the U.S. Supreme Court refused a last minute request to stay the execution.

In his remarks before the General Assembly, President Obama spoke of the legitimate aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians. He said there were no short cuts to peace. He said that a lasting peace would not come until “the parties sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and fears.” He spoke about the necessity of “creating the opportunity that makes life worth living.”

I thought about the ethics of commensality, the moral reasoning that understands right action is that which leads to both sustenance and joy. Maintenance of life is important, but life with no joy is not worth living. The relationship of friends sharing a meal together is a moment of joy in human life. I wondered whether or not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had ever sat down together – just the two of them – to share a meal. Had they ever visited one another’s home? Did each know the names of the other’s children and what was happening in those children’s lives? Was such sharing even possible?

I consider President Obama to be a just peace president. He knows that peace means health and prosperity and wholeness. He knows that truth, respect and security are the foundations upon which lasting and just peace is built. He knows that wholeness includes the holiness of recognition. We see ourselves in the Others, and the Others see themselves in us. With this kind of re-cognition, we are able to summon the moral imagination to live the Golden rule: IN EVERYTHING, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

When President Obama had concluded his remarks, I listened to a few other leaders including French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He proposed a timetable for Israeli/Palestinian talks – one month to restart talks; six months to agree on borders and security; a year to decide the final status issues. He proposed an intermediate step that would make Palestine a UN observer state. He spoke of the pain that both Israeli and Palestinian mothers feel when their children die.

This made me think of the various grassroots organizations in Israel/Palestine where grieving parents from both sides of the conflict come together to support one another and to work for peace. (http://www.theparentscircle.com/NewsMain.asp?id=506) I thought: The world is with the Palestinians. They will have UN recognition as a state no matter what Israel, the United States and France say. And God only knows what will come after.

I felt sad. I wanted to weep, not only for the tragedy of a continuing impasse in the Holy Land, the place that ought to be the geographical location for the example of human beings living in harmony, but I wanted to weep for my own country. I wanted to weep praying tears for a nation that still thinks executions make sense. I wanted to weep praying tears for a state that would execute a man on a day dedicated to peace and to global cease fire.

I wanted to weep praying tears, voiceless, wordless lamentations to a compassionate God who can translate the language of tears. Hear these prayers Oh Lord. But, the tears would not come. There existed only a deep dry well inside my soul. That the tears would not come was surprising to me since with each passing year both my laughter and my tears are closer to the surface. They erupt without my permission, and I shamelessly allow it. I have come to the place in my life where I do not care whether or not people understand either my laughter or my tears. I do not explain.

But on this Peace Day, I wanted to weep, but I could not. I wanted to stop thinking about ways to make an argument against the death penalty, but I could not. I still say that no government ought to have the power to take away what it cannot restore. Human beings are too flawed, too prone to error for such finality. No government can restore a life once it is taken. If a man or woman is wrongly incarcerated s/he may be compensated for h/er time. Nothing can remedy wrongful death. Further, the death penalty is a barbarity that most countries in the industrialized world have rejected. The death penalty is even losing ground in the United State as several states have abolished it and fewer juries vote for the death penalty.

The next day, I learned that Troy Davis had not been the only person executed on Peace Day. The State of Texas had executed Lawrence Brewer at 7: 21 PM EDT. Brewer had been convicted of the death of James Byrd. This case garnered national attention because Brewer and two other men, members of a white separatist group, dragged Byrd to death. They chained him and dragged him behind a truck until he was decapitated. It was a gruesome hate crime, and there was no doubt of Brewer’s guilt. (Brewer says that he did not personally do the deed, but he was with the men who did.) This news did not make me feel better, nor did it make me change my position on the death penalty. More grief piled upon more grief.

There is an axiom: People do harm out of their own pain. I think this is true. It is true of the people who murdered two innocent victims. (The killer of Officer Mac Pheil may still be at large.) This is also true of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This is true of a nation that still thinks the death penalty is an appropriate tool of retributive justice. To end the harm of pain causing pain, we need a way to end our psychic and spiritual pain.

And then, I remembered the music.

Artists express human emotions in their work. In the case of some music there is a confluence of words and music that eases our pain. Barbara Streisand sings “Avinu Malkeinu” on the CD Higher Ground. This is a song sung during Rosh Hashanah. Sung in Hebrew, the words in English say:

Hear our prayer

We have sinned before Thee

Have compassion upon us and upon our children

Help us bring an end to pestilence, war, and famine

Cause all hate and oppression to vanish from the earth

Inscribe us for blessing in the Book Of Life

Let the New Year be a good year for us.

In May of 1874, the world first heard Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass composed in honor of Italian poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni who had died a year earlier. It is a work that asks God to grant eternal rest to the dead. It asks for mercy. The work reminds us of the judgment of God and of the awful consequences of our wrongdoing. I say: the hell we ought to fear is the hell we create on earth, that the judgment we face is the inextricable connection between act and consequence. Thus, we ought to extend the mercy to others that we pray that God will grant to us. We ought to extend the forgiveness to others that we want God to give to us. This is especially true for our enemies and for those among us whose pain is so great that they kill.

Requiem reminds us that none of us can stand the justice of God. We can only hope for mercy. If reminds us that when we do not understand how to repair the world around us, that we have access to transcendence, to the mind of Divine Love that will hear our plea. In “Te Deum” Verdi writes:

Save your people, O Lord,

And bless your inheritance.

Govern them and sustain them for ever.

We bless you every day,

And we praise your name

For ever and ever.

Deign, O Lord, to keep us without sin this day.

Have mercy on us Lord, have mercy on us.

Let your mercy, O Lord be upon us,

For we have placed our hope in you.

I have placed my hope I you, O Lord,

Let me not be for ever confounded.

Like the other two works, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme comes forth from our human weakness. It is at once a sermon, a prayer and a psalm of praise. Coltrane reminds us in the poem “A Love Supreme” that God breathes through us, and our responsibility is to try to be worthy of the breath. The poem says in part:

No road is an easy one, but they all

Go back to God.

With all we share God.

It is all with God.

It is all with Thee.

Obey the Lord.

Blessed is He.

. . .

God breathes through us so completely . . .

So gently we hardly feel it. . . yet,

It is our everything.

Thank you God.

ELATION – ELEGANCE – EXALTATION -

All from God

Thank you God. Amen.

I entered into the music and the music entered into me. The breath of God breathing peace upon me through the talents of the artists – words and music– rejuvenated my soul, blew the clouds away and took away that ache inside that wanted to, that needed to cry. It reconnected me to the living waters, a well of waters springing up from God’s own Holy Spirit, from the fount of God’s love.

I entered into the music and the music entered into me to tell me that God who is Divine Love loves me with an inexpressible, incredible love. It is this love that it is my duty and my joy to share with world.