A Call for Peace and Justice on Mother's Day
Every parent's deepest desire is for a world in which there is peace and justice for all children. In spite of the commercial focus on flowers and cards, Mother's Day has become a focal point for these desires in the U.S. in recent centuries. Among them Julia Ward Howe's first proclamation made in 1870; the first march in 1907, organized to honor the extraordinary memory of Anna Reese Jarvis—an Appalachian mother who organized women to work for better sanitary conditions in the Civil War and to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors. In 1968 Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy called for a Poor Peoples March for Civil Rights on Mother's Day and in 2004, following many others, Dianne Feinstein called for a Mother's Day March to Halt the Assault, calling for a ban on assault weapons—their aims always having been echoes of Howe's call:
“Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”
This year, the Brattleboro Area Interfaith Initiative is reaching to all people of faith and to those who are moved by a great call to peace and justice in this community to join together in a Mother's Day March and Community Celebration, Sunday May 14th. At 1:00 pm, we will march from the Brattleboro Coop to the Common where the Mother's Day Proclamation written in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe, social reformer and peace activist will be read, and clergy, spiritual leaders and representatives will be invited to state a common sentence from the Proclamation in a unifying prayer for peace. Our goal is to bring us all together, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, Buddhists, Bahai's, Hindu's, Native Americans, Peace Activists, and all people who identify as spiritual but not necessarily religious, this includes anyone who feels that peace, justice and caring for the future of our children is a message we wish to send to the world. Voices of an interfaith chorus will raise us in song, and we will all sing together.
The event is sponsored by the Brattleboro Area Interfaith Initiative, a consortium of Faith Communities committed to peace and justice at home and in the world, with clergy; Barbro M. Hanson of All Souls UU, Jim Levinson of the Brattleboro Area Jewish Community, Lise Sparrow of the Guilford Community Church, Javed Chaudhri of the Muslim Community, and Rupa Cousins of the Network for Spiritual Progressives, Mary Lou Treat, All Souls Church, Janet and Walter T. Schwarz, All Souls Church and Judy Greenberg Brattleboro Area Jewish Community.
|
