I was just reading William G. Sinkford’s 2007 Holiday Pastoral Letter. Reverend Sinkford is the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of America. This year’s holiday letter is a call to arms for peace. Yes, it is exactly that conflicting sentiment that he addresses in his letter. Here is part of one paragraph.
When I hear that nearly 4,000 US troops and as many as a half million Iraqis have been killed for a war that began with a lie, I get angry. I can’t believe the number of injured troops coming home, and I can’t even fathom the number of injured people trying to make it through another day in Iraq. And when I hear that the money spent on this violence in one month is enough to completely rebuild New Orleans, or that the money spent in one week could provide three meals a day for nearly an entire year for 6 million children—the same number who die each year from malnutrition—I am ready to fight. I can’t sit still when I hear these things, and I hope you can’t either, because that is a righteous anger.
I would ask you to consider these ideas and to read the rest of the letter. In this time of year, not only because of the Christmas holiday but also because it is the time of New Year’s resolutions, we need to take stock of what is going on and ask ourselves what we can do about it.
