The Art of Peace: Lessons from The Peter Max Paper Airplane Book
May 18, 2025
The year 1971 might seem an odd year to look to for some spiritual inspiration, on how to navigate the times we’re in. Same-sex marriage was illegal. Roe v. Wade was still two years away. The war in Vietnam raged on. Despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed racially motivated redlining, racial discrimination continued in the selling and renting of homes to people of color. Fifty-four years ago, the arc of the moral universe sure was taking its sweet time bending toward justice.
Life was slower, too. We had only three television channels. If you wanted to call someone, you dialed them using a rotary phone, and God forbid if you didn’t have any dimes if you needed to use a pay phone. If you wanted to buy a book, you had to go to an actual bookstore or join the Book-of-the-Month Club. And if you were heard in a restaurant talking to a ghost named Siri, someone would have called a doctor.
But 1971 was also a time when art and activism in support of love and justice were alive and well. On the art side, former Beatle John Lennon recorded “Imagine,” one of the most famous songs of all time, a longing for a more perfect world. A new sitcom, “All in the Family,” debuted on CBS—one of those three television channels—with Archie, Edith, Gloria and Michael shedding light on such topics as racism, bigotry, antisemitism, homosexuality and women’s rights. On the activism side, 1971 was the year Greenpeace was founded by a group of environmental activists in Canada. The voting age was lowered to 18 from 21, due in no small part to a youth movement that sprang up as a result of the Vietnam draft calling up 18-year-olds.
Even at the young age of nine, I was aware of all of this. “Imagine” was omnipresent on my little red AM transistor radio. We all sat down on Sunday nights to watch “All in the Family.” And because politics was served up at dinnertime with my parents discussing the issues of the day, and with the TV in our dining room airing the nightly news while we ate, I was attuned to current events.
But the reason I’m looking back there now is that 1971 serves as an important reminder that creating the just and peaceful world we can only ever imagine is the work of both activists and artists, not one or the other. We need both. For although activists show us how we work for a better world, the artists remind us why it’s worth it.
Now, frankly, any year would do. You could close your eyes, flip open the calendar, hover your finger over the page and land on one year randomly, and you would find plenty of activism and artistic endeavor to satisfy your yearning for inspiration when inspiration seems to be in short supply.
The reason we’re talking about 1971 today is because when I was thinking about this sermon a few weeks ago, I happened to be walking by a bookshelf in my home and happened to pull down from the shelf this little book that I bought in fourth grade, which I happened to keep all these years, The Peter Max Paper Airplane Book. Thirty-three paper airplanes you could rip out of the book, fold and fly, all illustrated by the flower-power psychedelic artist whose artwork was everywhere in those days, much the way the graffiti-like protest posters of the artist Shepard Fairey are omnipresent today.
Flipping through the pages of my fourth-grade purchase with 63-year-old eyes, it was as if the gods were reminding me that the roots of lovingkindness are planted early. The planes in this book are adorned with words as well as the bold colors and themes Peter Max was known for. They include messages of love and positivity, like “Today is a great day,” “Today is your day,” “I’m me,” “I’m a bird” and “I can’t talk ‘cause I’m laughing.” “Love the earth, don’t feed me to the streets.” These were messages I was used to hearing in the late Sixties and early Seventies as our artists and activists pushed for civil rights and freedoms. Those message made me believe I would live my adult years in a kinder, gentler world, that we were headed in a good direction. They’re part of the reason I’m standing here right now, a guy who entered seminary at the age of 51, partly to fulfill the vision of that nine-year-old kid.
The book was still speaking to me after all these years, and it gave me an idea. Only a few pages were missing, meaning there were still plenty of planes to fold and fly. And lo and behold, just this week it became fashionable to give away airplanes, especially if you are an oil-rich country. So why not give away paper airplanes anyone can fly that send messages of love to the world? Isn’t that a proper response to greed and grift and corruption? In these little planes, art and activism converge.
But that’s the art side of 1971. On the activism side, that year is also memorable for the direct role Unitarian Universalists played in striking a blow for freedom of the press and for ending an unjust war, the Vietnam War. In publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Beacon Press, our publishing arm, exposed our government’s deceit and needless prolonging of the war and helped turn the tide of public opinion against the war. Our actions prompted the Nixon administration to install a secret taping system in the White House and to form the infamous group called the Plumbers, whose job was to stop leaks to the press but also to gather dirt on the president’s political enemies. They raided Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and eventually broke into the Watergate building. The rest, as they say, is history. And it’s why any scandal to this day is called Something-gate.
Had we not published the Pentagon Papers, there might not have been a Watergate or the taking down of a corrupt president, or the accelerated end of the war. That’s activism, and it is part of our tradition.
Not everyone can be an activist, however. Not all of us are marchers, sign-wavers, or willing to get arrested and hauled off to jail. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Happily, though, everyone can be an artist. How so, you might ask? I can’t draw. I can’t sing. I got Ds in English, I’m no Maya Angelou or James Baldwin. How can I be an artist?
Well. What is art?
My favorite dictionary defines art as, quote “a practical skill, or its application, guided by principles.” It goes further to define art as the “application of skill to the production of beauty and works of creative imagination.”
A little dry, but still I admire those definitions for their simplicity and directness. I also like that they allow room for theological reflection. For what are the Eight Principles of Unitarian Universalism after all, but practical skills or their application, guided by principles? If you practice any of our eight principles, such as encouraging spiritual growth in our congregations (and you should practice that one; it’s in the First Parish mission statement), or a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, approaches that are practical as well as respectful and meaningful, then you might also say you are doing more than just living; you are practicing the art of living.
What about the second part of that definition, though? The production of beauty and works of creative imagination? Ah. That is where we get into deeper theological territory. For although those words refer to the creation of actual works of art, like paintings, poems, songs, artisanal works and such, we can stretch that definition to include creating beauty out of anything, including out of nothing at all. That is something anyone can do, and there is spiritual power in doing so, for the act of creativity is where we get a little closer to being something like a god.
Because we are a liberal religion, and because we uphold religious freedom and freedom of thought above all else, Unitarian Universalism is made up of many theological threads. One of those threads is a school of thought known as process theology. Process theology, another dry term for something quite beautiful. Process theology views God as a dynamic force, not some static divine being, and it views creation as still being created, still in process. As our religious siblings in the United Church of Christ like to say, God is still speaking. As Henry David Thoreau, our Unitarian ancestor said in ye olde English, God speaketh, not spake.
Even if you remove God from the equation, though, you are still left with the incredibly beautiful notion that as works in progress ourselves with beginnings and endings, we are co-creators of a creation still in process. We are co-authors of creation. And whatever power might exist beyond us that breathed into us the spark of life, what we have in common with that force is that we too were given the ability to create.
There are many great examples of this creative impulse among us today. Cooks, bakers, farmers, chandlers, quilters, sewers, woodworkers, watercolorists, musicians … not to mention everyone who makes tie-dye shirts on Star Island during Building Bridges week.
We share this ability to create with many creatures. The bird builds a nest, and it is perfectly round, twigs perfectly entwined to form a fortress. The beaver builds a dam, an architectural wonder. The spider spins a web both fragile and treacherous to its prey. But we humans can create something just for the sake of art, for the sake of beauty, for the sheer pleasure of elevating what is before us into something to behold, something that makes us think, something that reminds us what a privilege it is to be alive. Only humans have the capacity to create something that makes them think more deeply and create new thought. The spark of originality. The spark of life.
And this doesn’t apply to just physical things. We can also create moments. And this is where those Ds in English come in. You don’t have to be a James Baldwin or a bell hooks, a Beethoven, a Da Vinci or a Michaelangelo. It’s okay if you can’t sing a single note. It’s okay if you’ve never touched a lathe or put on a pair of ballet slippers. We can still create moments that inspire others to build a better world. Memories. Pictures at an exhibition, and the exhibition is the font of human memory we build and that those who come after us remember us by, that we, by our love, called for a loving, just and peaceful world. That we tried to leave it better than we found it.
These moments, these memories, can also converge with the activism we so dearly need but not everyone is equipped or motivated to carry out. Our moments can protest injustice. Our creativity can call for love. Our art can speaketh volumes.
I’d like to try to create such a moment right now.
Please take out the airplane insert in your order of service and fold it in the classic back-of-the-classroom paper airplane form. The kind of airplane that used to sail up to the front of the classroom from the back row.
Just fold it in half and fold the front corners in. You’ll notice little folds marked on the back of the wings. Feel free to leave them be, or fold them up or down. Or one up and one down. Experiment. How might they affect your flight?
When you’re done, please hold up your plane.
(We’re also going to have the children join us, for the children, more recently arrived on this earth, are fresh from flight school and can lead us in our launch.)
Aim toward anyone you wish to reach with a positive message. Ready, set, release!
Let’s try three times.
What did you notice about each successive try?
Each time we tried again, did you notice that you tended to adjust something about the plane—a fold, tighter creases—or adjusted your toss, your throw? It's human nature to do that. It’s our creative impulse at work. Always seeking better.
We can all be like activists and artists. We can all keep fine-tuning what we do so we can fly higher and longer and truer. We sharpen the creases. We adjust our aim. We raise our eyes to heaven. With the heart of an activist and the soul of an artist, our dreams can still take flight.
