A Commitment to Nonviolence: Weekly Summary
Sunday
Righteous violence finally leaves people in self-justifying monologues instead of the unceasing love dialogue that manifests the very Trinitarian nature of God, and therefore of the entire universe.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God.
—John Lewis
Tuesday
This love ethic must be at the center of our whole life, or it cannot be effective or real in the crucial moments of conflict. We have to practice drawing our lives from this new source, in thought, word, emotion, and deed, every day, or we will never be prepared for the major confrontations or the surprise humiliations that will come our way.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
We say we value niceness, but this kind of niceness isn’t kindness or compassion or accompaniment or self-sacrifice. It’s not Christ’s example of emptying ourselves for the sake of the other. It’s the opposite—silencing and oppressing the other for the sake of ourselves.
—Elle Dowd
Thursday
What if the streams of contemplation and nonviolent resistance merged? What if our movements toward personal healing were also movements toward systemic transformation? To live the Gospel fully is to embrace both.
—Paul Engler
Friday
It’s that vision of the promised land before us, the practice of proactive nonviolence, that offers a way out of environmental destruction, as well as permanent war, corporate greed, systemic racism, and extreme poverty.
—John Dear
Week Thirty-Nine Practice
Peace Be with You
Catholic activist Eileen Egan (1912–2000) considers the universal nature of a greeting of peace:
“Peace be with you” was the greeting of Jesus to the apostles at his sudden appearance among them. They were in a locked room in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36; John 20:19), and behind them was the stupendous fact of the resurrection. Was this a ghost? To reassure them, Jesus showed them his pierced side and the marks of the nails on his hands and his feet. On this momentous meeting, he breathed on them the power of the Holy Spirit and commissioned them to preach in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
This is the greeting that priests give from the Table of the Lord throughout the earth. What more beautiful greeting can believers carry outside church walls to all we meet in daily life?
Wishing peace is wishing the highest good that life can offer. The traditional greeting in Hebrew is shalom (peace). Salaam, the word for peace, is the salutation in Arabic. In Korean, the age-old greeting [annyeong haseyo] is also concerned with peace. The peacemaker can wish it to those who are like-minded or not, to all children of God anywhere, everywhere, in season and out.
Whatever the turmoil, whatever the divisions among humankind, whatever the violence, the followers of Jesus who have accepted his commission can refuse to be moved from his transcendent message of peace. May there come a time when the church, as a peace church without any ties to violence, may greet the human family with the words, “Peace be with you.”
References:
Eileen Egan, Peace Be with You: Justified Warfare or the Way of Nonviolence (Orbis Books, 1999), 308.
Image credit and inspiration: Toa Heftiba, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Two people, different in perspective yet united in a shared value, reach across the divide—not with force but with courage, choosing the harder path of listening, of letting themselves be changed, of loving even when it is difficult.
