Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart.
—St. Francis of Assisi
Father Richard Rohr writes of the essential Christian call to nonviolence:
Generations of Christians seem to have forgotten Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence. We’ve relegated visions of a peaceful kingdom to a far distant heaven, hardly believing Jesus could have meant for us to turn the other cheek here and now. It took Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), a Hindu, to help us apply Jesus’ peacemaking in very practical ways. As Gandhi said, “It is a first-class human tragedy that peoples of the earth who claim to believe in the message of Jesus whom they describe as the Prince of Peace show little of that belief in actual practice.” [1] Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), drawing from Gandhi’s writings and example, brought nonviolence to the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Training in nonviolence has understandably emphasized largely external methods or ways of acting and resisting. These are important and necessary, but we must go even deeper. Unless these methods reflect our inner attitudes, they will not make a lasting difference. We all must admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction. [2]
Nonviolence teacher Ken Butigan understands God’s love to be at the center of nonviolence.
Our true calling is to love one another as God has loved us. When we take this seriously, we are transformed into lovers who care for all beings. In practical terms this means resisting the tendency of the violence system to divide the world into various enemy camps. A fundamental script of this system is to separate “us” from “them”: … those who are worthy of our love and those who are not…. Often, we project our own unacknowledged violence onto [them].
Nonviolence takes another approach. Practitioners of nonviolence seek to become their truest selves by slowly learning to love all beings, confident that all are kin and that we are called to embody this kinship concretely, especially in the midst of our most difficult and challenging conflicts…. Nonviolence is committed to challenging and resisting every form of violence. Nevertheless, it does not conclude that the opponent is absolutely and irrevocably incapable of loving or of being loved. To love the perpetrator … is a creative and daring act that seeks to provoke all parties to make contact with their true self, the undefiled reality of God which dwells at the center of their being. In short, their sacredness.… The greatest work of nonviolence is to create situations which free the sacredness of ourselves and our opponent. [3]
References:
[1] Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings, selected by John Dear (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 188.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 125–126.
[3] Ken Butigan with Patricia Bruno, From Violence to Wholeness (Las Vegas, NV: Pace e Bene Franciscan Nonviolence Center, 1999), 47, 48.
Image credit and inspiration: David Clode, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Australia, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a butterfly in open hands, peacemaking requires the humility of opening our hearts to the delicate dance of co-creating a just peace.
Story from Our Community:
Reading the Daily Meditations reminds me of the great Communion of Saints—both living and dead—that we all belong to. We are all connected to the great mentors of our tradition like St. Francis of Assisi, Frs. Dan and Phil Berrigan, Louis Vitale, Elizabeth McAllister, John Dear, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, named and unnamed. We are being mentored mysteriously by all the holy men and women who have gone before us. Much gratitude to Fr. Richard and the CAC community.
—Gregory G.
