Please join us on Saturday, February 26th from 9-10:30 at St. Joan of Arc Parish for the monthly meditation. The facilitator will be Dick Westby. The reflection piece is attached here and printed below.
The Spiritual Duty of Peacemaking by Josh Armfield, Cherith Brook Catholic Worker. Aug. 2010
We are called to love and this is why we live a life of resistance. We are called to love and this is why we do the works of mercy. We are called to love and this is why we protest Nuclear Weapons. We are called to be peacemakers. We preach nonviolence and believe in the resurrection. We have another world in view.
So let us not let injustice get the best of us. We are not zealots, we are peacemakers and we have come to save and not to destroy. We are not trying to defeat our enemy, but we are trying to love them even while they are intoxicated by the powers. We are calling for an intervention! We cannot be silent because we love you. This is why we protest. This is why we are thrown in jail, because we love each other.
As I am very new to the life of nonviolent resistance, I thought it would be appropriate for us to reflect on words from Thomas Merton who was a pastor to peacemakers in the sixties and was very vocal about condemning Nuclear weapons during the cold war until he was silenced by his superiors. Merton warned activists that there is a danger in any movement for those involved to become zealots or enthusiasts. There is the temptation to get swept away by ideologies and to replace good conscience and critical thought with slogans, rhetoric, and peer group pressure. We must not be swept away by the violence of our own enthusiasm. Merton said once that, “People do not feel at all threatened by the bomb, but they feel terribly threatened by some student carrying a placard.” In a letter to Jim Forest, Merton wrote,
One of the Problematic questions about nonviolence is the inevitable involvement of hidden aggressions and provocations. I think this is especially true when there are…elements that are not spiritually developed. It is an enormously subtle question, but we have to consider the fact that, in its provocative aspect, nonviolence may tend to harden opposition and confirm people in their righteous blindness. It may even in some cases separate [people] out and drive them in the other direction, away from us and away from peace. This of course may be (as it was with the prophets) part of God’s plan. A clear separation of antagonists… [But we must] always direct our action toward opening people’s eyes to the truth, and if they are blinded, we must try to be sure we did nothing specifically to blind them.
Yet there is that danger: the danger one observes subtly in tight groups like families and monastic communities, where the martyr for the right sometimes thrives on making his persecutors terribly and visibly wrong. That person can drive them in desperation to be wrong, to seek refuge in the wrong, to seek refuge in violence…In our acceptance of vulnerability…we play [on the guilt of the opponent]. There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of our time…all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow it all out in hatreds, race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation…We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that we don’t kill more than falsehood with it. In fact, we must be careful how we “use” truth, for we are ideally the instruments of truth and not the other way around.
We must protest out of love for our neighbors. And we must resist Nuclear Weapons here in KC because it is our duty as Christians, not based on a certain result, but simply because it is our duty. We have been called to the duty of peacemaking not only for love of neighbor, but also because of our own discipleship. Peacemaking forces us all to address the plank stuck in our own eye before we can notify our brother or sister about the small speck in their eye. We know we cannot change the world in one weekend of protesting, but we continue to protest because peacemaking is an important part of our own transformation toward wholeness. Merton wrote about this saying,
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for and idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.
You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.
The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important…
The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments…
The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand.
We have another world in view and together we want to live into it and invite others to join us. So let us be careful this weekend to not be like the zealots James and John wanting to call down fire from heaven to destroy our enemies. Let us be peacemakers that have been called by Christ to save and not to destroy.
