Overcome evil with good

Christian Peacemaker Teams--committed to reducing violence by getting in the way.

What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?

CPT photo: Jim Loney passes off a peace dove to a friend for release at a multi-faith walk for the release of Iraqi captives.

[found here: Missing in Iraq: Pictures Related to the Developing Crisis]

You must guard aginst further indulging in hateful thoughts and feelings--even repressed ones--and pray for good for those who hurt or oppose you. You see examples of what can happen to a soul who did not restrain feelings of hate and vengeance. Not a pretty sight, is it? Hatred and ill will are never pretty when fully unmasked. The pleasure you derive in them cannot be compared to the joy you will have when you put them away.
--Hal M. Helms, Echoes of Eternity: Listening to the Father, 1996

Early American Blogging, sort of

Food for thought about blogging:
Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading by W. Caleb McDaniel [at common-place.org]

Henry Clarke Wright was an antebellum American reformer whose eclectic interests ranged from antislavery to radical pacifism to health reform and beyond. Born in 1797 and educated as a minister, he later abandoned institutional religion and became a prolific writer and speaker.

[snip]

As a writer with grand aspirations for shaking the world, Wright was also an inveterate journal keeper. For most of his adult life, he filled a steady stream of over one hundred diaries. In these, comments on world events and social reform jostle with reflections on the diarist’s loveless marriage and his struggle for faith. While private, the journals were also public. Wright mailed pages and even whole volumes to his friends or read them excerpts from the diaries, and many pages were later published in his numerous books. Thus, as his biographer Lewis Perry notes, in the case of Wright, "distinctions between private and public, between diaries and published writings, meant little."

Blogs are not merely a new form of political pamphleteering -- the impression you may get from some of the mainstream media coverage, since the most visible blogs are political. Blogs are too diverse to try to confine into that box -- but I'm not sure what the purpose they serve. For me, this blog is just a way to remember and possibly share some 'stuff' with like-minded folks.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

On Pacifism

Hugo Schwyzer [check out the comments to Hugo's post for a classic fallacious either/or argument against pacifism.] recommends this post: 'Beach houses, protest posters, and peace-making according to me' by Christy:

Being anti-war is easy. Peace-making is hard. I suck at it sometimes, but I'm pretty sure I would be much worse at it if I wasn't even trying. There is no peace without justice, so peace-making has to be about trying to create spaces where both I and the structures around me are treating people with the respect that all image-bearers of God deserve.

I believe that the means are the ends, so I can't build something good based on anger or fear or disrespect or trying to shove a particular political platform down anybody's throat. Most of us have come to our particular opinions through our lived experience, not logical arguments, so talking myself hoarse probably won't change anybody's mind.

Here's a digression that I may flesh out soon:

Christy's post reminds me of the use of the phrase city on a hill at President Reagan's funeral. This is how a city on a hill exerts its influence--by being a good example, not by threatening and attacking. I hate the way that phrase is misused. The city on a hill is the church--God's people, not a particular nation. Governor John Winthrop was hoping that the good example of the Massachusetts Bay Company would purify the Church of England. He certainly didn't envision anything like the United States as it is today pretending to be God's city on a hill.

The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, "Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place." But he said to them, "You give them something to eat." They said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fish--unless we are to go and buy food for all these people." For there were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, "Make them sit down in groups of about fifty each." They did so and made them all sit down. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And all ate and were filled. What was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.--Luke 9:12-17 (from today's Sacred Space.

Today's reading on pacifism

Recommended by Hugo Schwyzer: Episcopal Priest Father Jake posting about Pacifism for Violent SOBs. Here he quotes Stanley Hauerwas:

"I say I'm a pacifist because I'm a violent son of a bitch. I'm a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I've got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it's too passive. But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all. That's part of what nonviolence is--the attempt to make our lives vulnerable to others in a way that we need one another. To be against war--which is clearly violent--is a good place to start. But you never know where the violence is in your own life. To say you're nonviolent is not some position of self-righteousness--you kill and I don't. It's rather to make your life available to others in a way that they can help you discover ways you're implicated in violence that you hadn't even noticed."

In my recent search for statue of liberty stamp images, I ran across a few that comment on the situation in Iraq:


I don't remember where I found these pictures.

Update:

I corrected the spelling of Hugo's name--I should have spotted it but Blogger's post creation window scrolls horizontally and Hugo's name was in the extreme right margin.

Jesus looked up to heaven and said, "Father, I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me."--John 17:20-21

Do I share God's desire...?

Do I share God's desire to make of all the nations citizens of his Kingdom of justice, love and peace?

From Catholic Ireland Zine:

We need look no further than today's newspapers to see the shocking misuse of power in the prisons of Iraq. Nothing can justify that behaviour, which so degrades human beings. Power entrusted to the hands of a fallible human being can easily lead to distorted judgments and exploitative behaviour… The power over others that comes with military victory has been abused and it is right that such events be brought to light.
– Most Rev Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Birmingham

Remember, it is our fallibility and weakness--our sinfulness--that make limits on power necessary. We should not trust people with power when they say "Trust us. We won't misuse our power."

Also at Catholic Ireland Zine, an article by the late Father Niall O’Brien on Preemptive strikes for peace has caught my eye. Here are some excerpts:

What will a future generation say of us who are so judgmental about the failures of previous generations? Today we know far more about what is going on in the Congo, Chechnya or the Middle East and have far greater possibilities of checking out the truth than our predecessors ever had. We have enormous financial and technical resources and still, for instance, nothing was done to stop the mass-destruction of half a million people in Rwanda or the slaughter of so many in Central America.

War, often promoted by outside financial greed, is the main cause of suffering in many of these poverty stricken places. Someone described war as the ultimate poverty. In war you loose everything. We are paralyzed with horror by the abduction and murder of children here at home. Yet in the armed conflicts that are presently taking place two thousand children are killed or injured every single day.

[snip]

Peace is not just the absence of war or tension. Peacemaking involves scanning the horizon for those things that are the seeds of war and then undertaking deliberate preemptive work to remove them. Peacemaking means support for those unsung people who work at the various peace processes throughout the world. It demands an awareness of what is going on in the world around us and a commitment to confront the conditions and issues which produce war and oppression. It means taking time to study issues like the effect on children of sanctions in Iraq (which according to a visiting group of Nobel Prize winners cause up to 4,500 deaths every month); the reasons why Palestinians are prepared to blow themselves up; or the involvement of multinational companies in Africa's wars. Peacemaking means educating ourselves, taking stands on issues and continually praying for peace.

[snip]

What is the alternative, you ask? The short answer is active non-violence. As one who has studied and tried to promote non-violence over the years I am sometimes daunted by the ignorance of ordinary Christians about the possibility and effectiveness of non-violence as an alternative to war.

Let me just say this: "Boy, do they prepare for war!" All those weapons, technology and research, all that discipline and money. And we expect nonviolence to work without preparation. God will provide! Not without our involvement!

Non-violence is not a magic wand, but a disciplined way of life. It is an art that demands much study and training. An example of what it can achieve was the fall of President Marcos in the Philippines (1986). Those of us who lived through his oppression were familiar with his death squads, with their massacres and "disappearances". A friend once said to me: "maybe non-violence would work in India with Gandhi and the British – who were sort of gentlemen – but certainly not here in the Philippines." Not long afterwards the Marcos supporters watched with amazement as his regime crumbled before crowds armed with flowers, sandwiches, statues and prayers.

[snip, to concluding paragraph:]

Some time ago I edited a prayer book and when I came to the part on confession I put in at the beginning the question: Before thinking of confession have you yourself forgiven? I suddenly realized that I had never seen that as a requirement for confession before. Yet it is in every line of the Gospel, it is the lifeblood of the Christian story. Start with your own life. Learn to forgive, disarm your own heart. Then begin to think of ways to bring the Gospel of Peace to your own house, to your neighbourhood and to the wider world.

I have been reading Simon Wiesenthal's book The Sunflower; On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. It is easy to understand the Christian responsibility to forgive sins against oneself. What authority does one have to forgive trespasses against others? This topic came up recently on Hugo Schwyzer's blog in a post entitled Nick Berg, anger, and pacifism:

Look, I'm a Christian pacifist more than I am a "liberal". My pacifism is not situational. And it is not rooted in idealistic illusions about human nature, either. Before the Nick Berg video, I was not under the impression that the boys in Al Qaeda were nice, reasonable folks, who just needed to be shown the love of Christ in order to bring them around to civilization. Real pacifists have no doubts about the reality of human depravity! Human beings do awful, disgusting, beastly things to each other -- they've been doing those things for centuries; only recently have they insisted on filming themselves while they do it. So no, I haven't "changed my mind" about anything as a result of being presented with video evidence of barbarism.

Most Christian pacifists throughout history have held to their pacifism in the face of incredible ugliness and persecution. I am tired of the accusation that Christian pacifism is a position of the "comfortably naive", while just war theory is the position of the (apparently) "responsibly wise". Pacifism flourished in the persecutions of 3rd century Rome, in 16th century Europe, and in 20th century South Africa. Sometimes the patient endurance of suffering impressed the oppressors so much that they rethought their oppression (the British in India), but most of the time, a lot of nice pacifists just got killed. I am a pacifist not because I believe that "love can change the world", but because I believe that God can and does act dramatically in human history to change what we cannot. I believe that to follow Christ is to foreswear the use of weapons, even in self-defense. I believe that the victory over death and evil has already been won by Christ, and my only job is to follow Him.

Look, these are the musings of a childless man. (Pacifism, I'm told, gets a whole lot tougher when you have little ones). But despite what some of my more conservative and hawkish friends say (and they are truly friends), I am not a pacifist because I fail to comprehend the enormity of human wickedness, nor am I pacifist because I am a coward. I am a pacifist because my lord tells me that even while I grieve Nick Berg, and feel nausea and sadness and, yes, rage at his death, I must pray all the harder for the men who killed him. I must respond even to this unspeakable ugliness with love. If Nick Berg had been my brother, could I write those same words? In the short run, no; I would surely be overcome by an anger so intense that it blinded me. But in the end, no matter what my human emotions may be, I know the only way forward is forgiveness, and that, as my Savior taught me and as my church teaches, that forgiveness must be expressed in action. And responding to Nick Berg's death with violence is incompatible with that understanding of forgiveness.

[emphasis in original]Then, read a comment by xlrq to this post:

Sorry, Hugo, but this time you're on your own. Your concept of forgiveness is, quite frankly, whacked, both as a matter of Biblical theology and as a matter of basic morals. No one has the right to "forgive" the monsters who butchered Nick Berg. Only Berg himself has that right, and thanks to them, he is no longer capable of exercising it. All you have the right to forgive them for is the pain that their heinous act caused to YOU. The rest is not yours (or mine, or anyone else's) to forgive. If there's a God (which, as an agnostic, I will neither admit nor deny), then I'll concede that HE has that right. For anyone else to take it upon themselves to forgive a wrong committed against someone else is, I submit, to play God.

But perhaps I err. Perhaps, when Jesus urged everyone to pray saying "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," he really meant "forgive us our debts, as we forgive each other's debtors." If that's how it works, have I got a deal for you: I'll forgive your mortgage if you forgive mine. I'm sure the banks will understand.

[emphasis added] If it is true that only the murdered can forgive the murderers...

And read Hugo Schwyzer's follow-up post on this topic:

What does it mean to not "repay" evil with evil, when no evil has been done to me in the first place? How can I advocate turning the other cheek when my cheek has not been struck?

[emphasis in original]

Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with loud songs of joy.
For the LORD, the Most High, is awesome,
a great king over all the earth.
He subdued peoples under us, and nations under our feet.
He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loves.
God has gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.
Sing praises to God, sing praises;
sing praises to our King, sing praises.
For God is the king of all the earth;
sing praises with a psalm.
--Psalm 47:2-7 (46:2-7 in the Roman Catholic numbering of the Psalms)

we should remember that we are messengers of Jesus’ gospel of peace

not of “the Mennonite peace position.” From an editorial by Paul Schrag in Mennonite Weekly in which he discussed a speech by Richard Kauffman on “Communicating the Message of Peace to Skeptical Audiences”:

Jesus desires all his followers to live peaceably, but many have failed to accept this essential part of his message.

At the same time, peace advocates must be clear that they do not claim to know how to solve all the world’s problems quickly. Christian peacemaking “is not about the most expeditious way of dealing with violence in the short term,” Kauffman said. “Part of being a Christian is saying we don’t take short cuts. Jesus’ way of peace isn’t the shortest way.”

Sometimes an effective way to stop violence, at least for a time, is to answer it in kind. We should admit that. But, eventually, violence breeds more of the same. Problems either aren’t solved, or they are traded for a new set of problems. We see this in Iraq: The invasion ousted Saddam Hussein but produced increasing terrorism against Iraqis and Americans.

That’s the practical argument, and we should make it. But it’s not the most important one. Fundamentally, we don’t advocate peace because it works but because it is a response of faith, an unavoidable consequence of a decision to give our lives to Jesus completely. When faced with a choice between doing what “works” and being true to Christ, we hope and pray we will choose to act faithfully.

Now the problem in Iraq is that the United States can't quickly disentangle itself without making things worse. How can the coalition forces leave without dumping Iraq into a bloody civil war and partition?

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)