To Violence and Back

The journey image is powerful because we can see it so well, so clearly and so often in our lives We journey through life, into life and within life and we journey on all levels of our being. The journeys within seem to me the most fascinating; within life, ourselves and the ideas and experiences that shape us. These few pages review one theme, one such journey grappling with the perception of violence. It's a journey of ordinary occurrences.

1932: our country was still deep in the grip of what has come to be known as the Great Depression. My family was certainly still within that experience. My father had lost the corner grocery store he had started with high hopes in the late 1920's. He worked now at whatever he could find whenever he could find it.

My mother's experience was of flight, to escape the pressures of creditors and bill collectors, who were themselves only trying to support their families. A fourth child could not have been what my parents most wanted on a practical level. Yet, because they lived with very ordinary faith and courage of all good people, I was welcomed. These dust bowl, Okie, Al Capone times were not perceived as violent.

1943: my young heart was bursting with pride as I stood in the downtown 5 and 10 cents store. My mother was letting me pick out the 'Service Flag' we would hang in the front window. I can see it now with the blue star, an anchor and a bit of gold braid across the top going down the sides to form tassels at the end.

Like everyone else we followed the news, looking at the maps on the front page of the newspaper every day. Our generation grew up conscious of war yet not really knowing. We saw some of those blue stars turn to silver or gold; unless it was the flag in our own window tragedy was still not too real. The war was good, just and salvific. John Wayne never played a Jew being sent to Auschwitz.

The World Was Not Perceived as Violent

My brother came home and I entered high school...peacetime...the Truman and Eisenhower years...we had dropped the Bomb and I for one was totally unaware. My parents, my teachers, my classmates-none of us raised our voice, none had any questions, none among us had insight enough to fear or to be awed or to seek a new vision.

The economy see-sawed through the close of the 40's until finally the Korean war brought about enough business to quiet things down. The military-industrial marriage steadied and has remained terrifyingly faithful. High school years are chaotic by nature but these years also reflected the fits and starts and heaving of a nation, a world, an era beginning to sway as if rocked from deep, deep within itself.

But still, the world and its people were not perceived as violent.

Looking back, the 30's, the 40's and the 50's seem so serene. There was something, either present or absent, that gives an aura of calmness to that period. A sense of purposeful, peaceful living. The music was mostly romantic, the movies fell into expected categories with happy endings and John Wayne always rode tall and got the girl. A few faint voices might have tried to break through, but who heard? The unconsciousness seems not a deliberate covering over the unawakened stage before maturity. We were not yet aware.

1958: I entered a Passionist contemplative community. John Kennedy's assassination a few years later barely entered the monastery walls. Civil rights were not an issue for us nor were we feminists. The deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were an abrupt awakening to the awareness of violence present in our society.

1968: I was one of three chosen to begin the foundation of our community in the Philippines. The country and its society seemed charged with life and vitality, full of color and quirks. Manila traffic was second to none in its hair-raising pace. There was full freedom of speech and what struck me as a rather flamboyant approach to politics.

1971: Overnight, literally overnight, the character of Philippine society changed. We woke up on the morning of Sept. 21 to a totally new order of things. It was an eerie day I shall never forget. We could only get one station on the radio, all newspapers had been closed, rumors abounded. The announcers read the presidential decree proclaiming martial law all day and all night. Interspersed was the report of the attack on Enrile's car, which even then was rumored to have been staged. (Amazingly, he has now admitted that.) The only song played was the new, never before heard Philippine "national anthem". That song was like the coup de grace to a people's heart on a bleak day in their history.

We grew to be able to taste and smell and touch the fear of our neighbors. Truly, the fear was palpable. There was no escaping the pervasiveness of fear, we were part and parcel of the neighborhood where, paradoxically or prophetically, we had built "Our Lady of Hope" Monastery. There was violence in that fear.

Can you imagine living in a small town and seeing young men walking the streets dressed for combat? They carried an 'Y116 rifle with bands of live ammunition criss-crossed on their chest, hand grenades hanging from their belts, along with a combat knife and bayonet. Can you imagine the power they must have felt, the confusion about their role and place in their own culture? These boys, off the street corners of Manila and Cebu and other towns and cities had been set over their own people to intimidate, to guard, sometimes to harass.

At night, almost every night, we would hear those M16's. The rifle has a strange, deep, guttural sound. To me, an obscene sound. It is an automatic rifle and shoots, not one bullet at a time, but a round of ammunition, a burst of deep, obscene sound. Then silence and a sense of waiting. There is no ambulance in such a small town, no sirens, only the silence...These episodes of the night would not be caused by ideology, it was more likely a girl, a bet, a drink; the down to earth things that kill people.

I began to reflect on violence.

1970's: The waves of change, of doubt, of indecision sweeping over the world, the Church and religious life were inescapable even in southern Mindanao. Life was too complicated, too puzzling for me to be able to seek answers calmly and objectively. Alone in my thinking and with no sense of direction I read all I could find of Holocaust literature, and began to comprehend the tremendous significance of that event in our history.

I went from the perception of living in a nonviolent world to the experience of living in fear filled tension. Not always my fear, but immersed in the knowledge and experience of society pervaded by reasonable fears. I struggled in my reflections on all this, I wanted to understand, to hope, to find faith and meaning.

I was not drawn to study or do research. In my contemplative community I live a life of prayer, reflecting on what I see and come to know through the connections discovered in prayer. My conviction is that as I begin to see so also shall the human family gain insight; that if I understand some portion of truth, the human family is enlightened. A later addition to that conviction is that as I discover and accept my feelings so also will the human family be enabled to reach its peacemaking potential.

My journey has been the ordinary one for my peer group, albeit a reflective journey. We and our parents before us did not perceive the violence of society, left out the consideration of violence and were, then, unprepared for the issues that sprang at society in the 60's and 70's.

It was difficult for me, from a distance, to grasp the meaning of these issues. These were the days of rioting in many of our cities, including my hometown, the days of the Watergate scandal in our government and the rise of the feminist movement.

My experience of violence in the martial law situation is all too familiar to many, many men, women and children throughout the world. It is intense and often physical. But that is not ordinarily our common experience. Here, in this country, in religious life, the violence we suffer and inflict is more often relational.

Let me share with you the moment I came to understand the why and what of the feminist issue. I was in a hospital in Manila. An American priest came to visit. When he arrived, he asked if he could use the toilet. When he came back into the room he said, "The toilet was running," and then began to lecture me on how to jiggle the handle, etc. to stop it....At first I thought he was kidding, so I nodded wide-eyed, as if fascinated. But he was dead serious, treating me as a child.

The violence in this is ordinary, a relational put-down on both sides; mine the more conscious as I mocked his seriousness. It really does not [flatter whether or not this person might have said the same thing to another man. It really does matter that we begin to see and understand the harm that can be done in such an exchange. The moment lighted up, for me, the abstract "feminist thing" and I began to see its impact on my life, values and attitudes.

This reflection continues to unfold. I under-stand to some extent the need for societal changes, the anger of some, the deep sorrow in others, toward existing structures and attitudes and am continually growing in sensitivity to these. All of this from an ordinary life situation and conversation.

I continued to read, to pray, to understand connections. Reviewing our years is a path to healing and wholeness. The image of the mushroom shaped cloud became more pervasive and holocaust took on a broader meaning.

1980's: After I had returned to the States the whole gamut of peace-making and pro-life issues coalesced, and through providential means unsought, I began to 'fleet other people with the same thoughts and hopes and dreams for peace.

The world, full of violence, is a place for peace.

Since that time, through the 70's and 80's, I have learned to see violence in all of creation, violence that must be present as creation unfolds, violence that must be brought to transformation.

We were born of a violent moment of creation that is still echoing through the cosmos....It is a realization not of negativity and fear but mind and heart expanding, one of bonding with the other parts of creation with whom and with which we truly "share space".

The contemporary need we have to find, acknowledge and deal with our feelings appropriately has to do with the development of peace and truth and justice as operative drives for the human family, as human and as family. The lessons of recent history lay this need on us as an imperative.

We can call it psychological development, we can call it making community, we can call it being saints; whatever we call it the movement toward wholeness and healing must be our next great human achievement. As the Pax Christi motto has it, "Violence ends where love begins."

Violence is part of our present reality. We acknowledge its existence but there is no need to be overwhelmed by that one part of reality. I cannot see a guarantee for the future in that same way I did in earlier years. We are a people and a world at risk, yet hope does rise from the faith given us. What life shall be and what death shall come are mysteries to me. A mystery based on the full cycle we are familiar with: there is life, there is death, there is New Life.

We have journeyed from a common perception of non-violence to the experience of living in a violent world. I have spent most of my life recording violent times and activities in my consciousness without even perceiving the violence. Now is a time of conversion so that what has been recorded can be disarmed and redeemed.

Many of my contemporaries are still living in our recently acquired perception of a violent world. That level of awareness pervades our present political and economic policies. The ultimate place of violence, however, is the only human heart that is mine, the ultimate place and the only place to make a start.

I felt I had to put my name on the line somewhere as a committed advocate of peace. In my 25th year of Passionist profession I privately took the Pax Christi Vow of Non-Violence. I believe it is a religious act, has a grace and a power to effect the change it envisions for the person and for the world. The power is channeled through a most imperfect human instrument and the change is imperceptible for the most part. My consciousness always needs to be sensitized to the violence in my mind, heart and actions.

This has been a journey of grace, of the love of God reaching into, shaping my life to see, to know and to return the knowledge of love back into the world, into the cosmos.

This Notebook was authored by Sr. Alene Perry, C.P., a member of the Passionist Nuns, 631 Griffin Pond Road, Clarks Summit, PA 18411. The article first appeared in THE PASSIONIST, published by the Holy Cross Province of the Congregation of the Passion, 5700 N. Harlem Ave., Chicago, IL 60631.