Nonviolence

A few years ago, I came across an article and poem by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh, entitled "Nonviolence: Practicing Awareness" which began with the poem "Please Call Me By My True Names." I held the poem within for a long time and allowed it to expand, somewhat like yeast in the dough. The poem is about three persons: the first, a twelve year old girl, one of the boat people crossing the Gulf of Thailand, raped by a sea pirate, an act which forced her to jump into the ocean; the second is the sea pirate, born in a remote village in Thailand; and the third person is the reader.

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive. I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope; the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. I am also the merchant of arms, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve year lid girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. I am also the sea pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true names so that I can hear at the same time all my cries and my laughs, so that I could see that my joy and pain are but one. Please call me by my true names so that I could become awake, so that the door of my heart be left open, the door of Compassion.

I would like to use this poem as the basis for my reflection because I go through these stages again and again, in a cyclical rhythm of pain, despair and hope. My thoughts on nonviolence are situated in the context of each of the three participants of the poem.

As a woman of the Church, of the earth, and of the 20th century, I have experienced those destructive forces which oppress, ravish and rob the very heart of life. This has come to me in the pain of other women whose lives have been broken and shattered and stripped of all dignity and worth, through the violence which is being done to the planet, in discriminating attitudes which strike at my womanhood, and in the cries and laments of the human community. In this I share in the suffering of the twelve year old girl.

As a human being, who is part of a wider community, as a consumer of limited resources and as one whose nature is marked by sin and greed, I am one with the destructive action of the sea pirate.

Finally, I am the person who reflects deeply upon life events. I am forever being swept into a paschal experience of powerlessness, despair, death and new life. I cling to hope and peace, and in this I reflect the mind and heart of the reader. I can push my memory as far back as 1963, being six years old at the time, to recall the first national violent event to touch my consciousness. This was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy followed shortly by the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, his assassin. What impressed me at the time was a terrific sense of pain on the part of many people outside my immediate realm of existence, a mood of collective grieving as it were. I remember the shocked and tearful faces which filled the television screen. There was Caroline, a girl my own age, caught up in the confusion and anxiety of a nation, the turmoil of her family and the loss of her own father taken away so violently. Poor Caroline, already brutalized! I looked across the room at my own father, wondering what it would be like to lose him to a bullet? The waves of fear, shock and uncertainty began to flow then, but also the underpinnings of a commitment to choose life at all costs.

Sympathy and compassion came to be born from the events of those days. My mind began to fill in what the press had failed to report on the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. I was overwhelmed with a pity for this man whose life was taken from him as violently as he had taken life. I wept but did not know why. Perhaps that event violated us all?

Years later I reflect on the fact that the violence, anger, estrangement and rage of the Kennedy assassination was but a manifestation of the disunity already seething within our own hearts. It seems there is only one thing to do and that is to turn inward and destroy in ourselves all that we think we ought to destroy in others. This is such a slow and painful process and there isn't any neat plan we can receive from another in how to go about this work. Other people are just as uncertain and weak in trying to root out the violence within themselves. We are always thrown back upon our own resources and the only responsibility we can shoulder in this work is responsibility for ourselves.

In 1968 I was the twelve year old girl growing up on the streets of Brooklyn. I had my share of sea pirates too. It was the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Vietnam, and racial riots. The neighborhood in which I grew up was a microcosm of the nation and world. It had its own stories, rituals, seasons and distinctive characteristics. There was the corner grocery store owned by an old German family, honest, hard working people who serviced our street for 25 years until they were forced out by the mob.

Life is difficult, it is true, even for a child in the local community. It is a struggle from minute to minute. But the struggle itself is so thrilling and activates many possibilities for mature growth in peace and self giving. I reflect on how the world is very much within the contemplative community of women in which I live. Community is the best arena for the struggle towards a nonviolent way of being. We may think of ourselves as nonviolent people, but living in community shatters all those illusions about our nonviolence. Community, in whatever form, is the greatest place of challenge. It pulls and pushes us into a self transformation we could not accomplish on our own. It is the place where we learn what we have to do to become nonviolent

Again I go back in memory to that summer of '68 just after Martin Luther King, Jr. was slain when the streets of New York were heavy with racial tension and outbreaks of violence. I wondered why such animosity and hatred existed over the color of one's skin? I had a black friend, Yolanda, whom I made it a point to invite over to the house often enough. The hushed silence and wide-eyed stares of the neighbors never ceased. Years later I spent time working in the country of Ghana, West Africa. I was a white woman in an all black milieu. The color of my skin did not matter and I was welcomed into the arms of a hospitable people. One day I visited an old slave castle in the town of Cape Coast, which had been left standing as a memorial to the thousands who were so brutally beaten, stripped and raped of dignity, culture and homeland. It is one of those dangerous memories we must never allow to die. I stood there with my black friends whose ancestors had been martyred within the castle walls or on the outgoing ocean voyage. We were in front of one of the cells which during the slave trading days held men, women and children like animals packed and confined in slaughterhouse fashion. We held each other, embracing the pain of the past, and wept.

My skin is the color of those who persecuted. Forgive me, Lord, for being part of that violence which was so outright and crude. Have mercy on my pitifully shrunken soul!

Often in prayer, I feel like a battlefield in which the problems of the past and of the present are being fought out. I am reminded of a line from Deuteronomy: "Yahweh will fight the battle, you have only to keep still." I try to keep myself available, allowing my heart to be the battlefield. The world in all it's pain needs some place to struggle and to come to peace. It is a service I can give, a great work in nonviolence, to volunteer my heart as the welcoming space of unrestrained hospitality. This takes all the courage I can muster up as the field of battle is often quite bloody!

In the late sixties and early seventies, the country was filled with resistance over Vietnam, the Attica prison riots, the shooting of George Wallace, the return of the P.O.W.s, the Watergate scandal, and the resignation of the President of the U.S. This was the backdrop of my teen years. I had a button on my jacket which read: "War is not healthy for children and other living things." On my wrist I wore a P.O.W, bracelet which held the name of a Major from Texas. Every time a list of returning P.O.W.'s was released I would search through, praying his name would be on it. I corresponded for a time with his wife. He never made it home.

I remember a teacher in school having us pray that when the boys in our class reached the draft age our country would be at peace and they would never know the horrors of war. I have carried my peers in prayer ever since. I did not recognize then that even though violence is everywhere condemned, it still flourishes. Where violence can be outright and crude, it is more often invisible and subtle, with effects no less deadly. Many are the ways we strike the vulnerable while not daring to touch the stronger. We victimize those who have no protection or escape from our abuse, especially those with whom we live and work. It happens in the daily digs and pokes that corrode the spirit, in the lacerating we do with tongue and wit, in frozen attitudes we assume and which we refuse to be melted in the fire of compassion.

We are now in the latter years of the 80's, a decade which has witnessed the Iranian hostage crisis, the attempted assassinations of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, the rise and fall of Solidarity, the invasion of Grenada, an escalation in nuclear arms build up, the Beirut bombings, the space shuttle disaster, etc., etc., etc. In some ways it is a time of world weariness, we live in the shadow of cross and passion. The earth suffers and nature is exploited in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. The heart and mind of humanity is racked and pierced.

We are in a life threatening situation today: we suffer from an addiction to militarism, the prospects of a catastrophic global emergency resulting from a nuclear war, pollution of our air, water, land and food. These addictive patterns must be broken by non-cooperation and an introduction to creative alternatives. Any work we do in choosing Life will of necessity call forth the feminine. The feminine is the refuge!

The feminine touches us to encircle the battered, fearful, death dealing shadows of ourselves with embraces of compassion. I love the image of the encircling feminine, holding and healing. The architecture of our monastery chapel speaks of the womb and the arms of Mary's embrace, It is in the maternal love of the feminine that our world will begin to find its healing.

Another image apt for our day is that of a boat crossing a stormy sea. The journey is rough and it seems our life boat is being pushed and pulled. Many seek to disembark, others jump overboard, and some just fall asleep. I am reminded of Jesus' admonition to the disciples to "stay awake and pray not to be put to the test." What does it mean for us to "stay awake" in these times of deep cultural and societal pathology? In The Challenge of Peace the American bishops remind us that a society cannot live in peace with itself unless every human person is treated with dignity and all human life is reverenced as sacred. We need to don our seamless garments and remember that it is holy ground upon which we walk.

Society makes it difficult to be awake. We are bombarded through the media with scenes of starving third world refugees, thousands of homeless and displaced persons, the violence of war and its tragedies, and the plight of the poor. We wake up for a time but then we forget again because the kind of society in which we live tries to anesthetize us into a dreamless sleep. How keen is our awareness?

I return again and again to the poem quoted in the beginning of this reflection. I live out of its cycle. We all do. I pray for the courage to withstand life's attacks in all its forms and faces. Yes, many are the deaths which weave through our lives. Sometimes we are forced to hurl ourselves overboard, the weight of our burdens like millstones around our necks. We sink into the depths of an ocean abyss. The oppressed and oppressor, the violator and violated all mingle in the life streams of ourselves. The girl despairs, the sea pirate rages, the on-looker tries to make sense of it all. We are a people of many names and faces, called and fashioned by the One who is our Source and our Shalom.

Sr. Gail Worcelo, C.P., a member of the Passionist Nuns, did this companion piece to a previous Notebook article on the subject of Violence. Her monastery is 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 Passionist Congregation, 5700 N. Harlem Ave., Chicago, IL. 60631.