Justluckie

Peacemaking is a way of life, not a quick fix

Yesterday's Gospel reading at mass was the section of Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount on non-retaliation and love for the enemy. I preached on this text using some of Gandhi's insights on nonviolence along with Thomas Merton's reflections on Gandhi. My principal concern was to say that Jesus makes it clear that love for enemy is key - 'The only real liberation is that which liberates both the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time from the same tyrannical automatism of the violent process which contains in itself the curse of irreversibility' (Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence p.14, emphasis original).  We share a common problem with our enemy, who is also our neighbour and one like us. For Gandhi, nonviolence is not a political tactic but a way of life, a religious commitment and the fruit of a mature spirituality.

Inevitably, one or two people challenged me afterwards with the 'hard cases' of threatened genocide and with references to current conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. The problem behind these objections to the commitment to nonviolence is the assumption that nonviolent approaches 'don't work' and that the use of force does. I think this is a highly contestable view and I think there are very many examples of situations where the use of force has made as many problems as it appears to have solved. But this is not really the point. In Jesus teaching - and Gandhi followed him in this - the issue is not whether or not love for enemy produces a satisfactory outcome. We love our enemy not to get one over on him, but because we have recognised him as a child of God, a fellow human being. Nonviolence is the refusal to justify the means by the end. It is a commitment to live life free of the impulse for revenge because to do otherwise would be a dehumanising enslavement.

Merton summarises Gandhi's teaching like this:

'The evils we suffer cannot be eliminated by a violent attack in which one sector of humanity flies at another in destructive fury. Our evils are common and our solution of them can only be common. But we are not ready to undertake this common task because we are not ourselves. Consequently, the first duty of every man is to return to his own 'right mind' in order that society itself might be sane.' (ibid p.16)

Christianity does not have political solutions of its own to offer a violent world, but it does have spiritual responses. Penitence, self-control, love for enemy, love of God, recognition of the unity of all things and a steady commitment to truth-telling are daily disciplines that make transformation possible.

Christian Nonviolence - a forgotten imperative?

To follow up on my thoughts yesterday, I reread some of Thomas Merton's thoughts on nonviolence. He was profoundly influenced by Gandhi's thinking and practice in this area, and Gandhi in turn had recognised his own debt to the Christian Gospels in his own thinking. Merton's essay, Blessed are the Meek, explores how the Christian approach to the nonviolent resistance of evil is founded on evangelical principles of justice, humility, love of neighbour, eschatalogical hope and love for the enemy. The refusal to employ violence in response to violence is based on the commitment to truth and to the wellbeing of all rather than the advancement of any partisan cause. Nonviolent methods used in the service of such partisan causes is mere manipulation.

Strikingly, Merton underlines the importance of acknowledging that we have something to learn from our enemy as a basis for commitment to nonviolence. I remember hearing the late Christopher Hitchens spitting with rage (literally) at the 'evil' Christian notion that we should love our enemy. He saw the world in rather binary terms and such a worldview inevitably leads to a constant and struggle in which no one ultimately triumphs. Christianity, on the other hand, acknowledges that our enemy may have something against us (Mt 5:23 - if your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift at the altar...). The humility to acknowledge this is the first step towards an outcome that benefits all and benefits the truth. Furthermore, if our enemy is 'one like us', do we not diminish humanity itself in seeking to destroy him or her? Merton's view is based on a more positive view of humanity than many so-called 'humanists' allow, but he is not unrealistic about the nature and depth of human sinfulness. There would be no need for nonviolent resistance in a world that was basically OK!

Merton also stresses the eschatalogical patience needed to act nonviolently. He draws on the 'Kingdom' parables that speak of seeds growing silently to show that our small actions in resisting evil nonviolently begin to make real what is already promised in the inaugurated Kingdom [interestingly, Merton was a fan of C.H. Dodd - this could explain his take on these parables!]. He describes our lust for instant results as a fetish.

Nonviolence is the ultimate recognition that means must be consistent with ends. If we use violence to overcome violence, we have already submitted to its 'logic'. As I said yesterday, the Cross has already offered us another way, and it is a costly way. Nonviolence demands commitment, faith and courage. 

It seems to me that the Christian insights into nonviolent resistance that were developed in the wake of Gandhi's leadership of his people and during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war have receded from the churches' consciousness, at least in the Northern hemisphere. Have we turned our backs on the violence in the world? Have we bought into a secularist myth that we are so much nicer than we used to be? Have we become so wedded to the power interests of rich elites that we no longer know how to speak prophetically? Or have we withdrawn into a cosy spirituality that has become disconnected from the suffering world? I don't know, but it does seem to me that we would do well to recover a deeper commitment to nonviolent resistance of the violence that still surrounds us.

War and God - Martial Images in Churches

In some churches, I  have found myself uncomfortably surrounded by images of warfare. These have included military banners, icons or statutes of soldier-saints and obtrusive memorials to military leaders. Their presence in churches disturbs me because they seem so much at odds with the message of the one who did not retaliate and commanded his followers to behave likewise. The presence of these images speaks of a church that has, at times in its history, been allied with secular power and secular power often exerts its influence militarily. As one example, large stone memorials on the walls of some 'civic' Anglican churches give honour to military leaders who executed Britain's colonial ambitions, with varying degrees of success, against subject peoples across a vast empire. That these same churches are often at the more iconophobic end of the ecclesiastical spectrum is a particular irony.

The truth is that churches have endorsed and even promoted the violent ambitions of the powerful at some points of their history. So is it more honest to allow these images to remain and use them as an opportunity to confess a bloody past or to remove them as having no place in a church that works for peace?

I have heard it argued that churches ought to be able to take the whole of human life into their worship and this includes the cruel realities of war. I agree with this principle, but I do not think that permanent memorials to military elites are the way to do this, whatever the ethical record of the individuals commemorated. I would rather see Picasso's Guernica in church as an icon of the cruelty of war than a plaque praising the perpetrator of such violence.

There is, of course, the further question of what one does with existing memorials. Should they be retained as a way of telling our history, however unpalatable? I can see the strength of this argument, but the iconographic arrangements of a church should be directed towards the worship of the God of peace, not the provision of didactic tools.

Churches should, of course, commemorate all the faithful departed, including all those caught up in violent conflict. But I think I would rather not see any martial images in church. I am strongly drawn to the simplicity of Cistercian architecture, which is sparing in its use of any imagery. Among the few images that should, in my view, adorn our churches, is, indeed, one of brutal violence. But it is the brutal violence of the apparatus of state shown for all its evil in the execution of an itinerant preacher who subverted that same violence by refusing to participate in its cycle of revenge, even to the point of refusing self-defence. God is caught up in violence. He is the victim of the powerful, not their ally. He is every bereaved mother, every expendable foot soldier, every piece of collateral damage, and every brave soul who silently resists violence by confronting it with forgiving love.

 

 

Drones, Evil and White-Collar Violence

In a radio report on the key issues in the forthcoming elections in Pakistan, I heard repeated references from all side in the elections to the drone attacks carried out by the US against targets in Pakistan. These have resulted in numerous civilian deaths and have, unsurprisingly, created a powerful resentment and fear among ordinary Pakistanis. Why is it that these attacks have occupied so little of our moral imagination in the West? We are captivated in a gruesome manner by the actions of the lone guman, the predatory stalker and the fanatical bomber because they fit our conventional discourse of evil - bad men doing bad things. We are far less well equipped to see evil in the cool, efficient, mechanised, 'precise', remote, technologically sophisticated world of the drone.

Thomas Merton wrote powerfully about this dynamic in an essay called Toward a Theology of Resistence, which opened his book of essays, Faith and Violence. In this essay, he describes 'white-collar violence, the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man.' He warns against violence that, unlike the individual murderer, is 'abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt-feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate.' This 'polite' and organised violence might well be now taking the form of unmanned drones, which harness all the power and cleverness of communications technology to carry out strikes which, we reassure ourselves, are clean, surgical, effective, efficient and low-impact. Unlike the nuclear threat of Merton's immediate context, we like to imagine that the war we are currently perpetrating over the skies of Pakistan is well targeted and does not carry the risk of mass civilian casualties. The evidence suggests that this is nonsense.

And from a moral and theological point of view, Merton's concerns remain urgent. How do we respond to violence when it is carried out with such technological precision that the very word 'violence' seems too strong? Merton urges us to remember the heart of the Christian message in the cross, where Jesus responded to violence by taking the full force of evil upon himself and thus breaking the cycle of violent response. He urged a theology that was realistic, not sentimental, in dealing with the reality of 'white-collar violence', a theology that was prepared to seek out the roots of violence and hatred within each one of us, a theology that is an awakening to the suffering we cause others in our sophisticatedly indirect ways. His message is as urgent today as it was in the late '60s. It seems that our imaginations have still not expanded enough to let us see evil beneath the seductive disguise of technological progress.