inspiral blog

The topic this week was violence, nonviolence and gender, and it was a really interesting dynamic. For starters, out of the 7 of us, 6 were couples. Then, we discovered, it was four introverted males and 3 extraverted females. Interesting.

This made the first exercise pretty much useless, as the girls were already the dominant force in the group, so rather than liberating, it just seemed contrived. Actually, we discovered that none of the girls present had had much experience of gender violence at all. Huh. So what to do here?

We spent some time acknowledging that gender violence is a reality for many, and the fact that these girls don’t experience it is the direct result of the efforts and suffering of many women throughout history. We had some great discussions actually around gender roles. This was perhaps the most useful part for us – clearing the air over what constituted feeling safe for both guys and girls.

An email discussion in the previous week with another FVTW facilitator cleared up some confusions about this session: that some distinctions needed to be made between feminist contributions to nonviolence on the one hand, and issues of gender violence and nonviolence on the other. Also there were some parts that were actually not necessarily exclusively about gender nonviolence at all (eg. the two hands of nonviolence, which is equally applicable to all types of nonviolence, and the opening quote, which while it references gender violence, is again actually a good general nonviolence principle.) Making these distinctions was useful.

The opening quote is, in my opinion, one of the best in the book. It comes from Pam McAllister’s You Can’t Kill the Spirit: Stories of Women and Nonviolent Action:

“What has drawn me most strongly to nonviolence is its capacity for encompassing a complexity necessarily denied by most strategies. By complexity I mean the sort faced by feminists who rage against the system of male supremacy but, at the same time, love their fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, and male friends. I mean the complexity which requires us to name an underpaid working man who beats his wife both as someone who is oppressed and as an oppressor. Violent tactics and strategies rely on polarization and dualistic thinking and require us to divide ourselves into the good and the bad, assume neat, rigid little categories easily answered from the barrel of a gun. Nonviolence allows for the complexity inherent in our struggles and requires a reasonable acceptance of diversity and an appreciation for our common ground.”

We tried personalising the two hands of nonviolence bit (one hand palm outward to indicate the unwillingness to tolerate oppression, one hand open to receive the oppressor), because having tested it a few weeks ago, it was hard to do as described in the book without giggling (it just felt ridiculous). Personalising it helped; and this became quite powerful, particularly for one person, who wanted to adopt it physically as a response to situations of conflict! I think one of the things that this course is great for is actually making us aware of our bodies and body language in a way that we have lost touch with otherwise. I don’t think most of us are aware of the ways in which we place our bodies are not merely reflective of how we’re feeling, but have the power to shape our experience. This course is giving us practice at that, which is great once you get past the strangeness of it.

Sam mentioned a good point at the end: that none of this session dealt (at least directly, as I would say they are implied in all of it) with the religious or faith dimensions of gender violence or nonviolence, including Jesus. The way Jesus dealt with gender was utterly revolutionary, not only for his time but for ours as well. This struck me as a significant oversight, not so much on the part of the FVTW course, but rather on my part.

Overall, I’d say this was one of the weaker sessions in terms of our experience of the course – not that the material was weak so much as the dynamics and characteristics of our group are such that there was less necessity or resonance in it. Nonetheless, still a very useful session that adds much to our knowledge and experience of nonviolence as a way of life. Next week: Anthony leads our Gandhi session.

I’m sure by now you’d all be familiar with my enormous respect (to say the least) for Ched Myers, who wrote one of the books I’m basing our current series of talks on. I came across this rather insightful review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ by Ched, and think it is well worth wading through. When you finally get down to what he means, you find he’s hit the nail right on the head, but I’ll admit it’s tough going to get there sometimes.

Here are a few brief excerpts from what is a fairly long article:

The inevitable result of narrating the death of Jesus without narrating his life is that the credulous viewer is forced to surmise that Jesus must have been a nice guy who was killed for no good reason by mean, spiteful people. And if, in addition, the theological assumption (as is the case for Gibson) is that the main purpose of Jesus’ life was for him to die “for our sins,” then someone had to do the dirty deed of killing him.

And:

Attempts to “harmonize” what are four very different versions of the Jesus story have long been discredited because they give the editor such wide license to pick and choose. This effectively creates a “fifth” gospel – or in Gibson’s case, anti-gospel. The only way to unravel Gibson’s fabric is to examine each gospel separately, in order to see their different emphases and purposes.

Also:

While the via crucis in Gibson’s film is an agonizing, interminable study in pietistic Catholic midrash, Mark’s version is spare and grim, needing no embellishment. This is because in his time, this public spectacle functioned to deter subversives and to aggrandize the Roman military presence. It inspired not beatific (voyeuristic? sadistic?) ecstasy in the beholder, as in the film, but sheer terror.

On the subversive nature of the church (as it was intended):

“It is often said that the Christian understanding of the human individual, which considers him at the same time fallen yet redeemable, offers a point of departure more adequate, i.e. more correct and more realistic, than that which was provided by the Utopian idea, where man is seen as almost ready to complete his own redemption, or by the mechanistic idea, where man is nothing but a product of his circumstances. We are now ready to affirm that the biblical understanding of the powers in history can give us a more adequate intellectual framework of the task of social discernment to which we are especially called in our age. This discernment is not simply a way of helping the needy with their social problems, a kind of updated philanthropy, nor does it mean simply to guide individual Christians by helping them to do good deeds or to avoid sin. It is rather a part of the Christians’ proclamation that the church is under orders to make known to the Powers, as no other proclaimer can do, the fulfillment of the mysterious purposes of God (Eph 3:10) by means of that Man in whom their rebellion has been broken and the pretensions they had raised have been demolished. The proclamation of the Lordship of Christ is not a substitute for nor a prerequisite to the gospel call directed to individuals. Nor is it the mere consequence within society of the conversion of individuals one by one. Nor does it dispense with, or guarantee, or always necessarily facilitate such conversions… That Christ is Lord, a proclamation to which only individuals can respond, is nevertheless a social, political, structural fact which constitutes a challenge to the Powers. It thus follows that the claims such proclamation makes are not limited to those who have accepted it, nor is the significance of its judgment limited to those who have decided to listen to it.”

John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, pp. 159-161, emphasis in bold type added.

Researching for this week, I came across these two quotes in Ched Myers’ Who Will Roll Away The Stone?. On the erosion of the modern democracy:

“Democracy is a good idea, insofar as it redistributes power on a regular basis. But its great vulnerability is that it demands an empowered citizenry, one that is constantly training itself to identify and resist concentrations of power. That is hardly the case in the locus imperii [centre of power] today. Regular citizens have steadily decreasing control over the steadily increasing centralization of State power, which electoral politics simply no longer has the power to change…Because electoral politics under capitalism is firmly under the rule of image, it is also under the sway of those who can afford to manufacture those images. Representation has degenerated into consumer choices between rabidly competing, but scarcely differing, political personality cults. Elitist decision-making, structured advantages for big capital, two-party monopolizing, public mystification – these are the true enemies of democracy.” (WWRATS, p. 256.)

On somatic politics (or putting our bodies on the line for a cause):

“Hope is where your ass is.” — Philip Berrigan, Plowshares activist and former Catholic priest.

This week we look at denial through the eyes of Peter. I just wrote a whole massive post on it, but the blog deities ate it (it’s a new-look control panel for some reason), so I’ll just post the two quotes I wanted to include. Both of them come from the book I’m reading, called Waging Peace, which was written at the height of the Cold War, about peacemaking in the age of nuclear weapons. Both, significantly, are about prayer, and the way it subverts our denial of Jesus. The first is from Jim Wallis of the Sojourners community:

When Paul speaks of Christ’s “disarming” the powers, he simply means that he exposed their lie, showed them for what they were, unmasked the illusion of their power, and stood free of their rewards and punishments. Jesus’ freedom from the fear and control of the powers was rooted in the deep knowledge of who he was and to whom he belonged. His communion with his father was his constant source of strength and power.

Prayer is the act of reclaiming our identity as the children of God; it declares who we are and to whom we belong. The action of prayer places us outside the realm of the powers and principalities. As prayer declares our true identity, it destroys our false identities. In prayer we act upon who we really are, and thus prayer has the effect of diminishing the illusions that have controlled us. It is therefore an act of revealing the truth and unmasking the lie. Prayer allows us to step out of our traps and find ourselves again in God.

We can regain ourselves from the control of the powers only by placing ourselves totally in God’s hands. Prayer, therefore, not only declares our true identity but also declares where our true security is. As prayer roots our security in God, it roots out the false securities that enslave us and lead us to war.

The second is from the same book, but a chapter by Henri Nouwen, the Christian mystic:

In a situation in which the world is threatened by annihilation, prayer does not mean much when we undertake it only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter, or as an offering of comfort in stress-filled times. Prayer in the face of a nuclear holocaust only makes sense when it is an act of stripping ourselves of everything, yes, even of life itself. Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.

This explains why, although we often feel a real desire to pray, we experience at the same time a strong resistance. We want to move closer to God, the source and goal of our existence, but at the same time we realize that the closer we come to God the stronger will be his demand to let go of the many “safe” structures we have built around ourselves. Prayer is such a radical act because it requires us to criticize our whole way of being in the world, to lay down our old selves and accept our new self, which is Christ. (emphasis mine)

When Homer Simpson goes into space on a NASA mission, he accidentally smashes an ant farm that was on the shuttle, and as the ants fly out from behind the glass, one screams “Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!” This is our very real paradox; we maintain our denial because we are afraid of the freedom God gives us from this world, a freedom almost too big for us to grasp. But if we can shake that denial, and grasp that freedom, together becoming a community of resistance to the powers of this world, then we can truly live.

I’ve been reading Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi (a book that, interestingly boasts “a story that can make you believe in God”), and I came across this quote about doubt:

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them – and then they leap.

I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

He uses a number of similes like this, but I found it to be a useful comment. There is an extent to which doubt can be useful, but only to a point. At some stage (as I have blogged previously) one must nail one’s colours to the mast, and at the same time, be prepared to risk being wrong.

I’ve been reading ‘The Essential Gandhi’, a collection of Gandhi’s writings compiled by Louis Fischer, a contemporary of Gandhi’s and someone who wrote a great deal about him. It’s been fascinating to get a closer and more detailed look at his life and ideas, particularly when it’s from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

One of the things I appreciate greatly about Gandhi’s activism is his insistence on consistent conduct – means and ends being essentially the same thing. Nowhere is this more apparent than his views (and actions) on loving one’s enemies. Not an original concept, to be sure, but certainly one that has rarely been lived out, especially in a situation of conflict. His whole understanding of Satyagraha (his way of life, incorporating non-violence, love and truth) is based in seeking the good for all. So much of the activism I see in my community is oppositional, and usually hateful towards various people or groups (John Howard in particular), and therefore destructive. Gandhi insisted that we must love those whom we seek to “convert” as it were, and not merely outwardly, but inwardly as well. I think what makes Gandhi so compelling a figure for me is that he had the opportunity to develop ideas that we get only grabs of in Jesus’ life. Love of enemies, for example, was clearly something that Jesus did, and did well, but Gandhi kind of developed how he thought that worked more thoroughly. There’s something concrete about having someone so recent, and so historically documented, that is helpful in grounding it.

Like this quote, on seeing the best in those who consider themselves your enemies:

Let us…honor our opponents for the same honesty of purpose and patriotic motive that we claim for ourselves…I believe in trusting…A man who is truthful will not believe charges even against his foes. He will, however, try to understand the viewpoints of his opponents and will always keep an open mind and seek every opportunity of serving his opponents.

If only we could do that! It’s so difficult when you disagree or are in conflict with someone to actually assume the best of them.

There are things about Gandhi that I struggle or disagree with (particularly his treatment of his family), but there is much to affirm about the ways he attempted to live out his beliefs. That’s all I have at the moment, but he will continue to be a significant figure in my development towards a non-violent spirituality.

Our OI fundraising problems are solved. When I told my 3 year old niece what we were doing (“we’re trying to get some money for people who don’t have very much”) she said, “I know how to get some money!”

“Ooh, tell me!” says I.

“You get in the car and go to the shops, and there’s a machine at the shops that you put your card in and money comes out.”

Now why didn’t I think of that earlier?

After a conversation with Erica the other day about the scourge of busyness, I was reminded of this prayer of Leunig, and particularly of the sentiment that ‘nothing can be loved at speed’. We are obsessed as a culture with being busy – just ask anyone how their week was, and if the reply doesn’t include the word ‘busy’, it’s usually the exception rather than the rule. In fact, imagine answering ‘no’ to someone who asked if you’d been busy lately. Seriously, try it. Makes you feel like you’re lazy, or unproductive, or have no life. Nonetheless, I strive incessantly for an unhurried existence – intentionally leaving space (in the form of time) between appointments, and not cramming too much into my life. In this way I am free to respond to needs as they arise, and am (hopefully) able to cultivate a prayerful peace in my being that is infectious.

Anyway, I was reminded of this idea again last night during a CS Lewis documentary, as it brought to mind a passage in his partial autobiography ‘Surprised by Joy’. His passion for deliberately walking the countryside never waned.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not yet been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return, I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.” The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation that lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimmage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

This is one of the pleasures of living in the inner city for me – most things are within walking or riding distance, and public transport takes you places in a reasonable amount of time, so there is little need for a car. Nonetheless, these things require a degree of patience, because you don’t get there as fast or perhaps as “conveniently”. I read in the newspaper the other day that 25% of all car trips are less than 2km, so a lot of people are opting for speed and so-called ‘convenience’ over walking, cycling or public transport. That says a lot about our busyness in itself.

I’m reminded of this every time we drive out to my family’s houses in the Eastern Suburbs (more like 35 km), and I sit impatiently in traffic on the freeway. I often wish for some kind of portal that would cut out the distance between point a and point b, because to me it is useless space in terms of achieving my objective. This is the way we are taught to think. So CS Lewis’ thoughts gives me pause for thought. It’s a horrible cliche, but in that context, the idea of life being “about the journey, not the destination” may actually be an important distinction for our wellbeing. What happens to us when we lose the sense of distance between things? In what ways does it warp our view of the world?

I recall a statistic I heard once that walking speed is the fastest a human can go whilst still genuinely taking in their surrounds. Anything faster, and the eyes and brain cannot fully cope.

Anyway, I try to maintain a reasonable degree of unhurriedness to my life. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t. And so I continue to appreciate the prayer of Leunig:

Dear God, we pray for another way of being: another way of knowing.

Across the difficult terrain of our existence we have attempted to build a highway and in so doing have lost our footpath. God lead us to our footpath: Lead us there where in simplicity we may move at the speed of natural creatures and feel the earth’s love beneath our feet. Lead us there where step-by-step we may feel the movement of creation in our hearts. And lead us there where side-by-side we may feel the embrace of the common soul. Nothing can be loved at speed.

God lead us to the slow path; to the joyous insights of the pilgrim; another way of knowing; another way of being.

AMEN

Peekay’s comes to his granpa with a question about the Bible. This is his granpa’s response:

“All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes there’s trouble. The only time I ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer I was with at the battle of Dundee told me that he’d once gotten hit by a Mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a Bible in his tunic pocket and the Bible saved his life. He told me that ever since he’d always carried a Bible into battle with him and he felt perfectly safe because God was in his breast pocket. We were out looking for a sergeant of the Worcesters and three troopers were wounded while out on a reconaissance and were said to be holed up in a dry donga. In truth I think my partner felt perfectly safe because the Boer Mausers were estimated by the British artillery to be accurate to 800 yards and we were at least 1,200 yards from enemy lines. Alas, nobody bothered to tell the Boers about the shortcomings of their brand new German rifle and a Mauser bullet hit him straight between the eyes.” He puffed at his pipe. “Which goes to prove, you can always depend on British army information not to be accurate, the Boers to be deadly accurate, the Bible to be good for matters of the heart but hopeless for those of the head and finally, that God is in nobody’s pocket.”