inspiral blog

This week we focussed on MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights struggle in the US. This session provides some inspiration and key principles in the lead up to our next couple of weeks in planning and carrying out a nonviolent action: our very own ‘experiment’ with nonviolence.

We started tonight by choosing from the selection of Leunig prayers, just to get our heads in the space and to connect with each other somewhat. Then we spent a while hearing about how we’d all been connecting with nonviolence in the last couple of weeks (I was away in Adelaide last week, so missed the catchup session some people did).

After that we watched the ‘We Were Warriors’ section of the documentary ‘A Force More Powerful’, which focusses on the Civil Rights movement and specifically on the movement to desegregate Nashville’s lunch counters. I love it for heaps of reasons – it brings out brilliantly the dynamics of nonviolence, and doesn’t use Martin Luther King Jr. very much. This was one of the beefs that many of (particularly the women) in the Civil Rights movement, that he dominated the whole thing too much, when in reality the work was being done as much by a mass of grassroots people. Anyway, it mainly uses James Lawson as the trainer.

Highlights:
1. It shows the amount of training and discipline necessary to build a movement like that.
2. It shows the reality of having to be patient to see your movement grow.
3. It shows how much suffering many have to go through in order to achieve your objective.
4. It is deeply inspiring to watch.

So then we talked about that and used the examples in it in the rest of the session. Probably the main section we used was King’s 6 Principles of Nonviolent Resistance:

1. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
2. Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
3. Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
4. Nonviolence holds that [voluntary] suffering can educate and transform.
5. Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
6. Nonviolence believes the universe is on the side of justice.

All of these are, of course, filled out further, but together they provide a pretty compelling picture of how to go about your life, let alone social movements. And of God, too.

One of us even remarked about how foolproof this is: if you can follow it (and let’s face it, that’s a big ‘if’) it’s pretty difficult to argue with. In fact, the question was asked, “How come more people don’t know about this stuff?!” Another evangelist is born: I started this stuff asking the same question.

The question was asked too, “What if you’re wrong?” – that is, what if what you’re fighting for is not the right thing. This is one of the many beauties of nonviolence: in that case, not only have you not violated yourself or the other person, and thereby maintained your integrity, but through the process you’ve improved yourself because now you are closer to the truth than before. So even when you ‘lose’, you win! And this is the thing: when you win, there are no losers because the same is true for your opponent. And there is no reason for rancor, because you’ve always treated them with love and respect.

Foolproof indeed. Now we just need the courage, the training, and the practice. As Thomas Merton said:

“If this task of building a peaceful world is the most important task of our time, it is also the most difficult. It will, in fact, require far more discipline, more sacrifice, more planning, more thought, more co-operation and more heroism than war ever demanded.”

Thinking about this idea of focussing on means rather than ends (something we’ve been coming back to since the first week of inspiral), it occurred to me that this resonated deeply with what I’ve heard from Thomas Merton and John Howard Yoder, two of the theologians who have been most influential for me. Certainly for Gandhi it was absolutely central (his acorn/oak tree idea of the means having to be consistent with the ends, as an acorn produces an oak tree), but he wasn’t operating entirely out of the Christian story, so these guys impress me even more greatly.

Because to me, this is the hardest thing for the average person to get their head around with nonviolence. Why should I be nonviolent if it doesn’t result in the best outcome for me? If it doesn’t reduce conflict every time, or if it doesn’t solve conflict, or whatever, what good is it? If I don’t win – ie. if I’m not comfortable at the end of it, why would I bother? It’s really tempting to argue for nonviolence for pragmatic reasons (nonviolence is the only way to reduce or solve violence) but ultimately it can’t be justified. (I’m reminded of Joan Baez’s comment “Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.”) The point is that the means of nonviolence are themselves the ends. This sounds awfully abstract, but the point is, if I act in love all the time, regardless of the result for me, that is the best I can do; the results can go either way. I could go on all day about this, but these guys said it better.

First, Thomas Merton wrote in a letter to Jim Forest in 1966:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself…

You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness. You are using it so to speak to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.”

Then there’s John Howard Yoder, who makes a realistic look at obedience a large feature in his book “The Politics of Jesus”:

The Gospel concept of the cross of the Christian does not mean that suffering is thought of as in itself redemptive or that martyrdom is a value to be sought after. Nor does it refer uniquely to being persecuted for “religious” reasons by an outspokenly pagan government. What Jesus refers to in his call to cross-bearing is rather the seeming defeat of that strategy of obedience which is no strategy, the inevitable suffering of those whose only goal is to be faithful to that love which puts one at the mercy of one’s neighbor, which abandons claims to justice for oneself and for one’s own in an overriding concern for the reconciling of the adversary and the estranged…

We thus do not adequately understand what the church was praising in the work of Christ, and what Paul was asking his readers to be guided by, if we think of the cross as a particularly efficacious technique (probably effective only in certain circumstances) for getting one’s way. The key to the ultimate relevance and to the triumph of the good is not any calculation at all, paradoxical or otherwise, of efficacy, but rather simple obedience. Obedience means not keeping verbally enshrined rules but reflecting the character of the love of God. The cross is not a recipe for resurrection. Suffering is not a tool to make people come around, nor a good in itself. But the kind of faithfulness that is willing to accept evident defeat rather than complicity with evil is, by virtue of its conformity with what happens to God when he works among men, aligned with the ultimate triumph of the Lamb.

And THAT, ultimately, is good news – when you get your head around it. Maybe even THE good news. Because even Paul says, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” 1 Cor 1:18-21
In other words, the gospel looks stupid to most people; but to those who understand it (not merely intellectually, but experientially and relationally) are being saved.

This week we looked at structural violence, or more correctly, combating structural violence.

We moved through reasonably quickly for once, which was a really good thing, as you need the context of it all to get your head around some of the dynamics. The Bill Moyer stuff about the rhythms of social change movements is particularly good for defending against despair and disappointment, simply by being aware that the most vigorous opposition always comes before a victory. Anthony reminded us of the importance Gandhi placed on the means rather than the ends: that the ends were not really as important, as you may well not achieve them, or they may not be what is best; what was really important was how you went about the struggle. This is important.

For me, it was also good to have it reiterated that it is usually best to show your good faith by getting as much done inside the system as possible. It’s so tempting sometimes to get frustrated with institutions and politics and systems and just seek to work against them, rather than seeing them as potentially redeemable, or at least assuming the best of them until they fail utterly.

So looking forward to putting together our own nonviolence project in a few weeks (MLK first though – woo hoo!) and experimenting on a wider scale with it.