Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2008
A Persistent Peace: One Man's Struggle for a Nonviolent World
By John Dear, SJ
Review by Ken Butigan
OURS IS THE AGE OF A WIDELY emerging "Engaged Spirituality." In many religious traditions, including Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity, "spiritualities of engagement" for social change are tapping and transforming ancient spiritual truths and pathways to respond to the titanic challenges facing the planet and its inhabitants. Spiritual practices rooted in the primordial wisdom of these and other traditions are actively challenging deeply-embedded structures of violence and injustice and working to cultivate a sustainable, just, and peaceful world.
While each tradition's engaged spirituality is shaped by its own history, rituals, and symbols, in most cases these emergent paths share certain characteristics. They each: consciously grapple with the profound crises of our time; regard spirituality as a powerful force for active and nonviolent change; maintain the indivisible connection between personal and social transformation; and involve organized and public action.
This is the great sacred work of our time. The question is: How does one actually live this life of engaged spirituality here and now?
John Dear's new autobiography, A Persistent Peace, is a record of one person's attempt to answer this question. Dear has spent more than a quarter of a century engaged in a relentless journey of peace and justice, a pilgrimage that began with a gnawing restlessness that led him to abandon his technicolor teenage dreams of rock stardom (he wrote rafts of songs and recorded them at a studio near Duke University where he studied history) and to slowly discover and test his growing faith in God. Not unlike other spiritual autobiographies, Dear's journey to the divine is existentially harrowing and arduous yet ultimately transformative. He comes, in the end, to definitively root his meaning and direction in what he experiences as the unconditional love of God.
Almost with the same breath in which he says, "I believe in God," Dear finds himself saying, "And this God is nonviolent." In this he was following the logic of his experience. If God is love, then God's power is the power of love. And if we are to live in the midst of the life and power of God, then we must live this love--the active regard for every person, the embodied yearning for the well-being of all--with our entire mind, heart, soul, and body. With none of the wavering uncertainty others can experience on the question of nonviolence, Dear stepped decisively and irrevocably onto the path of spiritually-grounded nonviolent change. Once he had made his fundamental option for God, Dear sought to live out what seemed clear to him to be God's way: nonviolent transformation for a just and peaceful world.
In the early 1980s Dear sought to deepen his vocation as a faith-based peacemaker by joining the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), an international order of Catholic priests known for scholarship and intellectual rigor. While this order has included a number of Dear's activist mentors (among them Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Fr. Richard McSorley, and Fr. Ignacio Ellacuria, president of the University of Central America, who was assassinated in 1989), it has, by Dear's account, exhibited a perennial ambivalence (and at times outright hostility) toward Dear's unwavering ministry of peacemaking. This echoes a central theme of this book: if you take up the work for peace and justice, expect trouble--whether from your government or from your home community.
The book's title is not misplaced. Virtually every one of the book's last thirty chapters features at least one or more nonviolent actions--and the trouble that comes with each one. These include numerous acts of civil disobedience: resisting war in Central America and Iraq at the Pentagon and White House; protesting war research at the nation's nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos, NM and Livermore, CA, as well as the Riverside Research Institute in New York City; and advocating for the homeless. This ministry has also included a year at a peace center in Northern Ireland and working to end the death penalty (Dear's story of entreating Mother Teresa to call prison officials on behalf of a death row inmate who was eventually granted clemency is particularly moving). In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, he organized over 500 chaplains as a coordinator of the Red Cross Spiritual Care Program.
Challenging the Just War Theory
Through John Dear's relentless program of nonviolent action--and his more than twenty books on faith-based peacemaking--this Catholic priest has joined the growing community of voices in the Catholic Church who have decisively questioned and critiqued its Just War theory and are helping to set it on the path to becoming a Peace Church.
In his book The God Of Peace: Toward A Theology Of Nonviolence (Orbis Books, 1994), Dear carefully analysed the documents of Catholic Social Teaching, especially since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Here he described an evolution within the Catholic Church from an uncritical acceptance of "justified warfare" to an increasingly critical stance that has begun to name nonviolence as the Gospel way of peacemaking.
The modern foundations of a Catholic turn toward peacemaking, Dear explained, began with Pope John XXIII's 1963 Pacem in Terris, which "questioned all warfare and opened the door to a church of nonviolence." In the documents of Vatican II and succeeding meetings, the Catholic Church articulated a central commitment to peacemaking rooted in justice that addresses the causes of war. In 1983, the U.S. Catholic Bishops' pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace", "proposed a theology of peace, explored the scriptural basis of peacemaking, imagined Jesus as a peacemaker and elevated nonviolence as a real Christian option." Ten years later, the U.S. Catholic Bishops issued a letter entitled "The Harvest of Justice Is Sown In Peace" in which they wrote:
Although non-violence has often been regarded as simply a personal option or vocation, recent history suggests that in some circumstances it can be an effective public undertaking as well. Dramatic political transitions in places as diverse as the Philippines and Eastern Europe demonstrate the power of nonviolent action, even against dictatorial and totalitarian regimes. ... These nonviolent revolutions challenge us to find ways to take into full account the power of organized, active nonviolence. (US Bishops' Conference. "The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace". [Washington, DC, 1993], 10-11.) More recently, Pope Benedict XVI reflected on Jesus' call to "love your enemies" in a 2007 address at the Vatican:
This page of the Gospel is rightly considered the 'magna carta' of Christian nonviolence; it does not consist in surrendering to evil--as claims a false interpretation of "turn the other cheek" (Luke 6:29)--but in responding to evil with good (Romans 12:17-21), and thus breaking the chain of injustice. It is thus understood that nonviolence, for Christians, is not mere tactical behavior but a person's way of being, the attitude of one who is convinced of God's love and power, who is not afraid to confront evil with the weapons of love and truth alone. Loving the enemy is the nucleus of the 'Christian revolution.' (Pope Benedict XVI, "Pope Benedict XVI Calls for a 'Christian Revolution,' Invites Faithful to Respond to Evil With Good," Public Address in Vatican City, www.Zenit.org, Feb. 18, 2007.)
During its first three centuries, the Christian community maintained a firm commitment to the way of Gospel Nonviolence (including general conscientious objection to war-making), which it viewed as constitutive of the way of Jesus. Its collusion with empire, which began in the fourth century C.E. (with its collaboration with the Roman Emperor Constantine), led to a theology of justified warfare that reigned intact for nearly fifteen centuries. Over the past several decades this position has begun to be challenged, prompted both by the barbarity and scope of modern warfare and by the praxis of faith-based nonviolence dramatically and patiently lived and organized by Catholic women and men including Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, and Cesar Chavez. John Dear, through his nonviolent witnessing and writing, is part of this lineage that is slowly helping to transform the Catholic Church's vocation as a Church of Peace.
By taking part in this historical process, Dear is not only helping to unleash the Church's power for transforming the world, he is inviting the Church itself to transform its own relationship to power in light of nonviolence: to put compassion, care, and cooperation into action in place of the dogmatic authoritarianism to which it has regrettably been prone both within and without its community.
Dear's work, more broadly still, is part of the historical momentum of an emerging engaged spirituality around the globe. While it irrevocably has a political dimension (for example, supporting and deepening a progressive agenda), this evolving spirituality is rooted in a vision ultimately not reducible to that agenda. More than an ideological commitment, its power springs from a spiritual journey of personal and social transformation grounded in a profound and inclusive understanding of "the love that does justice." Dear has played an important part in this slowly emerging reality.
John Dear's life journey is one of many possible forms of engaged spirituality. In his case, he has marked out a path in which the religious life is one immersed in the challenging but powerful work for justice and peace. This memoir is itself a kind of nonviolent action--dramatic, challenging, illuminating--that prods us to ask: What is the life we will lead to put our own "spirituality of engagement" into action?
by John Dear, SJ
Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2008
Review by Ken Butigan
Ken Butigan is on the staff of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.
