Learning Non-Violence

Sunday, October 3, 2004

Rev. Gretchen Woods

CHALICE LIGHTING

As we light this chalice,

Symbol of our shared Unitarian Universalist faith,

May its light shine into the dark places in our lives,

May its warmth open our hearts and minds to a better way to live,

May it kindle a fire in our souls for justice and peace.

OPENING WORDS

from Paul Robeson, Singing the Living Tradition, # 462

I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear the melody of freedom or the words that might inspire hope and courage in the face of despair and fear. My weapons are peaceful, for it is only by peace that peace can be attained. The song of freedom must prevail.

Reading

“A Network of Mutuality” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.

Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.

We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.

The foundation of such a method is love.

Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war.

One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

Sermon: Learning Non-Violence

While serving the Kitsap Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bremerton, Washington, I had occasion to converse with several workers at the Peace Pagoda, which was built next to the train tracks that brought missiles to SubBase Bangor to be loaded on the nuclear submarines . These peace activists often sat in front of the trains, even in the dead of night, trying to delay the missiles from being delivered and put into place, potentialy to destroy who knows how many people. What impressed me most was that they continuously trained in non-violent forms of confrontation, focusing upon their own personal disarmament as well as that of our nation. They knew that peace begins within, or, as Thich Nhat Hahn says, “Peace is every step.”

Thich Nhat Hahn is the Vietnamese Buddhist monk whose monastery decided that they could not remain cloistered and set apart from the war in their country in the 1970’s. The monks moved out of the monastery and into their country, teaching non-violence, and protesting the war at great personal cost. Hahn ultimately left Vietnam and has become one of the foremost practitioners and teachers of non-violence in our world. He constantly reminds us that learning to live simply and lightly upon the earth with mindfulness of our connections to all of life is probably the most effective means to peace.

As our children and youth learn non-violence in their religious exploration classes, we adults also need to be mindful of the possibilities of non-violence, especially in a world where war is the first topic of our presidential debates. Today we examine James Gilligan’s studies on preventing violence and some of the practical changes in our lives that might take us closer to a peaceful world. As ethicist Sissela Bok once pointed out, peace can only truly begin when peace is practiced in small communities, which then spread the practice.

From 1967 until 1992, James Gilligan worked in Massachusetts prisons, “first as a psychotherapist . . . , then as Medical Director of the prison mental hospital . . . , and finally as Director of Mental Health Services for the prison system as a whole.” (Gilligan, p. 15.)

Concurrently, he was Director of the Institute of Law and Psychiatry of the Harvard Medical School, providing psychiatric evaluations and treatment at the prison mental hospital. He became convinced that violence is not a criminal issue. It is a health issue.

Gilligan became convinced that “. . . it is possible to succeed at preventing violence only to the extent that we abolish the traditional moral and legal approach, which the prisons had been following up to that time.” (Ibid, p. 17.) Punishment did not work. In fact, it was in the British prisons in Egypt that intifada in the Middle East had its inception as Muslim men were humiliated beyond bearing and plotted violent retaliation. Non-violence is at the heart of “Systematic Training for Effective Parenting.” Repeatedly we find that punishment creates greater violence, while therapy and caring concern alleviates the problem. Why can’t we learn from this information, both as individuals and as a nation?

Gilligan notes that shame and death of a sense of self underpin most of the violent behavior of human beings, especially young men. If a young man of any race feels that he has been disrespected, he is far more likely to resort to violent response. Poverty and unemployment, caste stratification, age discrimination, and violence as proof of masculinity contribute to the loss of sense of self that leads to violence. Please notice that these causes are societal problems, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his first report on violence in America. That report was suppressed by the United States government and the blame thrown back on the victims of the societal problems in the later, published report.

Gilligan is very clear about the ways to create nonviolent societies: social and political democracy, guaranteed employment, a willingness to counter gender expectations and homophobia, restricting media violence, gun control, universal access to free higher education, diverting children’s experience of violence, deterring the drug culture, creating anti-prisons, and violence prevention workshops. Does it feel like we are heading in the wrong direction today? All of these steps require intentional effort on the part of the whole of society to break down the one-up, one-down approach to human being that insists, “Either I am on top, or I am nothing.”

When I went to visit my mother’s brother a few years back, I was shocked and pained by his language. It felt like every other sentence had something in it about, “If this doesn’t happen, I am going to beat you up or kill you!” I realize that this is the vernacular with which he was raised. I later watched “The Gangs of New York,” which depicted the New York City in which his grandfather worked as a yellow journalist. I saw the violence that had been part of my family heritage vividly depicted and now can more readily understand the violence I experienced as a toddler.

But that doesn’t make that violence right or acceptable. We need to stop the violence, beginning with language and completing the process by ending causes of violence, especially against the weakest and most vulnerable women and children. One way to begin is to stop viewing women and children as property. I shall never forget hearing a man who came to me for counseling insist, “No other bastard will be first sexually with my daughter.” And he thought I should be sympathetic to his needs. He was surprised when I told him I could no longer counsel him.

Marshall B. Rosenberg spent his life creating a process of non-violent communication, beginning in 1943, when he experienced race riots in his neighborhood in Detroit and then faced being called a “kike.” He recognized that moralistic judgments, comparisons, denial of responsibility, and the notion that certain people deserve punishment or approval all contribute to violence. In response, he developed a process that includes making observations, expressing feelings fully, identifying needs, and making clear requests or empathically receiving requests for needs. (Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, p. 150.) I wonder what would happen if we actually tried some of these techniques with the disenfranchised in the Middle East, especially if we followed Jay Roth’s advice to factor in issues of identity. (Roth, Identity Based Conflict)

Marshall Rosenberg notes that the anger that leads to violence usually has three truths behind it:

1) There is something I’m wanting that I am not getting.

2) I’m telling myself that someone ought to be giving it to me.

3) I’m about to speak or behave in a way that will virtually assure that I won’t get what I want. or at least assure that even if I get it, it will not be given in the way I’d want it most. (handout for workshop)

Sound familiar? We are our own worst enemies, both as individuals and as nations.

Standing against violence is a spiritual issue. We stop the violence when we recognize that all of life is connected and that causing pain to another will cause pain within the web of life. We stop the violence when we recognize that love is not control. Alice Walker captures some of this when she writes:

Love is not concerned

with whom you pray

or where you slept

the night you ran away

from home.

Love is concerned

that the beating of your heart

should kill no one.

Any woman or child who has run away from violence knows this horrible inner conflict: I could kill to save myself and I still love this perpetrator. It is a horrid situation.

Rosenberg notes: “The intention behind the protective use of force is to prevent injury or injustice.” (Rosenberg, p. 121). This is the appropriate moral use of force and should not be required of a victim, but expected of society and our communities. We, together, are called to support those institutions, like CARDV, that protect the weak and vulnerable, and help to end violence.

Ending violence takes practice. It takes willingness to risk for justice and love. It is not safe work, for there will always be those who feel their needs should supercede all others, that they are entitled to work their wills upon those who have something they want. It is our job, as a religious community, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and to challenge those who need to find better ways to get what they feel they need.

I close with words of Mohandas K. Gandhi:

If someone with courage and vision can rise to lead in nonviolent action, the winter of despair can, in the twinkling of an eye, be turned into the summer of hope.