Kindly join me in appreciating that The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey “family,” near and far, belong to an unofficial organization – Seth would call it an Unfoundation – called Shanti Sena. Shanti Sena means Peace Army. It was founded by Mahatma Gandhi in India in the 1920s.
John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and The Beatles – unofficially and unknowingly, but with great determination – joined Shanti Sena in the 1960s.
So did Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Yoko Ono. So did Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. And Paul Newman, James Baldwin, Joni Mitchell, and Muhammad Ali.
Today, their life and legacy is carried forth by Greta Thunberg, Victor Wallis, Vandana Shiva, and so many others, recalling the courage of conscience of Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Thomas Merton, and Oscar Romero.
In this sense, then, we – as honored members of the Engaging Peace community and supporters of positive peace – are all students for a democratic society; indeed, for a global village of ecological sanity and egalitarian harmony.
T. S. Eliot ends his poetic masterpiece, “The Wasteland,” with … “Shantih shantih shantih.” And thus, I salute you. For you are bodhisattvas and kalyanamittas.
A bodhisattva is committed to a life of learning and service; and, therefore, to the active practice of “positive peace-making,” rooted in ahimsa (non-violence). Kalyanamitta means: “virtuous friend” and “spiritual companion.”
Let us recognize that the dream that never dies also grows. And let us remember that the dream was never over, because John never ceased to IMAGINE.
Therefore, let us keep the faith, and daily water the seeds of peace with our commitment to justice and universal brother-sisterhood.
TheShanti Sena does indeed endure. And together, with a reverence for Mother Earth and the sacred spark that grew us in the womb, we are – Yes, we are! – creating a Rainbow Bridge to The Peaceable Queendom.
Said the sage: “The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.”
The Peace Abbey grew out of The Life Experience School. Together, they house The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; present The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award to individuals who embody the spirit of Shanti Sena; promote vegetarianism and animal rights; still hope to have the Memorial Stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War planted in Arlington National Cemetery; and maintain The Pacifist Memorial Peace Park (in Sherborn), at the center of which is a nine-foot statue of Gandhi, fanning out from which are brick walls displaying bronze plaques in honor of those peacemakers who have received the Courage of Conscience and Champion of Peace awards.
Now, here is the link to a short, thrilling, video-tribute to The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey, created by film-makers at The Radiance Project. ………………………………………………………………………………….
Stefan Schindler is a philosopher, teacher, and poet. He is co-author with Lewis Randa, the founder of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey, of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection. Stefan is a frequent contributor to Engaging Peace; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; author of The Courage of Conscience Awards for John Lennon and Howard Zinn; and author of Space is Grace, Discoursing with the Gods, The Tao of Socrates, and America’s Indochina Holocaust. His newest book – Buddha’s Political Philosophy – will be published later this year.
by Chris Hedges [first published on Monday, December 31, 2018 Truthdig and Common Dreams]
Becket: It is not for me to win you round.
I have only to say no to you.
King: But you must be logical, Becket!
Becket: No. That isn’t necessary, my liege. We must only do—absurdly—what we
have been given to do—fight to the end.
—From the play “Becket,” by Jean Anouilh
The struggle against the monstrous radical
evil that dominates our lives—an evil that is swiftly despoiling the earth and
driving the human species toward extinction, stripping us of our most basic
civil liberties and freedoms, waging endless war and solidifying the obscene
wealth of an oligarchic elite at our expense—will be fought only with the
belief that resistance, however futile, insignificant and even self-defeating
it may appear, can set in motion moral and spiritual forces that radiate
outward to inspire others, including those who come after us. It is, in
essence, an act of faith. Nothing less than this faith will sustain us. We
resist not because we will succeed, but because it is right. Resistance is the
supreme act of faith.
During the Vietnam War, on the afternoon of
May 17, 1968, nine Catholics, including two brothers, the radical priests Phil
and Dan Berrigan, entered the draft board in Catonsville, Md., and seized
Selective Service records. They carted them outside to the parking lot in metal
trash cans and set them on fire with homemade napalm—the recipe was from the
Special Forces Handbook of the U.S. Army. The men and women, many of whom were
or had been members of Catholic religious orders, stood and prayed around the
bonfire until they were arrested. They were protesting not only the war but, as
Dan Berrigan wrote, “every major presumption underlying American life.” They
acted, and eventually went to prison, Berrigan went on, “to set in motion
spiritual rhythms whose outward influences are, in the nature of things, simply
immeasurable.”
The group’s statement read:
Our apologies good friends
for the fracture of good order the burning of paper
instead of children the angering of the orderlies
in the front parlor of the charnel house
We could not so help us God do otherwise
For we are sick at heart
Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. …
We say: Killing is disorder
life and gentleness and community and unselfishness
is the only order we recognize. …
How long must the world’s resources
be raped in the service of legalized murder?
When at what point will you say no to this war?
We have chosen to say
with the gift of our liberty
if necessary our lives:
the violence stops here
the death stops here
the suppression of the truth stops here
this war stops here. …
The Catonsville protest sparked a wave of
break-ins at draft boards in which files were burned, mutilated, stolen or
destroyed. The Selective Service, in the first eight months of 1970 alone,
recorded 271 “antidraft occurrences” at draft boards across the country.
The nature, power and cost of civil
disobedience, along with the understanding that confronting evil is the highest
form of spirituality, is the subject of the play “The Trial of the Catonsville
Nine,” written by Dan Berrigan. Transport Group
will present a production of the play at the Abrons Arts Center in New York
City from Jan. 16 to Feb. 23. It will be performed with three actors, one of
whom is my wife, Eunice Wong. Our daughter
was baptized by Dan Berrigan
(1921-2016).
The men and women who became known as the
Catonsville Nine pleaded guilty to the charges leveled against them—theft and
destruction of property of the U.S. government and “disrupting the official
activities” of the Selective Service. The Catonsville Nine used the court to
indict the now-omnipotent war machine, which as Berrigan wrote “has come to
include the court process that serves it.” The courts, the presidency and the
Congress, he noted, have calcified and turned to stone. “The ‘separation of
powers’ is proving a fiction; ball and joint, the functions of power are
fusing, like the bones of an aged body,” he wrote.
“For you cannot set up a court in the
Kingdom of the Blind, to condemn those who see; a court presided over by those
who would pluck out the eyes of men and call it rehabilitation,” Berrigan
continued.
The defendants in the Catonsville Nine trial
declined to question or challenge any potential jurors during the selection
process. Later they would use their testimony not to attempt to prove their
innocence—they freely admitted they were guilty of the prosecution’s narrow
charges—but to put the nation on trial. They argued that to abide by a higher
law they must confront the law. Breaking the law was a function of conscience.
“The law, as presently revered and taught
and enforced, is becoming an enticement to lawlessness,” Dan Berrigan wrote in
his book of essays, “No Bars to Manhood.” “Lawyers and laws and courts and
penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken society, which is making
civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a religious) duty. The law is aligning
itself more and more with forms of power whose existence is placed more and
more in question. … So if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced,
in the present crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of
humanity.”
“The courts, up to the U.S. Supreme Court itself, are unwilling, especially in wartime, to consider seriously the moral and legal questions of war itself,” Berrigan wrote. “So we felt that civilized people must seek to use the courtroom in order to achieve some public audibility about who we were and what we were about. The issues raised by the war—issues of constitutionality and morality of the war, of free speech and freedom of protest—might thereby be separated from our personal or corporate fates.”
The Nine understood that it was “spiritually
absurd and suicidal to be pretending to help the poor at home while we bombed
the poor abroad.”
The law, Berrigan saw, is used to
strengthen “a corporate system bent in the direction of more and more American
hegemony abroad, more and more firmly imbedded poverty and racism at home.”
This capitalist machine, he said, had to be “taken apart, built over again.”
The Nine understood that it was “spiritually absurd and suicidal to be
pretending to help the poor at home while we bombed the poor abroad.” Mass
incarceration and widespread poverty were the inevitable results of endless war
and unchecked militarism. If this militarism was not curbed—and it has not been
curbed—the Nine predicted it would exacerbate racism among dispossessed whites,
expand lethal, militarized police forces and transform the Congress, the
judiciary, the presidency and the press into handmaidens of the corporate
state. The trajectory, Dan Berrigan wrote, would lead to “an interlocking dance
of death, a celebration of horror.”
The Catonsville Nine were indifferent to
their fate. “We were obliged in fact to attain some kind of personal liberation
before acting at all,” Berrigan wrote, “a certain spiritual detachment from the
fact of prison.” They did not expect miracles. They were not deceived by the
roller coaster of emotional highs and lows that characterize a consumer
culture. Patience, as the Vietnamese in Hanoi told Dan Berrigan, “is a
revolutionary virtue.” It was the truth that was on trial. The point of civil
disobedience, Berrigan said, is not that people will agree or even follow. It
is that such actions foster among the wider population “a deepened
consciousness.”
“Still,” Berrigan wrote in his
autobiography, “this or that court, no matter what its crimes against justice,
its stacked cards, its vindictive blindness, would never succeed in closing the
dossier on conscience. And this was exactly our hope. Time would work in its
imperceptible way, mysterious, invisible; other lives would be touched as the
stories of the courageous and nonviolent were heard, often by word of mouth
only. Time taking its own sweet time, so to speak, the motion and motive of a
larger soul.”
The Berrigans, who identified as religious
radicals, had little use for liberals. Liberals, they said, addressed only
small, moral fragments and used their pet causes, in most cases, not to bring
about systemic change, but for self-adulation. Liberals often saw wars or
social injustices as isolated evils whose end would restore harmony.
“But the consciousness of the radical man
is integrated,” Dan Berrigan wrote in “No Bars to Manhood.” “He knows that
everything leads to everything else. So while he works for the end of the war,
for the end of poverty, or for the end of American racism, he knows that every
war is symptomatic of every other war. Vietnam to Laos and on to Thailand, and
across the world to Guatemala, and across all wars to his own heart.”
“Our act was aimed, as our statement tried
to make clear, at every major presumption underlying American life today,” he
wrote. “Our act was in the strictest sense a conspiracy; that is to say, we had
agreed together to attack the working assumptions of American life. Our act was
a denial that American institutions were presently functioning in a way that
good men [and women] could approve or sanction. We were denying that the law,
medicine, education, and systems of social welfare (and, above all, the
military-paramilitary styles and objectives that rule and overrule and control
these others) were serving the people, were including the needy, or might be
expected to change in accord with changing needs, that these could enlist or
embody the sources of good men [and women]—imagination, moral suppleness,
pragmatism, or compassion.”
Phil Berrigan
(1923-2002), a highly decorated infantry officer who fought in Europe in World
War II, was the driving force behind the Catonsville Nine. He had already
broken into a draft board office in the Baltimore Customs House in October 1967
with three other protesters—they would become known as the Baltimore Four—and
poured blood over draft files. The event was well publicized. He and the
artist Thomas P. Lewis,
one of the Baltimore Four, were awaiting sentencing for their Baltimore action
when they participated in the act at Catonsville. Phil Berrigan and Lewis knew
that their participation in Catonsville meant their sentences for the Baltimore
protest would be harsher. But they understood that resistance cannot be
reactive. It must be proactive. Phil Berrigan convinced his brother Dan to join
the protest at Catonsville at a time when Dan believed that his work was
“standing by the students [protesters] in their travail; nothing more.” “In
comparison with him,” Dan wrote of Phil, “I was a coddled egg indeed.” But Dan
Berrigan knew that “if I delayed too long, I would never find the courage to
say no” to the war.
It was clear, Dan Berrigan wrote, that the
government “would allow men like myself to do what we were doing almost
indefinitely; to sign statements, to picket, to support resisters in court.
Even if they did pick us up, it was the government who were choosing the victim
and the time and place of prosecution. The initiative was entirely in their
hands. But in the plan under discussion, the situation was entirely reversed. A
few men [and women] were declaring that the initiative of actions and passion
belonged to the peaceable and the resisting.”
The Berrigans
excoriated the church hierarchy for sacralizing the nation, the government,
capitalism, the military and the war.
The Berrigans excoriated the church
hierarchy for sacralizing the nation, the government, capitalism, the military
and the war. They argued that the fusion of secular and religious authority
would kill the church as a religious institution. The archbishop of New York at
the time, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, in one example, sprinkled holy water on
B-52 bombers and blessed the warplanes before their missions in Vietnam. He
described the conflict as a “war for civilization” and “Christ’s war against
the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”
Phil Berrigan, the first priest to go to
jail for protesting the war, celebrated Mass for his fellow prisoners. The
services were, for the first time, well attended. The cardinal of Baltimore, in
response, stripped Phil Berrigan of his priestly functions. The Masses
celebrated later by an assigned outsider were boycotted by the prisoners.
“There seemed to be some connection, too subtle for those in power to grasp,
quite lucid to the imprisoned, between the Eucharist and a priest who was a
fellow prisoner,” Dan Berrigan wrote.
“In sum, in a time of crisis, the Church
had waited on the culture,” Dan Berrigan wrote in “No Bars to Manhood.” “When
the war-making society had completed its case against a nonviolent, protesting
priest, the Church moved against him too, sacred overkill added to secular.
Indeed, Christ made common cause with Caesar; religion preached a new crusade,
a dubious and savage war. The Church all but disappeared into the legions.”
Those of faith, Berrigan wrote, should be content to “live and die ‘outside the
walls’; they are men [and women] without a country and a church. They can flee
the nation or languish in jail; the curse of the inquisitor will penetrate the
jails to strike them there.”
It has been 50 years since Catonsville. And
yet, often unheard and unheralded, the steadfast drumbeat of nonviolent
religious protest against the war machine continues. Elizabeth McAlister, of Jonah House in Baltimore and the widow of
Phil Berrigan, along with the Jesuit priest Steve Kelly and Catholic Worker
Movement members Carmen Trotta, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy (the
granddaughter of Catholic Worker Movement co-founder Dorothy Day),
Mark Colville and Patrick O’Neill, will be put on trial next spring for trespassing onto the Kings
Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Marys, Ga., to protest our nuclear weapons
arsenal.
The activists entered the base on April 4,
2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
who thundered against the “triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism.”
They carried hammers and baby bottles of their own blood to defile the nuclear
weapons storage bunkers. The Kings Bay naval facility is the largest nuclear
submarine base in the world. Five of the group were released on bond and are
forced to wear ankle monitors. McAlister,
who turned 79 last month in jail, and Kelly remain incarcerated in the Glynn
County Detention Center.
Dan Berrigan reflected on the burning of
the Catonsville draft records in “To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography”:
The act was pitiful, a tiny flare amid the
consuming fires of war. But Catonsville was like a firebreak, a small fire lit,
to contain and conquer a greater. …
For the remainder of our lives, the fires
would burn and burn, in hearts and minds, in draft boards, in prisons and
courts. A new fire, new as a Pentecost, flared up in eyes deadened and
hopeless. …
“Nothing can be done!” How often we had
heard that gasp: the last of the human, of soul, of freedom. Indeed, something
could be done; and was. And would be.
We had removed an abomination from the
Earth. It was as though, across the land, a series of signal fires had been
lighted. The first was no larger than a gleam of an eye. But hill to hill,
slowly at first, then like a wildfire, leaping interstices and valleys, the
fires flared. …
In the following years, some seventy draft
boards were entered across the land. Their contents variously shredded, sacked,
hidden out of sight, burned, scattered to the winds. In one case, the files
were mailed back to their owners, with a note urging that the inductee refuse
to serve.
That morning! We stood in the breach of
birth. We could know nothing. Would something follow, would our act speak to
others, awaken their resolve? We knew only the bare bones of consequence. …
The act was done. We sat in custody in the
back room of the Catonsville Post Office, weak with relief, grinning like
virtuous gargoyles. Three or four FBI honchos entered portentously. Their
leader, a jut-jawed paradigm, surveyed us from the doorway. His eagle eye lit on
Philip. He roared out: “Him again! Good God, I’m changing my religion!”
I could think of no greater tribute to my
brother.
Do you occasionally feel that you’re about to go crazy? Or think that perhaps you already have? Do you often feel like Don Quixote, vainly tilting at windmills? Yes, probably. But then you remember the meaning of the term Greater Fool. A Greater Fool is one who exhibits greatness in commitment to peace, no matter how foolish that commitment seems in a world intent on going mad.
You remember that you are not alone. You have comrades. Millions of brothers and sisters equally committed to kindness and compassion. They too are Greater Fools, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Romero, Tolstoy, Emerson, Tagore. Like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein. Like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Like Mark Twain, William James, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn. Like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, George Fox, Matthew Fox, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama. Like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon, the Trung sisters of Vietnam. Like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. John and Robert Kennedy, too. Greater Fools, one and all.
And, yes, The Beatles. “All you need is love,” they sang, and you hum it every day. War without end seems to be the world’s way, and yet you never cease to chant, “Give peace a chance.” The Statue of Liberty weeps. Mother Earth is crucified. Storm clouds darken the horizon. And yet you sing: “Here comes the sun.” Yes, I am you, you are me, and we are all the walrus. We have each other. We keep the faith. We persevere.
Chogyam Trungpa, combining Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, called it Crazy Wisdom. So, yes, it’s OK to be a little crazy, as long as your craziness is that of the Greater Fool. Humanity may elect lunatics for leaders, and go about their business sleepwalking through history. Yet you, at least, are awake. Indeed, you are part of The Great Awakening. You belong to The Global Peace Abbey. It welcomes all and has no walls. We are warriors for peace, on the cutting edge of evolution. There is no greater satisfaction, no greater joy, no greater service.
So rejoice, my friend. The angels sing your praises, and lend you unconditional support. The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.
In my years of preparing and teaching seminars in Family Violence and the Psychology of War and Peace at Boston University, I learned a lot about moral disengagement (the kinds of thinking that allow people to tolerate and promote violent and inhumane behavior) and moral engagement (involvement in behavior that promotes humanity, peace, and justice, even when doing so is unpopular and costly). Most of you know the names of some of the best-known models of moral engagement—e.g., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa, Howard Zinn.
Rejoice! There are thousands of less well-known people who live lives of moral engagement. I bet you’ve encountered a few in your own life. One such individual I know is Lewis Randa, who will be leading a new Stonewalk on October 24, 2018. Under his leadership, volunteers will unearth a memorial stone for Victims of Violence at its present location at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA, and pull it, using human power alone, on a caisson to the September 11th Labyrinth at Boston College.
Ideally, a democracy should encourage morally engaged leaders like Lewis to flourish, to inspire, and to promote positive change. To improve our own struggling democracy, more people need to engage morally in the task of finding and supporting reforms and reformers at the most basic political levels in their communities, while doing their best to evaluate the characters and commitments of politicians who have reached, by hook or by crook, higher office.
Moral engagement may not be common at the top, but it is not absent either. The good news is that to help make your community, your country, and the environment better, you don’t have to be a martyr, you don’t have to help pull the caisson from Sherborn to Boston (although that would certainly show engagement!), and you don’t have to be MLK. However, there are things you can do. How about getting together with other reform-minded people and searching for ways to encourage morally engaged leaders to run for office–and win? Meanwhile, you can help get out the vote November 6.