Dec. 4 – Peacemaking Theologies
Peacemaking Theologies
Rev. Thea Nietfeld
Last month, at a gathering of the Kansas Nonviolence Network, Dorothy, a Mennonite clergy and Duane, a Mennonite history professor, were feeling discouraged about the pervasiveness of evil, as one of them called it, and suggested that we need clarity about when to take a major form of citizen resistance action…that it seems like the time for such action is upon us. State reductions in support of mentally ill people and others in deep need was on our minds.
Dorothy and Duane are pacifists by religious tradition…pacifists whose vision and guidance I value.
Its wondrous to live so close to religious peacemakers – just down the road in Newton – home to the global Mennonite Central Committee… the local Peace Connection and the statewide Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution – KIPCOR.
I am glad to consult with our pacifist neighbors about peacemaking activism… and wonder how Unitarian Universalists might work with these allies or others…there’s so much peacemaking to be done…
And, there’s work to be done within our tradition:
In 2006, our General Assembly delegates voted to study and address the issues involved with the question:
“Should the UUA reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes between peoples and nations and adopt a principle of seeking just peace through nonviolent means?”
Back then, I was thrilled with this study-action issue and proposed in early national conversations that we begin moving toward becoming a peace church – like Mennonites! A couple of people on the conference call laughed and someone said “that would never happen!”
That hurt.
Still, there are historic and contemporary peacemaking theologians in our tradition:
It was James Luther Adams (JLA) who showed me how to apply life-affrming moral values in the public sphere: He helped me find meaning in activist groups, to make and keep the affectionate and grateful promises we call covenants, and to keep looking for links between the “ultimate and intimate.”
JLA has something to say when we grow tired of reaching out to make peace: his steady optimism cheers us on: Those of us who are religious need to contribute hope. We need to keep working for justice and peace no matter what, he says – that’s who we are and what we do.
Yet there came a time in my life, when even JLA’s encouragement was inadequate.
It was a war that brought me to paralyzed despair:
In March, 2003, the US invaded Iraq, with a pre-emptive strike and “shock and awe” intensity.
You may have been protesting here.
Where I was in Tahlequah, OK, a dozen of us held candles in the town square and carried signs near the federal building at the nearby county seat – Muskogee, Oklahoma!
It didn’t matter that all over the country and the world, voices were raised for using diplomatic means of resolving this conflict.
Our country went to war and I went into despair.
By fall of 2004, it was clear that my theology was inadequate for how I perceived the condition of the world. I didn’t know what to do next/ I didn’t know what hope to offer the congregation; I needed guidance.
I thought if I went to India, maybe I could learn something about what had kept Gandhi going for all those years as he made huge social changes without violence.
In 1919, when Rev. John Haynes Holmes learned about Gandhi, Holmes was in despair about the violent state of the world and the pervasive logic of violence. With the exception of the congregation that he founded, what is now Community Church in NYC, Holmes was rejected by the Unitarians of his time for his pacifism in relation to World War I. Even the Unitarian Association actively sanctioned congregations whose ministers were not “willing, earnest, and out-spoken supporters of the war.”
(At least that policy has changed.)
When Holmes first preached on Gandhi in 1921, he called him the most important man in the world, yet hardly anyone outside India knew of him. Later, in Holmes’ little book, My Gandhi, he said that he would have been lost if he had not found Gandhi; “Gandhi gave him a peace of mind and serenity of soul which will be with me to the last.” Holmes wrote that he needed to bear witness to Gandhi because he wanted to offer an alternative to the logic of violence/ to show the power in “joining a peaceful inner and outer life.”
I also found hope in Gandhi:
In the spring of 2005, I found myself on a 3-week, 250-mile walk through the Indian state of Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state…moving with a few hundred or a few thousand other pilgrims,, commemorating the 75th anniversary of Gandhi’s walk to the sea in 1930…
the walk that began the 17-year nonviolent change of governments – from British rule of India to self-rule.
Gandhi’s great-grandson Tushar did what Gandhi had done – speaking nearly every day to sweaty crowds seeking conciliation and inspiration. He preached against the caste system and for local democratic action/effort to install public toilets, establish schools.
Being with Gandhians…including those elders whose parents had walked with Gandhi –
being with those whose lives were dedicated to facing conflict directly and nonviolently showed me what it looked like to live from a peacemaking logic. There was curiousity, engagement, humor, steadiness…and commitment over time.
With John Haynes Holmes and contemporary Gandhians, I found this fallible, eccentric guide – Mohandas Gandhi – was someone who “joined at once the inner and outer life, making saint and statesman one.” (Holmes)
This integrated life showed how to find contentment, companionship, and the capacity to make friends of opponents…and to experiment with cooperative power.
What Gandhi’s ways gave Holmes and me was a coherent spiritual approach to social activism – a bridge between inner and outer life that is completely compatible and aligned with Unitarian Universalism.
When I returned to Tahlequah, I immersed myself in nonviolence study. Some truths settled in: means and ends/ methods and goals of peacemaking must be consistent;
violence never defeats violence and exchanging one form of dominance for another doesn’t help;
I came to understand that nonviolence has to do with creative ways to use cooperative power in all aspects of life – personal and public.
I got the bumper sticker: be the change you wish to see in the world – Gandhi’s most popular aphorism. (Maybe if I got another one for my current car, it would cover some rust!)
Back then, and to this day, I intend to be alert for opportunities to embody peacemaking spirituality;
In day to day life, there are opportunities in conversations at home and in religious community. Back in Oklahoma, I found opportunities for peacemaking efforts in addiction ministry, prison minitry, in restorative justice, protection for battered women, and in treatment of perpetrators of family violence.
Let me describe that final project – which got going after a year of effort:
For more than 2 years, a group of men met in the Tahlequah church basement every week to re-think their logic of violence; there were ordered to meet with this treatment group because they were convicted of abusing their wives or children.
To begin, the director of the local domestic violence shelter and I met with local law enforcement and justice officials, who agreed to sentence domestic violence offenders to serve time learning creative alternatives to hitting family members when there was a conflict. There was already state legislation to allow for this. Once the group was established, the Unitarian Universalist congregation was the only religious group willing to make space available for the meetings.
Ed, the gentle, soft-spoken counselor who ran these meeetings believes that offenders can change their ways and that some of them want to. This is where the cycle of violence is stopped for some of the offenders: a caring person spends time with them, beginning where they are and showing them that there is a different way to live – a way with contentment and the capacity for compassion and the possibility that power can be cooperative.
When I asked Ed about the project’s results, he was not effusive; he said these guys aren’t used to sharing feelings and so something could be changing inside them and they weren’t expressing it…well, he expected and hoped that this was how it was…
sometimes one of the men told him that he had used one of the new ways at home…and Ed was satisfied with that.
This is how a violent culture like ours changes: people changing how they think and behave, supported by one caring person, one open-hearted congregation, and progressive legislation that supports a prison alternative.
JLA said that the only way we make peace is to find it “within the heart and mind and will of every person.”
A century before JLA, Universalist Adin Ballou offered the guidance of Christian Non-Resistance:
Ballou was the first thinker in recent generations to remember how Jesus integrated his inner and outer life for peace. Ballou’s book , Christian Nonresistance in All Its Important Bearings, published in 1846, was a primary source for Tolstoy and Thoreau, and through them, for Gandhi. Mennonites also value this text.
Ballou’s logic was that the God of Universalism is Love. Love involves doing good to others. God loves everyone no matter what…and everyone eventually dwells in God’s loving presence.
When we try to be like God, we try to be loving. He said the love we offer because we are loved by God operates independent of external influences…
It does not inquire, Am I loved? Have I benefited? Have my merits been appreciated?”
Whether others love or hate, bless or curse, benefit or injure…” this love says “I will do right; I will love still; I will bless; I will never injure even the most injurious; I will overcome evil with good.” ( from Christian Nonresistance as on Oberlin website)
Ballou found this theology and way of life in the teachings of Jesus:
He said Jesus regarded humility as the true greatness and the opportunity to serve as the greatest privilege.
It was a duty to forgive, not punish…and to love enemies, bless those that cursed, do good to those that hate and pray for the spiteful.
Jesus did not allow retaliation or even vengeance at law.
Ballou said “Jesus commanded his followers not to resist evil, not to resist it even according to law…but to bear all indignities, insults, assaults and wrongs with forgiving meekness and patience.”
Gandhi echoed Ballou’s assertion that this approach to life “takes the noblest of courage and strength.” (Ballou, p. 9-13)
Ballou led our tradition into peacemaking; his faith called him to total-life commitment to pacifism/ to trying to never cause harm, no matter what.
He witnessed to his religious pacifist Universalist faith through writing, talks, and a 16-year effort at living communally in Christian community.
Ballou was not respected by clergy in his time; as our tradition has aged, this kind of pacifism has continued to be a minority view. But at least for me, Adin Ballou is a source of inspiration: I aspire to a life of inner and outer peacemaking, as he modeled.
When contemporary theologian Paul Rasor discussed our historic UU stances on war in the spring, 2008 issue of the UU World, he synthesized the pacifist and just war streams of our tradition with intellectual peacemaking: his essay looked beneath positions for common needs and values. I thought he showed his own peacemaking inclinations by offering all arguments fairly, leading to deeper understanding and common purpose. He showed a logic of peacemaking.
In his book, Faith Without Certainty, Rasor returns again and again to the problem of liberal religion’s individualism. He reminds us that we are biological creatures who evolve as a species, like everything else, and that our very selves are formed in groups – with the group always being there first. He says “we are social beings through and through”. In order to practice our moral agency, Rasor says, we need to interact intentionally with others. In fact, interaction among social agents is the organic basis of morality. (103) We need each other do to the shared work of transforming ourselves and our world.
This means that social justice work/positive peacemaking efforts form our identities; it is part of who we are because we are seeing ourselves in solidarity with the other…healing those who appear to be different – along with healing ourselves. (104)
Whether our day to day work is intellectual, mechanical, interpersonal, agricultural, artistic, or some combination of these, w have peacemaking opportunities and challenges in our personal lives. And we have peacemaking opportunities and challenges together – as the UU Fellowship in the Hutchinson area, and collectively as citizens of Kansas, the US, and the world…
Our tradition and our pacifist allies can give us spiritual strength and discerning guidance regarding how to face the peacemaking challenges before us.
It seems to me that we use our pragmatic natures to be real about ourselves and our situations – like I was able to get the batterers’ treatment group going because of my role in the community and the congregation’s commitments…back in Oklahoma… Each of us has such a sphere of influence…and so will this Fellowship as we establish a center-city home base.
Then we consider and activate spiritual resources that enable us to have the courage of our convictions and the steadfastness necessary for perserverance:
From Adin Ballou – we can remember the Universalist God of Love, and move from the abundance of that Love
From John Haynes Holmes – we can integrate inner and outer peace – no matter what others think…
From JLA – we can know that it is our responsibility to continue moral evolution – to becoming and promoting a truth and goodness that has not yet been brought to birth…to do so through creative controversy.
From contemporary theologians Paul Rasor and Rebecca Parker, we can remember that our way is to look out for the good of all – staying intellectually alert and morally committed.
Our Unitarian Universalist General Assemblies adopted that Peacemaking Resolution, though they made an exemption for war – thereby emphasizing that we are not a peace church in the conventional sense.
But for me, allied with the peacemakers of our tradition, Gandhi, the religious pacifists of our state,
I have found that lifting up alternatives to the logic of violence – peacemaking – is a significant expression of Unitarian Universalism.
I’ll be interested to hear your theology and experiences of peacemaking when we have a chance to talk about it…live or online.
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